We Are Smarter Than Me

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We Are Smarter Than Me:
How to Unleash the Power of Crowds
in Your Business
We are smarter than me - book cover.jpg
We Are Smarter Than Me
AuthorBarry Libert
Jon Spector
and hundreds of other contributors [1]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre Non-fiction
Publisher Wharton School Publishing
Publication date
October 5, 2007
Media typeHardcover
Pages176 pp (Hardcover edition)
ISBN 978-0-13-224479-4
OCLC 144330898
658/.044 22
LC Class HD69.S8 L53 2008

We Are Smarter Than Me is a collaborative-writing project using wiki software, whose initial goal was producing a book about decision making processes that use large numbers of people. The first book was published as a printed book, late in 2007, by the publishing conglomerate Pearson Education. Along with Pearson, the project's four core sponsors include research institutes of the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Contents

The wiki book was featured in a November 28, 2006, broadcast of NPR's All Things Considered .

History and overview of project

The project was started as "a business community formed by business professionals to research and discuss the impact of social networks on traditional business functions". [2] Initiated by illustrious faculty from the Wharton School and MIT Sloan School of Management

The people behind this initiative [3] [4] are Barry Libert, CEO of Shared Insights, Jon Spector, vice dean and director of Wharton's Aresty Institute of Executive Education, Thomas W. Malone, Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and founder and director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Tim Moore, editor-in-chief of Pearson Education and Jerry (Yoram) Wind, Lauder Professor and Professor of Marketing at the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania and founding director of the Wharton “think tank,” the SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management.

The project was started in late 2006 [5] and a wiki website was established to allow people to contribute text to the book. It was published on October 5, 2007.

Participation

According to the project's website, [6] "over a million students, faculty and alumni of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the MIT Sloan School of Management, as well as leaders, authors, and experts from the fields of management and technology were invited to contribute in a wiki-based community that coalesced at wearesmarter.org. Members were asked to develop and share their insights about why community approaches work or don't work when it comes to marketing, business development, distribution, and more, and what companies have to do to make them work better."

They had reached the following participation statistics [7] by the time the book was ready for publication:

The project's website reports that, "In addition to actual community members and contributors, the project was influenced by hundreds of bloggers, Podcasters, and conference attendees at the inaugural Community 2.0 Conference in Las Vegas." [7]

Advisory board

The project's advisory board for phase 1 (the writing of the first book) included:

Chairman:

Board members:

Content

According to the authors, [6] "the goal of the project was to develop a book that addresses what other best-selling books on community have not. Wikinomics and The Wisdom of Crowds have identified the phenomena of emerging social networks, but they do not confront how businesses can profit from the wisdom of crowds". [6]

The book contains case studies from several companies, including Eli Lilly and Company, Amazon.com, Dell Computers, Cambrian House, Angie's List and Procter & Gamble

Media coverage and acceptance

The project received wide coverage in US media, including such venues as The Wall Street Journal , Forbes.com , Newsweek and NPR's radio show "All Things Considered". [8] The book was ranked #6 in Amazon's "Best of 2007" and "Top 10 book to inspire your business for 2008" from TheStreet.com . [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MIT Sloan School of Management</span> Business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The MIT Sloan School of Management is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs, as well as executive education. Its degree programs are among the most selective in the world. MIT Sloan emphasizes innovation in practice and research. Many influential ideas in management and finance originated at the school, including the Black–Scholes model, the Solow–Swan model, the random walk hypothesis, the binomial options pricing model, and the field of system dynamics. The faculty has included numerous Nobel laureates in economics and John Bates Clark Medal winners.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Surowiecki</span>

James Michael Surowiecki is an American journalist. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he wrote a regular column on business and finance called "The Financial Page".

<i>The Wisdom of Crowds</i> 2004 book by James Surowiecki

The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas W. Malone</span> American business theorist

Thomas W. Malone is an American organizational theorist, management consultant, and the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Mass collaboration is a form of collective action that occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, often modular in its nature. Such projects typically take place on the internet using social software and computer-supported collaboration tools such as wiki technologies, which provide a potentially infinite hypertextual substrate within which the collaboration may be situated. Open source software such as Linux was developed via mass collaboration.

Enterprise social software, comprises social software as used in "enterprise" (business/commercial) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to corporate intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, enterprise social software tends to encourage use prior to providing structure.

<i>Wikinomics</i> Book by Don Tapscott

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is a book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, first published in December 2006. It explores how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration and open-source technology, such as wikis, to be successful.

Collective wisdom, also called group wisdom and co-intelligence, is shared knowledge arrived at by individuals and groups.

Decentralized decision-making is any process where the decision-making authority is distributed throughout a larger group. It also connotes a higher authority given to lower level functionaries, executives, and workers. This can be in any organization of any size, from a governmental authority to a corporation. However, the context in which the term is used is generally that of larger organizations. This distribution of power, in effect, has far-reaching implications for the fields of management, organizational behavior, and government.

The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) is a research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, headed by Professor Thomas W. Malone, that focuses on the study of collective intelligence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collective intelligence</span> Group intelligence that emerges from collective efforts

Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence (GI) that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. The term appears in sociobiology, political science and in context of mass peer review and crowdsourcing applications. It may involve consensus, social capital and formalisms such as voting systems, social media and other means of quantifying mass activity. Collective IQ is a measure of collective intelligence, although it is often used interchangeably with the term collective intelligence. Collective intelligence has also been attributed to bacteria and animals.

Paul J. H. Schoemaker, Ph.D. is an academic, author, and an expert in the fields of strategic management and decision making.

Satish Nambisan is the Nancy and Joseph Keithley Professor of Technology Management at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University.

Jonathan Spector is the former president and CEO of The Conference Board, and currently a senior advisor to the organization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew McAfee</span> American digital technology research scientist

Andrew Paul McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT, is cofounder and codirector of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies how digital technologies are changing the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeanne W. Ross</span> American computer scientist

Jeanne Wenzel Ross is an American organizational theorist and principal research scientist at MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), specializes in Enterprise Architecture, ICT and Management. She is known for her work on IT governance, and Enterprise architecture.

Jagmohan Raju is an American marketing professor and author. He is the Joseph J. Aresty Professor and Director of the Wharton-Indian School of Business Program at Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania. Professor Raju is internationally known for his research on Pricing. He is the author of the book Smart Pricing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerry (Yoram) Wind</span>

Jerry (Yoram) Wind is The Lauder Professor and Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and is the founding director of the Wharton "think tank,” The SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management. He is internationally known for pioneering research on organizational buying behaviour, market segmentation, conjoint analysis, and marketing strategy. He consults with major firms around the world, provides expert testimony in many intellectual property and antitrust cases, and has lectured in over 50 universities worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yaniv Altshuler</span>

Yaniv Altshuler, is an Israeli computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, at the Human Dynamics group headed by professor Alex Pentland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Damon Centola</span>

Damon Centola is a sociologist and the Elihu Katz Professor of Communication, Sociology and Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is Director of the Network Dynamics Group and Senior Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.

References

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  2. "Initiatives to harness the power of collective intelligence". Gizmag.com. Archived from the original on 29 November 2014. Retrieved 16 November 2014.
  3. "Putting people first 2006 October". Experientia.com. Archived from the original on 2014-11-29. Retrieved 16 November 2014.
  4. [ dead link ]
  5. "Is 'We' Really Smarter Than 'Me'? Wharton, MIT, And Pearson Will Find Out". InformationWeek. Retrieved 16 November 2014.
  6. 1 2 3 [ dead link ]
  7. 1 2 "Mzinga Learning Management and Social Collaboration Tools". Mzinga. Archived from the original on 16 May 2008. Retrieved 16 November 2014.
  8. "Collective Wisdom: 'We Are Smarter Than Me'". Archived from the original on May 7, 2008. Retrieved October 2, 2008.
  9. "Mzinga OmniSocial Learning - Mzinga". Mzinga. Archived from the original on 2009-02-07. Retrieved 16 November 2014.