James Surowiecki quotes
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“Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.”
-- James SurowieckiSource : "Digital Transformation - Part II: Collective Intelligence Is the Game Changer" by Rod Collins, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 4, 2017.
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“Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle.”
-- James SurowieckiSource : "Later" by James Surowiecki, www.newyorker.com. October 11, 2010.
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“Auto repair, piloting, skiing, perhaps even management: these are skills that yield to application, hard work, and native talent. But forecasting an uncertain future and deciding the best course of action in the face of that future are much less likely to do so. And much of what we've seen so far suggests that a large group of diverse individuals will come up with better and more robust forecasts and make more intelligent decisions than even the most skilled "decision maker."”
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“Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“For a crowd to be smart, the people in it need to be not only diverse in their perspectives but also, relatively speaking, independent of each other. In other words, you need people to be thinking for themselves, rather than following the lead of those around them.”
-- James SurowieckiSource : "The Wise Way to Crowdsource a Manhunt". www.newyorker.com. April 23, 2013.
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“The paradox of Steve Jobs's career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers - he was famously dismissive of market research - yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted.”
-- James SurowieckiSource : "Apple: What Happens Now?". www.newyorker.com. August 24, 2011.
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“Although oil is a commodity, it's still not a commodity like coffee, which, thank God, we will have with us always. At some point the oil will run out.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“In the business world, bad news is usually good news - for somebody else.”
-- James SurowieckiSource : "Don't Do the Math". www.newyorker.com. January 24, 2005.
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“It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that are animated by both fear and greed at the same time.”
-- James SurowieckiSource : James Surowiecki (2005). “The Wisdom of Crowds”, p.241, Anchor
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“Lower oil prices won't, by themselves, topple the mullahs in Iran. But it's significant that, historically, when oil prices have been low, Iranian reformers have been ascendant and radicals relatively subdued, and vice versa when prices have been high.”
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“Unlike fuel-economy standards, the most common method of reducing demand for oil over the past thirty years, a gas tax doesn't tell people what kind of car to drive. It simply raises the price of gasoline and lets people adjust their behavior accordingly.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Life insurance became popular only when insurance companies stopped emphasizing it as a good investment and sold it instead as a symbolic commitment by fathers to the future well-being of their families.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“Linux is a complex example of the wisdom of crowds. It's a good example in the sense that it shows you can set people to work in a decentralized way - that is, without anyone really directing their efforts in a particular direction - and still trust that they're going to come up with good answers.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Tough times have always lent themselves to nativist sentiments and closed-door policies. But in the case of highly skilled immigrants, these policies are a recipe for stagnation.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“To be sure, if you watch CNBC all day long you'll pick up some interesting news about particular companies and the economy as a whole. Unfortunately, to get to the useful information, you have to wade through reams of useless stuff, with little guidance on how to distinguish between the two.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“There are certainly valid reasons for taking a company private, and it's also possible that C.E.O.s perform better when monitored by a small number of owners in a private company rather than by the dispersed and often uninterested shareholders of a public corporation.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“It may be that the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises. It's hard to prepare for the worst when you think you're the best.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call 'incremental innovation' - innovations that build, in some way, on others.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Critics of consumer capitalism like to think that consumers are manipulated and controlled by those who seek to sell them things, but for the most part it's the other way around: companies must make what consumers want and deliver it at the lowest possible price.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Disasters redistribute money from taxpayers to construction workers, from insurance companies to homeowners, and even from those who once lived in the destroyed city to those who replace them. It's remarkable that this redistribution can happen so smoothly and quickly, with devastated regions reinventing themselves in a matter of months.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“Discussions of health care in the U.S. usually focus on insurance companies, but, whatever their problems, they're not the main driver of health-care inflation: providers are.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Flexible supply chains are great for multinationals and consumers. But they erode already thin profit margins in developing-world factories and foster a pell-mell work environment in which getting the order out the door is the only thing that matters.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.”
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“Corporate welfare isn't necessarily a bad thing.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“If we want our regulators to do better, we have to embrace a simple idea: regulation isn't an obstacle to thriving free markets; it's a vital part of them.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“If you thought the advent of the Internet, the spread of cheap and efficient information technology, and the growing fragmentation of the consumer market were all going to help smaller companies thrive at the expense of the slow-moving giants of the Fortune 500, apparently you were wrong.”
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“In a world where companies increasingly know about their business in real time, it makes no sense that public reporting mostly follows the old quarterly schedule. Companies sit on vital information until reporting day, at which point the market goes crazy.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“In industries where a lot of competitors are selling the same product - mangoes, gasoline, DVD players - price is the easiest way to distinguish yourself. The hope is that if you cut prices enough you can increase your market share, and even your profits. But this works only if your competitors won't, or can't, follow suit.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the gap.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“In the auto industry, there's one thing you can always count on: if a new environmental or safety rule is proposed, executives will prophesy disaster.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“In the days when corporate downsizing was all the rage, Wall Street took a lot of flak for judging companies too harshly and setting the bar for corporate performance so high that executives felt their only option was to slash payrolls.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Instead of mindlessly tossing billions at or taking billions from the Net as such, investors should be spending their time making sure that it's the future Fords and General Motors of cyberspace that are getting the capital they need.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“Unlike most government programs, Social Security and, in part, Medicare are funded by payroll taxes dedicated specifically to them. Some of the tax revenue pays for current benefits; anything that's left over goes into trust funds for the future. The programs were designed this way for political reasons.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Until the nineteen-seventies, Western countries paid little attention to corruption overseas, and bribery was seen as an unpleasant but necessary part of doing business there. In some European countries, businesses were even allowed to deduct bribes as an expense.”
-- James SurowieckiSource : "Invisible Hand, Greased Palm" by James Surowiecki, www.newyorker.com. May 14, 2012.
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“The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other.”
-- James SurowieckiSource : James Surowiecki (2005). “The Wisdom of Crowds”, p.41, Anchor
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“Unfortunately, there is something of a flaw in this idealized picture of the way the scientific community discovers truth. And the flaw is that most scientific work never gets noticed. Study after study has shown that most scientific papers are read by almost no one, while a small number of papers are read by many people.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“The smartest groups, then, are made up of people with diverse perspectives who are able to stay independent of each other. Independence doesn't imply rationality or impartiality, though. You can be biased and irrational, but as long as you're independent, you won't make the group any dumber.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromising. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead…the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Companies often become victims of their own mythologies.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“Companies, like people, don't much like to change.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed...”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Sometimes you have to destroy your business in order to save it.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“The business of America shouldn't be subsidizing business.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“In part because individual judgement is not accurate enough or consistent enough, cognitive diversity is essential to good decision making.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert's. But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you're better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart those people are.”
-- James SurowieckiSource : James Surowiecki (2005). “The Wisdom of Crowds”, p.31, Anchor
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“What an economy really wants, after all, is not more investment per se but better investment. It wants capital to flow to companies that will create value - not in the form of a rising stock price but in the form of more goods for less cost, more jobs, and rising wages - by enhancing productivity.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“What corporations fear is the phenomenon now known, rather inelegantly, as 'commoditization.' What the term means is simply the conversion of the market for a given product into a commodity market, which is characterized by declining prices and profit margins, increasing competition, and lowered barriers to entry.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“When all is said and done, cheap gas is an illusion, because our reliance on gas creates a whole series of costs that aren't factored in to the pump price - among them congestion, pollution, and increased risk of accidents.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“When Americans are asked to rank professions in terms of honesty and ethics, insurance agents routinely end up near the bottom of the list - somewhere between politicians and car salesmen. Generally, insurers are seen as clever hucksters who prey on insecurity and ignorance to sell people what they don't need at prices they shouldn't have to pay.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“When Americans think of college these days, the first word that often comes to mind is 'debt.' And from 'debt' it's just a short hop to other unpleasant words, like 'payola,' 'kickback,' and 'bribery.'”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Workers who come to the U.S. see their wages and their standard of living boosted sharply simply by crossing the border. That's a good thing, and one of the best arguments for immigration reform, even if you'll rarely hear a politician make it.”
-- James SurowieckiSource : "Immigration Reform and the American Worker". www.newyorker.com. February 21, 2013.
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“Bubbles and crashes are textbook examples of collective decision making gone wrong. In a bubble, all of the conditions that make groups intelligent - independence, diversity, private judgement-disappear.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“Groups are only smart when there is a balance between the information that everyone in the group shares and the information that each of the members of the group holds privately. It's the combination of all those pieces of independent information, some of them right, some of the wrong, that keeps the group wise.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“But, if recent history has taught us anything, it’s that self-regulation doesn’t work in finance, and that worries about reputation are a weak deterrent to corporate malfeasance.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“This intelligence, or what I'll call "the wisdom of crowds," is at work in the world in many different guises. It's the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. It's the reason it's so hard to make money betting on NFL games, and it helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“Corporations hope that the right concept will turn things around overnight. This is what you might call the crash-diet approach: starve yourself for a few days and you'll be thin for life.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Wall Street has come a long way from the insider-dominated world that was blown apart by the Great Depression.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Most corporate name changes are the result of mergers and acquisitions. But these tend to be unimaginative.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Movies' mistrust of capitalism is almost as old as the medium itself.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“Of course, plenty of people don't think that guaranteeing affordable health insurance is a core responsibility of government.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Of course, presidents are always blamed or rewarded for the state of the economy.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“Real politics is messy and morally ambiguous and doesn't make for a compelling thriller.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“The autocracies of the Arab world have been as economically destructive as they've been politically repressive.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.”
-- James SurowieckiSource : "The crowd is smarter than you think". Interview with Todd Leopold, www.cnn.com. July 14, 2004.
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“The fact that industries wax and wane is a reality of any economic system that wants to remain dynamic and responsive to people's changing tastes.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“The stock market has an insidious effect on C.E.O.s' moods, because of its impact not just on their companies but on their own bank accounts.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Traditionally, tours were a means of promoting a record. Today, the record promotes the tour.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“We assume that good-looking people are smarter and more effective than they really are, and that homely people are the reverse.”
-- James Surowiecki -
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“In order to work well, markets need a basic level of trust.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.”
-- James Surowiecki -
“In conditions of uncertainty, humans, like other animals, herd together for protection.”
-- James SurowieckiSource : "That Uncertain Feeling" by James Surowiecki, www.newyorker.com. September 1, 2008.
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