With Waze, Google Signals Arrival Of New Business Model. The Wisdom of Your In-House Crowd. Recent evidence might suggest that business judgment is only getting worse. Each day brings word of some fresh leadership misstep. Indeed, The Motley Fool has launched a new feature: “CEO Gaffe of the Week.” Dispatches from the fields of behavioral and cognitive science, meanwhile, prove how biased and emotion driven we are in making decisions—and the penalties for making bad ones are growing worse. But the good news is that the more we encounter the cognitive limitations of individuals, the better it is for business judgment, because it helps us shed the myth of the lone wise leader. That myth goes back at least to the 19th century and Thomas Carlyle’s “great man” theory, and it lives on in our view of CEOs as the sole agents of their companies’ fortunes. An example comes from WGB Construction, a small home builder west of Boston.
At the data storage giant EMC such participation is enabled by a social media platform called EMC|One. Of oxes and the wisdom of crowds: Lior Zoref at TED2012. Photo: James Duncan Davidson Possibly the most meta speaker on the TED stage is Lior Zoref. He had a dream: to speak at TED. He shows a video of himself saying to his friend that he wanted to do that, and his best friend telling him it was impossible. But his Facebook and twitter friends encouraged him. He wanted to give a talk on the wisdom of crowds.
One suggestion came from a 16 year old, named Or Sagy: have the audience recreate a classic experiment in the widsom of crowds. No, really. (echos of “Oh my god” and “No fricking way” around the room.) Zoref asks the audience to guess the weight (using, of course a nifty website). Now, if using crowd wisdom worked for companies, why couldn’t it work for his life? Kai Busman is a pastor who uses crowd wisdom to create his Sunday sermons. Francine is raising her son using crowd wisdom on a daily basis, and said that she feels as if “super-nanny” is helping her. “Is this the best crowd wisdom has to offer?” -The lowest guess was 308 lbs. Crowd dynamics: The wisdom of crowds.
When the Crowd Isn’t Wise.