James Surowiecki Quotes

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.

To get real diversity of thought, you need to find the people who genuinely hold different views and invite them into the conversation.

Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. Each man seeks those of different quality from his own, and such as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other men, and the rest.

The problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds.

Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.

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.

The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.

One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.

Sometimes other people have better ideas.

What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.

I like friends who have independent minds because they tend to make you see problems from all angles.

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.

I'm really lucky to have the kind of people I've got around me. I've got such a great group of predominantly young people, but so diverse, and they bring different perspectives to the table. They will tell me exactly what's on their mind.

And so, however many people watch this thing, that's how many different opinions there will be about it. But I don't feel like it has an agenda in terms of its ideology. It just presents a story like a mirror. It's a mirror more than it is than a distorted mirror.

Them which is of other naturs thinks different.

In part because individual judgement is not accurate enough or consistent enough, cognitive diversity is essential to good decision making.

We wouldn't be successful if we didn't have independent thinkers who can argue and then resolve their arguments.

I like collaboration, I like to incorporate other people's ideas [and] that's what happens when you do a big movie. Unless you're called Stanley Kubrick and you do an independent movie for like $200 million.

I have always tried to do my job in a way that I have people give me different points of view.

But I'm hopeful some of that will start to change. The public is more libertarian, the public is saying we want people who are going to be independent and not bow to leadership in either of the major parties.

Intelligent people need a fool to lead them. When the team's all a bunch of scientists, it is best to have a peasant lead the way. His way of thinking is different. It's easier to win if you have people seeing things from different perspectives.

The biggest gains come from associating with people u DONT agree with!

You should have disagreements with your leaders and your colleagues, but if it becomes immediately a question of questioning people's motives, and if immediately you decide that somebody who sees a whole new situation differently than you must be a bad person and somehow twisted inside, we are not going to get very far in forming a more perfect union.

I like to hear what other people's interpretations are, because people come up with things I'd never thought about.

I hire people who can do their jobs and who will advise me of things they don't agree with. The worst thing you can do is get in a room with 14 people who say, "OK!" Then you really are making decisions about engineering and finance and other areas.