249 Quotes by 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.

The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.

Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.

Sometimes you have to destroy your business in order to save it.

The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed...

Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.

Companies, like people, don't much like to change.

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.

Now, modern economies have a very effective mechanism for deciding if salaries are really too high: it’s called the free market. That’s how most people’s salaries are set, after all, including those of major-league baseball players and European soccer players.