If someone really wants my company's business, why shouldn't he be able to do everything he can - including paying me off - to get that business? Because bribery encourages people to make decisions based on the wrong criteria, which means in the business world that it distorts the efficient allocation of resources.

James Surowiecki

Categorized in : People Mean Decision

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 Surowiecki

smart way thinking

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 Surowiecki

procrastination self dream

Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.

James Surowiecki

independence diversity decision

I typically don't adopt the ascetic approach. In part, that's because I do use the Net for research even as I'm writing (to check facts, or so on). But I think it's also because I find the possibility of distraction comforting.

James Surowiecki

writing comforting thinking

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 Surowiecki

nineteen attention country

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 Surowiecki

smart independent thinking

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

oil coffee running

You'll sometimes hear from people that they actually do a better job of getting their work done when they have a lot of other obligations - in effect, it removes the possibility of procrastinating.

James Surowiecki

done jobs people

In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they'd never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.

James Surowiecki

done heart country

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 Surowiecki

financial greed fear

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."

James Surowiecki

hard-work intelligent skills

I think people don't understand compound interest because typically no one ever explains it to them and the level of financial literacy in the US is very low.

James Surowiecki

levels people thinking

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 Surowiecki

careers listening jobs

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

James Surowiecki

groupthink dissent important

The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.

James Surowiecki

american-capitalism environment challenges

I do think to some extent multitasking is a way of fooling ourselves that we're being exceptionally efficient.

James Surowiecki

multitasking way thinking

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

quality people thinking

The history of the Internet is, in part, a series of opportunities missed: the major record labels let Apple take over the digital-music business; Blockbuster refused to buy Netflix for a mere fifty million dollars; Excite turned down the chance to acquire Google for less than a million dollars.

James Surowiecki

google apples opportunity

Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.

James Surowiecki

reform self people

In effect, dividing your attention means that neither (or none) of the things you're working on is really getting the full effect of your intelligence, and that it in the end takes you longer than it would if you did one thing at a time.

James Surowiecki

ends attention mean