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If being the biggest company was a guarantee of success, we'd all be using IBM computers and driving GM cars.

James Surowiecki

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James Surowiecki
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: April 30
Journalist
Writer
Meriden
Connecticut
James Michael Surowiecki
Biggest
Using
Car
Computer
Guarantee
Company
Computers
Success
Guarantees
Cars
Driving

More quotes by James Surowiecki

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Punk rock has never really had much patience with musical virtuosity. Actually, it'd be more accurate to say that for most of its history, punk has been actively hostile to virtuosity.
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Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.
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On Wall Street, fraudulent schemes tend to thrive during economic booms, and to blow up when times turn tough.
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The U.S. is excellent at importing cheap products from the rest of the world. Let's try importing some human capital instead.
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No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.
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Moviegoers love the intricacies of a crime all the more when it's for a good cause.
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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.
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The challenge for capitalism is that the things that breed trust also breed the environment for fraud.
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Medical tourism can be considered a kind of import: instead of the product coming to the consumer, as it does with cars or sneakers, the consumer is going to the product.
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I tend to delay writing by doing more research - it's really the act of writing the piece that I have the hardest time with.
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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.
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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.
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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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All things being equal, letting people make decisions for themselves will produce smarter outcomes, collectively, than relying on government planners.
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Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably smart - smarter even sometimes than the smartest people in them.
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Being out of a job can erode people's confidence and their sense of possibility and employers, often unfairly, tend to take long-term unemployment as a signal that something is wrong.
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Downsizing itself is an inevitable part of any creatively destructive economy.
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Companies, like people, don't much like to change.
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The truth is that the United States doesn't need, and shouldn't have, a debt ceiling. Every other democratic country, with the exception of Denmark, does fine without one.
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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.
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