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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
Company
Computers
Success
Guarantees
Cars
Driving
Biggest
Using
Car
Computer
Guarantee

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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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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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Of course, presidents are always blamed or rewarded for the state of the economy.
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The profit motive, indecorous though it may seem, may represent the best chance the poor have to reap some of globalization's benefits.
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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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One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.
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In practice, downsizing is too often about cutting your work force while keeping your business the same, and doing so not by investments in productivity-enhancing technology, but by making people pull 80-hour weeks and bringing in temps to fill the gap.
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If private-equity firms are as good at remaking companies as they claim, they don't need tax loopholes to make money.
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In terms of productivity - that is, how much a worker produces in an hour - there's little difference between the U.S., France, and Germany. But since more people work in America, and since they work so many more hours, Americans create more wealth.
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The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.
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Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in which corporations would be run by professional managers who had only small ownership stakes.
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There does seem to be some evidence that as people get older, they procrastinate less, perhaps because they feel the pressure of time more.
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The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it's been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them - blogs, say, or Wikipedia - can become influential.
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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.
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In part because individual judgement is not accurate enough or consistent enough, cognitive diversity is essential to good decision making.
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The typical American corporation is a shareholders' republic the same way that China is a peoples' republic.
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If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.
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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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Capitalism, after all, is no fun when real failure becomes a possibility.
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In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.
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