We are Smarter than Me - Collaborative Book

"The central premise of We Are Smarter Than Me is that large groups of people ("We") can, and should, take responsibility for traditional business functions currently performed by companies, industries and experts ("Me")."

Management and Leadership, once the funnel for innovation, can often become the bottleneck for innovation.

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"What do we mean? Let's look at some recent examples:

Procter & Gamble is recruiting 600,000 housewives to help market its products through word of mouth. In return for much greater reach and impact, the company is giving up control of the marketing message, relying on its community of customers/marketers to craft their own message in the most appropriate fashion.

Microlending websites provide the ability for individuals to lend to small businesses directly. The underwriting decisions (assessing the risk of each loan) are made by individuals, and the price of loan is established through lender bidding. We expect these lending decisions to be superior to the same decisions currently made by experts at banks.

Patients faced with rare diseases are increasingly turning to internet discussion groups to learn more about risks and treatment options, and as a result are participating with doctors more actively (in some cases much more actively) in decisions regarding their care.

A few books have recently been written on this topic, but they all fail to confront one central paradox. While they extol the power of communities, they were each written by only one person. We're putting this paradox to the test by inviting hundreds of thousands of authors to contribute to this "network book" using today's technologies."

We are seeing a sea change. This collaborative thing is gaining momentum, openness is becoming a must, command-and-control is giving way to front line empowerment and a new generation is right behind us who think this is the way things actually work. (And if they run into a roadblock they hack, mod and remix).