JAMES SUROWIECKI

The Wisdom of Crowds

Feb 16 at 7:30pm · Mountainlair Ballroom

James Surowiecki writes the popular business column "The Financial Page" twice a month for The New Yorker. He speaks on an unusually wide range of topics with a fresh voice and from surprising angles. Typically pegged to a timely event, Surowiecki's columns incorporate insights from economics, sociology, and business history to make new connections between business and current trends in economics, society, and politics. In addition to his position as a staff writer for The New Yorker, Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds.

At the heart of The Wisdom of Crowds is an explanation as to "why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations" (the book's subtitle). Instead of relying on a single person for a good decision, Surowiecki argues that organizations should open up the decision-making process and collect the information and intelligence that's usually scattered across their different parts. The best decisions will emerge from organizations that value independent judgment by individuals and "the wisdom of crowds."

Newsweek calls The Wisdom of Crowds "a fun, intriguing read-and a concept with enormous potential for CEOs and politicos alike." Time magazine agrees, calling it "A subtly intelligent book that's fun to argue with."

Surowiecki's previous release, Best Business Crime Writing of the Year, is a collection of 27 articles from different business news sources that chronicle the CEO's fall from grace. He has included P.J. O'Rourke's hilarious "How to Stuff a Wild Enron," in which he compares trying to understand Enron's finances to trying to buy an airline ticket at the best price, Marc Peyser's perceptive look at Martha Stewart, and Joe Nocera's investigation of how it all went wrong.

Surowiecki has written for a wide range of publications on a wide variety of topics, ranging from what the study of primates can teach us about the economic importance of fairness to the fundamental organizational changes that are propelling America's current productivity boom. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Wired, The Wall Street Journal, and other major publications.

Before writing for The New Yorker, he wrote "The Bottom Line" column for New York magazine, and was a contributing editor at Fortune.