Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | about this site Smart mobs beat dumb CEOs (01 Jun 2004) Surowiecki's is a big-idea book, reminiscent of his New Yorker colleague Malcolm Gladwell's 'The Tipping Point.' Although he spends much of the book pointing out all that can go wrong in a group or a crowd, Surowiecki's big idea is that a well-designed group can be exceptionally intelligent, smarter even than its brightest member. Ask a crowd to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar and the average of their guesses will be almost exactly right. In the same way, people organized in markets, in betting pools, in corporations or even in governments can sometimes magically arrive at the correct solution to a tough problem. Article URL: http://salon.com/tech/books/2004/06/02/crowds/index_np.html Read 47 more articles from Salon sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Be a web editor, not administrator This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy