What do Google, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, eBay and Wikipedia have in common? Besides being six of the fastest growing organizations in history and making several of their founders billionaires in less than a decade, they all utilize a new reality of the information age – whoever leverages the most brains wins! Figure out how to do this better than your competition and you win big.
Collective Wisdom
The subtitle of James Surowiecki’s best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations is another take on this new strategic weapon. It’s no longer sufficient to have just a smart executive team. You need to launch initiatives to access the collective wisdom of your employees, customers, and the broader world around you.
Entrepreneurship like ants
Besides reading Surowiecki’s book (quicker yet, just read the collective wisdom of Wikipedia’s overview!), read Steven Johnson’s breakthrough book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. It’s Emergence Theory that drives the success of the organizations listed above. You not only have to understand and apply this theory to your business, you need to start doing it immediately – so jump on Amazon, another Emergence Theory company, and place your order.
In past columns I’ve touched on several approaches to tap into the collective intelligence of your marketplace including the systematic gathering of customer and employee feedback and the use of wikis to capture and organize this information. There is also some innovative new “community” or “networking” technologies that aid in helping your customers connect with and help each other and in the process.
4.000 pages in one year
Lee Rosen, President of Raleigh-Durham based Rosen Law Firm, knew he needed to capture the intellectual capital of his employees and find a way to efficiently organize the information necessary to run his thriving law practice that specializes in divorce cases. Launching an internal wiki, Rosen notes “I used a $1000 contest to encourage our lawyers and staff to contribute to the wiki and within a year we had over 4.000 pages of intellectual content!” For more details, Rosen pointed me to a February 2008 FORTUNE Small Business magazine article about how companies are using wikis featuring his firm.
Avoid being a wiki-island. Why is this important? A significant and powerful aspect of wikis is the ability to link to other wiki pages. And it’s this rich-link environment that helps raise the profile of your information on search engines. So it’s important that your wiki, if you want it to be found by others, is housed where it can connect with many other wiki pages. If you want to check out my wiki, go to AboutUs.org and search for “quarterly themes.”
At your next executive meeting, tackle the question “how can we dramatically increase the number of brains we can access to drive our business.” Then do it and let me know what you create – I need your brain as well!
Verne Harnish (Gazelles.com)
