We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business

Barry Libert, Jon Spector, Don Tapscott

Pearson Prentice Hall, Sep 25, 2007 - Business & Economics - 176 pages

Wikinomics and The Wisdom of Crowds identified the phenomena of emerging social networks, but they do not confront how businesses can profit from the wisdom of crowds. WE ARE SMARTER THAN ME by Barry Libert and Jon Spector, Foreword by Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, is the first book to show anyone in business how to profit from the wisdom of crowds. Drawing on their own research and the insights from an enormous community of more than 4,000 people, Barry Libert and Jon Spector have written a book that reveals what works, and what doesn't, when you are building community into your decision making and business processes. In We Are Smarter Than Me, you will discover exactly how to use social networking and community in your business, driving better decision-making and greater profitability. The book shares powerful insights and new case studies from product development, manufacturing, marketing, customer service, finance, management, and beyond. You'll learn which business functions can best be accomplished or supported by communities; how to provide effective moderation, balance structure with independence, manage risk, define success, implement effective metrics, and much more. From tools and processes to culture and leadership, We Are Smarter than Me will help you transform the promise of social networking into a profitable reality.

Contents

• 01 Look What We Can Do: 1
• 02 Go from RD to RWE: 19
• 03 How May We Help We?: 43
• 04 Customer Sell Thyself: 61
• 05 If We Build It We Will Come: 81
• 06 Welcome to the World Bank of We: 101
• 07 Make Everyone a CWeO: 117
• 08 Lead from the Rear: 125
• AfterwordJoin the Crowd: 143
• Company Index: 149
• Name Index: 151
• Subject Index: 153
• Acknowledgments: 158

Popular passages

Page 143 - I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet. The president of the United States. A gondolier in Venice. Fill in the names.‎

Page 65 - Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let the public know you are doing the right thing.‎

Page 73 - And he adds the following bit of advice that bears directly on our subject: You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by. If you tell lies about a product, you will be found out — either by the Government, which will prosecute you, or by the consumer, who will punish you by not buying your product a second time. Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don't think the product...‎

Page 2 - If at first the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it.‎

Page 61 - We have one of the largest and strongest portfolios of trusted, quality brands, including Pampers, Tide, Ariel, Always, Whisper, Pantene, Bounty, Pringles, Folgers, Charmin, Downy, Lenor, Iams, Crest, Clairol Nice'n Easy, Actonel, Dawn and Olay.‎

Page 46 - Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line, and your call will be answered as soon as we finish servicing all of North America.‎

Page viii - P&G was notoriously secretive, and it was failing, punctuated by a stock collapse in 2000. New CEO AG Lafley led the company on an ambitious campaign to restore P&G's greatness by sourcing 50 percent of its innovations from outside the company.‎

Page viii - Others are concerned that the incentives for knowledge producers are disappearing in a world where individuals can pool their talents to create free goods that compete with proprietary marketplace offerings. People as wise as Bill Gates have argued that capitalism is undermined by any movement to assemble a global "creative commons" that contains large bodies of scientific and cultural content.‎

Page vii - Rather than painstakingly designing its supply chain, Boeing coinnovated the 787 Dreamliner with thousands of partners around the world in a mind-boggling peer-oriented ecosystem.‎

Page xii - Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, was to follow, showing how some companies are using mass collaboration and open-source technology to beat the competition.‎

About the author

This book is the result of an unprecedented wiki-based collaboration bringing together leading experts on social networking and communities at Wharton Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and more than 4,000 business innovators from around the world, all of whom have generously contributed their extraordinary knowledge, insights, and personal experiences.

Bibliographic information

• Title: We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business
• Authors: Barry Libert, Jon Spector, Don Tapscott
• Publisher: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007
• ISBN: 0132716453, 9780132716451
• Length: 176 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / General; Science / Life Sciences / Biology