Tuesday, December 27, 2005
To Fail or Succeed
On the treadmill this morning I was listening to James Surowieki's talk at O'Reilly's e-Tech conference as supplied by IT Conversations. In his talk he quotes:
Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.Which is taken from:
Keynes, John Maynard (1936). The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Cambridge, England: Macmillian Cambridge University Press, Chapter 12, section 5.Surowieki argues that to achieve better wisdom it is better for people to be in loosely coupled networks, than tight-knit networks. The exposure to diverse ideas helps more than the focus of concerted thought.