Crowds are Brilliant - Individuals are Leaders

Over the last few years there has been a push, especially in the business world, to trust the brilliance of crowds to make major financial decisions. This can be seen in many different applications from finding new places to mine for minerals to finding lost people using Google maps. Called crowdsourcing, this phenomenon is explored most thoroughly in the intriguing book Wikinomics. It is truly a great idea, 100,000,000 heads are better than one but the world still needs the Big Kahuna.

Crowds are, after all, just crowds. They definitely have much more combined intelligence than leaders do but without the direction offered by leaders they can be extremely destructive. Maybe worse, though, is a leader who leverages the power of crowds to do evil (Hitler anyone?).

Our increasing technological abilities makes it possible to expand a crowd's base and by extension its power and reach. That is why, now more than ever, we need moral leaders.

Take for example NowPublic, a site where many people post news stories (like me) and a place where many get their news. This site has exponentially increased the power of individuals to break news and make news. What this site has done so exceptionally well is that it enables individuals to have more power based on their merit to help decide what news is good and bad.

Hopefully NowPublic will remain a bastion of democratic meritocracy and not turn into something like your local PTA where all the parents sit around discussing how best to spend the schools money on trips for the PTA members themselves.

Quite possibly the greatest example of an undirected mob would be the government. You have these bureaucracies with all this kinetic knowledge doing hardly anything right. They are mired in paperwork, politics, ineffective policies and so much more. And the problem has no chance of being fixed in this situation because there is no real way of getting leaders at the helm to turn these rusting Titanics around.

Perhaps the best example of a leader directing a crowd in the right way would be Ken Mehlman's steerage of President Bush's reelection. In Michael Barone's  2004 article about the election he had this to say:

Mehlman was the structural engineer who turned the plans into reality. Mehlman's great achievement was to create a largely volunteer organization of 1.4 million people who turned out the vote in counties big and small for Bush. He managed this task the way Rudolph Giuliani managed the New York City Police Department: by requiring metrics--numerical goals, validated by independent parties--to measure the work being done every week. This enabled the Bush organization to plug holes and to provide psychic rewards for those doing good work. No one (including Giuliani himself) thought Giuliani could cut crime in half in New York City; very few thought that Mehlman could produce 10 million new votes for Bush. But Giuliani did it, and so did Mehlman.

Great things come from crowds; we find out how well the economy is doing, what the price of every good should be, and who should be elected president are all decided by crowds. But crowds need great leaders because without a leader they don't do anything, with a bad leader they are ineffective, and with an evil leader they are capable of very horrible things. BigT