'We' Wrote the Book on Community
WeAreSmarter.org
We wrote the book on community
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When our co-CEO Barry Libert and Jon Spector, the CEO of the Conference Board (and former Vice Dean and Director of Executive Education at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania), decided to team up to write a book about how businesses can profit from the wisdom of crowds, they ignored conventional wisdom and chose to be their own test case: They would create an online community to collaborate with them in writing the book.
According to the plan, the people who joined this community would be asked to develop and share their thoughts and insights about why community approaches work or don't work when it comes to marketing, business development, distribution, and more, and what companies have to do to make them work better.
In keeping with the project's theme, Barry and Jon named the community "We Are Smarter Than Me" – and set out to prove they were right.
The Process
Barry and Jon invited Thomas W. Malone, Founder and Director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, to chair an editorial board whose members included faculty from The Wharton School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. The board would then moderate the evolution of the book's chapters online.
Via a series of email blasts, more than a million students, faculty, and alumni of the Wharton School and the Sloan School of Management, as well as leaders, authors, and experts from the fields of management and technology, were invited to contribute to the book.
Their immediate results? Nearly 3,000 people responded to the invitation to join the community and contribute to the project online.
The Book
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When they first developed the concept, Barry and Jon's intention was that the book would be compiled mostly on the community wiki, with contributors editing its content as it grew. Instead, members' contributions came in the form of discussion forums, podcasts, related blog posts, and even in-person comments – and all of them became substantial sources of content for the book:
- 4375 registered members
- 737 forum posts
- 250 wiki contributors
- 1600 wiki posts
In the end, Barry, Jon, and their editorial assistants organized and polished all of the members' contributions to produce the final draft, albeit in the conventional way. The book included practical instructions on how to apply key lessons from the many case studies to meet the needs of business executives – marketing, sales, finance, manufacturing, and customer service. The case studies focused specifically on companies that successfully harnessed the crowd to improve all aspects of their businesses, including Eli Lily, Amazon.com, Dell Computers, Cambrian House, Angie's List, Proctor & Gamble and more.
"We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business" was published by Pearson Education and released in October of 2007 to critical acclaim. Don Tapscott, author of "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything," wrote the book's foreword.
Royalties from the book will be distributed annually to a charity chosen by a vote of all contributing authors.
What's Next
The "We" project continues to grow. Barry and Jon have a second "We" book underway, which will focus on how community is improving marketing within many of today's corporations.
The first phase of this new project consists of collecting case studies and using Mzinga's new IdeaShare tool to allow "We" community members to submit ideas and then rate, rank, and comment on them. The winning ideas will form the foundation for the second book.
In the second phase, Barry and Jon will use the Mzinga wiki to edit and polish the book's content by posting the draft copy and then allowing the community members to edit the content – producing yet another work that validates the series' premise:
"We" really are smarter than me.
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