Week 3 : Crowd Wisdom

The first term I heard today is group think. I've learnt it before. Well for info, group think is a condition when in a meeting the participants don't voice out their opinion. They just follow whatever the leader says in the meeting. Group think makes the meeting inefficient because the purpose of meeting is to find the best solution the participants can think of. If there is group think the solution only comes from the leader which can't be the best solution all the time, therefore has to be avoided. There are several factor that caused group think:
1. The participants wants the meeting to end quickly because if there is a difference in opinion the meeting will last longer.
2. The participants don't want a conflict among themselves, so they just agree to others' opinion.
3. The leader usually never pay attention to his subordinates opinion. This caused the subordinate to think what's the use of his opinion anyway.
Group think has a bad effect to the company, the leader and even the subordinates. Like mentioned by Professor, the employees of TT Durai former Chief Executive Officer of National Kidney Foundation (NKF) in Singapore will be labelled as the people who won't voice out their opinions. Of course this will ruin their career life for years.

There is difference in opinion about the crowd size in decision making. As was said by Henry David Thoreau "The mass never comes up to standard of its member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest". James Surowiecki said"Under the right circumstances groups are remarkably intelligent, are often smarter than the smartest people in them." Actually these two persons didn't say the wrong thing the key word here is "under the right circumstances". A simple example is to calculate the load that a bridge can handle, one expert is better than a crowd. But for judging people's behaviour crowd's opinion is better than the experts.

Going back to James Surowiecki statements. For a group to be more effective than experts required diversity, independent of opinion, decentralization and aggregation. According to Surowiecki hypothesis decision quality is proportional to number of types of solutions. Diversity is needed as it provides more alternatives which then will give a better solution. Independent is the main problem in group think, people's opinion is determined by others opinions. One way to solve this is by making the decisions made simultaneously.

Then the Professor talked about the process to launched a new product to market. The first thing to do is to conduct a marketing research. There are several things to consider here i.e. the cost, the functionality, form of the product(small or big), appearance(nice or ugly). After doing research and know what the market wants they start building the product. The next process is to distribute it to the consumers through available channels. Because the time doesn't permit the professor only touched a little on the infrastructure for mobile commerce.