We Are Smarter Than Me
How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business
Barry Libert & Jon Spector
Wharton School Publishing, 2007

This book is a product of what it preaches – authors Libert & Spector apparently compiled their text with the help of thousands of contributors who chipped in with case studies, examples and the like. The authors dub this process “crowdsourcing” – the act of tapping on the resources of numerous external contributors.

The authors aim to explain how you can successfully leverage the potential of crowdsourcing in your own business.

The election before the election is finally over – Barack Obama has secured the Democratic party’s nomination with Hillary Clinton expected to formally stand down her campaign sometime today. The pundits are falling over themselves to analyse how the relatively unknown freshman senator managed to overcome Clinton who entered the primary race as the prohibitive favourite.

Form a small business perspective, one of the more interesting take-aways comes from Steven Strauss in TheStreet.com. He likens Obama to an unknown, under-funded start-up going up against a gigantic, well-known and well-resourced institutional brand (Clinton).

So, how did the little guy prevail against the established goliath? By being unique, playing smart and competing to his strengths. Read Spencer’s full article for the details.