Why I love Wikipedia

Wikipedia has its critics to be sure.  How can an encyclopedia written by anonymous amateurs be considered a reliable source?  Why do so many people turn there to settle factual disputes in the heat of an argument.  (I’ll admit, one of the reasons I wanted to buy an iPhone was so that I woud have unbridled access to this treasure trove of knowledge).

The argument goes someting like: Wikipedia articles can’t be trusted.  ANYONE can simply write whatever they want, or edit an existing article, maliciosly (or unwittingly) re-writing history.  That is a valid concern.  I’m not sure I want my grandmother to be the one writing an entry on WW2.  (Her memory might not be very trustworthy).  But I believe this weakness is Wikipedia’s greatest asset.  It is the quintessential peer-edited jounral.  Errors are quickly dealt with.

In their book “The Starfish and the Spider” Brafman and Beckstrom write about the power of community collaboraion: “..put people into an open system and they’ll automatically want to contrubute.” (pg 74)  Wikipedia has a large user base that thrives off the chance to write, re-format, or edit erroneous information.

Of course it is a bonus that the real-time nature of an internet resource means that mistakes do not come with a costly printing price tag.

Everything (no matter the source) shold be read with a grain of  salt.  This applies to your printed textbooks and newspapers as well.  Errors find their way into all sorts of places.  We cannot escape that.  What we get from Wikipedia though is a vibrant community of collaborators who are excited about spreading and imporving human access to a limitless body knowledge.

Finding a Group to Lead

Have you read Tribes by Seth Godin?  If not, I highly recommend it.  It’s a quick read.  If you are armed with a good pot of coffee and a warm spot to sit, you might tackle it in a day.  But it is the kind of book you can consume in bite-sized pieces if you wish.  In his conversational style, Seth writes about the phonomenon of tribes.  Now before you get your warpaint and blowdart gun ready, it’s not that type of tribe (although I imagine Seth might support your quest to lead such a tribe.)

Tribes are simply groups of people united around a common interest, goal, or idea.  There are literally dozens of groups like this that are waiting to be activated. It could be a group of Korean langugae enthusiasts (shameles plug), civil-war era stamp collectors,  or it could be your sales team at work.  Whoever it is, these groups need someone to lead them.  Seth encourages his audience to be the leader for some group.  To find it, and lead it.  In fact, in the modern internet age, these groups are even easier to find.  The internet also makes collaborating with these groups incredibly easy.

What groups are you a part of?  What groups could you lead?  Isn’t there something about which you are passionate, and around which you could gather people to collaborate?

Integrative Thinking

As I wrote before, I am currently reading Roger Martin’s The Opposable Mind. Martin believes that for some business leaders, a certain method of thinking has contibuted to their success. Integrative thinking, according to Martin is the ability to keep multiple options, which may even be contradictory, in play as viable options when facing any business decision.mm

For example, Red Hat is a software company offering Linux, a FREE computer operating system. When open source software like Linux was first introduced and becoming popular, distributors made money by selling disks for a nominal fee (perhaps around $15). This is of course much more attractive than the hunderds of dollars competitors like Microsoft were charging for a proprietary system. Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat rejected the tradtional model used by Micrsoft et. al. He much preferred the collaboration and innovation that the open source community could provide in a very nimble way. He also knew that selling CD’s for $15 was not going to be a profitable business model.

Hindsight is always 20/20, so it may not appear to be such a breakthough using the lens of today, but These two models were accepted as reality in the industry. There was an impasse. But Martin identifies Young as an integrative thinker, to revoltionized the open source software community by ofering the software for FREE (as an internet download) and combining that with services (training, installation, consulting, etc). The prodcut price enabled Red Hat to undercut practically the entire market, giving them substantial penetration. The high-margin services gave them an immediate and lucrative path to profit.

Young excercised integrative thought in finding this solution. From the incongruity of 2 traditional models, he saw the oppotunity for a innovative third model.