Wise Guys

For our book club project, out team read “The Wisdom of Crowds”, by James Surowiecki. This book shows how groups of people, when used effectively, are as smart as or smarter than the smartest individuals in a group. For a group to be successful, it needs to be aware of what type of problem they are trying to solve, so they can plan accordingly. I really enjoyed this book because it talked about all the aspects of successful groups and kept it interesting with detailed examples. This book has also changed my views regarding group work and altered my future goals for when I work in a group or team.

Whenever I was told to work in a group for a class project, I was always frustrated because I did not like to work in groups. I am someone who likes to get things done and do not like to put things off. Whenever I have worked on group projects in the past it seems like I am the only person who wants to work on the project ahead of time. Everyone else usually wants to let other people do all the work, while they take the credit for the final product. Before reading this book and learning about teamwork in class, I did not prefer to work in teams for these reasons, however; this book and our section in class on teamwork helped change my view of working on teams to complete projects. They also taught me how to deal with some of the problems that come with working in teams.

When reading this book, the first connection that came to my mind was our book club team. The book was explaining how groups can be more successful than individuals, and I kept connecting it to our book club team and how we could use this information to our advantage. The material from the book relates directly to our team because we are a group of people working toward a common goal. As a group, we wanted to work together to produce a final product that is better than any of us could have come up with individually. We also talked a lot about teamwork in class earlier in the semester. A...