We are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business

Afterword—Join the Crowd

In his 1990 hit play Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare has one of his characters say, “I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. ... The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we’re so close.”

That six-degree equation evolved from the 1967 experiment of a social psychologist named Stanley Milgram, who had volunteers mail packages to 100 people at random. Columbia University professors repeated the experiment in 2002, but this time it was via e-mail, and some 60,000 people from 166 nations participated. ...