WSJ: "Wiki" Book from Wharton, MIT and McKinsey

Pearson is joining with two top business schools - MIT Sloan and Wharton School - in a project called "We are Smarter Than Me" to create a business book authored and edited by a "wiki." There was an extensive article covering this in today's issue of Wall Street Journal:

U.K.'s Pearson Tests
The Group Dynamic
For a 'Wiki' Book
By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY
Wall Street Journal
November 16, 2006; Page B1

In a move that could shake up the book industry, publishing giant Pearson PLC is joining with two top business schools to create a business book authored and edited by a "wiki" -- an online community dedicated to writing.

The effort is inspired, in part, by the best-known wiki-produced work -- Wikipedia, a not-for-profit online encyclopedia. Despite occasional hiccups, Wikipedia is increasingly regarded as a reliable source for information, aided by community-enforced rules that it can't contain either personal points of view or original research.

In general, a wiki is an online site that lets users add and edit content. The name is based on a Hawaiian term meaning "rapidly" -- as in "wiki wiki."

The wiki book, produced by a community of business experts and managers, will be called "We Are Smarter Than Me." It will explore how businesses can use online communities, consumer-generated media such as blogs, and other Web content to help in their marketing, pricing, research and service.

Barry Libert, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant who is CEO of Shared Insights Inc., a Woburn, Mass., company, persuaded London-based Pearson, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School to help develop the new book, which will be published under Pearson's Wharton School Publishing imprint.

The WeAreSmarter.org Web site, co-founded by Mr. Libert and Wharton vice dean Jon Spector, went online a month ago with initial content they shaped along with MIT management professor Thomas Malone, among others. They chose chapter headings and then wrote a few pages to create a starting point. For instance, a chapter titled "We Can Research It," tells an anecdote about an Australian man who started a mail-order brewery based on votes by 20,000 cellphone users on what makes an ideal beer. Other participants can then edit the contents or add anecdotes.

The wiki leaders expect business consultants and executives to contribute to the book site, which, like Wikipedia, doesn't pay writers for their work. The site is open to anyone, but does ask contributors to supply information. WeAreSmarter expects to close submissions to the book wiki by the end of the first quarter next year and turn it over to paid ghostwriters to turn it into a 120-page business book aimed at the fast-growing airport bookstore market. It will go on sale next fall. Despite the free labor of the original authors, the list price will be $25.99, says Tim Moore, publisher of two of Pearson's business imprints, Wharton School Publishing and FT Press. Authors will vote on a charity to receive any profits.

"Wikis are one of those things that you have to embrace early, so you can figure out what the brave new world looks like," Mr. Moore says. Part of his goal is to avoid being ambushed by the Internet like "the music industry, which really got whacked." He wouldn't say how much Pearson was spending on the project, but called the sum comparable to other business books.

Wiki authoring of a printed book could be a "wonderful" online marketing tool, Mr. Moore says. After the book is published, WeAreSmarter will remain online, where people can continue to contribute. He notes that 10,000 people, mostly alumni and faculty at the two schools, have already heard about the book through invitations to join the project and 1,000 have accepted; the plan has already been cited in "like, 47 blogs," he adds.

Other publishers are looking on with interest. Joe Wikert, executive publisher with John Wiley & Sons Inc., a Hoboken, N.J., textbook publisher, predicts that the book's quality will be high. "The community won't allow it to be garbage," he says. But with so many experts involved "it will be interesting to see how they manage the egos," he says.

"I doubt authors will see this as much of a threat to their domain," says Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, a New York-based writers' organization. "Readers generally look for a strong, consistent author's voice, which isn't something a wiki can really provide." However, having a wiki produce a book about wikis might be one of the few times that it would work, he adds.

The Wikipedia Foundation, which produces Wikipedia, has an online textbook project with the longer term goal of providing an alternative to pricey high school and college texts that often cost over $100 each. But these "Wikitexts" -- now online only -- haven't been embraced by school boards and professors who assign reading material.

Many experts are impressed with the ability of large groups of people to solve problems or predict outcomes. The 2004 best-seller "The Wisdom of Crowds," by James Surowiecki, covered the phenomenon. Many companies have started using wikis internally and with partners for product development. "Prediction markets," in which participants invest imaginary money, have often proved accurate in forecasting elections.

One goal of the WeAreSmarter project is to see how a wiki can organize and balance material provided by experts such as consultants and professors and managers who are using the techniques in their own businesses.

Mr. Libert thinks that the big community collectively will select solutions that are better than the answers provided by individual professors or consultants.

One of the big challenges will be finding ways to motivate the professional experts, many of whom make money by writing books themselves, says Mr. Malone of MIT. "The question is, can we create an incentive structure so they'll put in some of their best thinking, or will this just be incidental thinking?" He says it's possible that individuals may get credits for having primary responsibility for a particular chapter. On the other hand, he says, "If you really are an expert in this area, you wouldn't want to be left out." Authors' names will be printed on the book cover and on the Web site.

The wiki is handling the copyright question by getting participants to agree to a Creative Commons license that turns their contributions over to WeAreSmarter. Creative Commons, organized by Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, provides a variety of different licenses by which people can allow or restrict their words or music to be used by others.