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21 " Mintzberg’s emergent strategy, Peretti’s mullet strategy, crowdsourcing, and field experiments—are really just variations on the same general theme of “measuring and reacting. "
― Duncan J. Watts , Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer
22 " The real problem with relying on experts, however, is not that they are appreciably worse than nonexperts, but rather that because they are experts we tend to consult only one at a time. "
23 " Plans fail, in other words, not because planners ignore common sense, but rather because they rely on their own common sense to reason about the behavior of people who are different from them. "
24 " This is the strategy paradox. The main cause of strategic failure, Raynor argues, is not bad strategy, but great strategy that just happens to be wrong. Bad strategy is characterized by lack of vision, muddled leadership, and inept execution—not the stuff of success for sure, but more likely to lead to persistent mediocrity than colossal failure. "
25 " scenario planners attempt to sketch out a wide range of these hypothetical futures, where the main aim is not so much to decide which of these scenarios is most likely as to challenge possibly unstated assumptions that underpin existing strategies.18 "
26 " When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious, then, as Lazarsfeld put it, “something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness.’ ”5 "
27 " sense turns out to suffer from a number of errors that systematically mislead us. Yet because of the way we learn from experience—even experiences that are never repeated, or that take place in other times and places—the failings of commonsense reasoning are rarely apparent to us. Rather, they manifest themselves to us simply as “things we didn’t know at the time” but which seem obvious in hindsight. The paradox of common sense, therefore, is that even as it helps us make sense of the world, it can actively undermine our ability to understand "
28 " In other words, our perceptions of who influences us may say more about social and hierarchical relations than influence per se. "
29 " In other words, the shift from “predict and control” to “measure and react” is not just technological—although technology is needed—but psychological. "
30 " What it means, though, is that the law of the few is not one, but two hypotheses that have been mashed together: first that some people are more influential than others; and second, that the influence of these people is greatly magnified by some contagion process that generates social epidemics. "
31 " The reason is simply that when influence is spread via some contagious process, the outcome depends far more on the overall structure of the network than on the properties of the individuals who trigger it. "
32 " Just as forest fires require a conspiracy of wind, temperature, low humidity, and combustible fuel to rage out of control over large tracts of land, social epidemics require just the right conditions to be satisfied by the network of influence. "
33 " When we hear about a large forest fire, of course, we don’t think that there must have been anything special about the spark that started it. Indeed, such an idea would be laughable. Yet when we see something special happen in the social world, we are instantly drawn to the idea that whoever started it must have been special also. "
34 " This tendency, which psychologists call creeping determinism, is related to the better-known phenomenon of hindsight bias, the after-the-fact tendency to think that we “knew it all along. "
35 " Much of life, however, is characterized by what the sociologist Robert Merton called the Matthew Effect, named after a sentence from the book of Matthew in the Bible, which laments “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. "
36 " Creeping determinism means that we pay less attention than we should to the things that don’t happen. "
37 " Even though the Kim Kardashians of the world were indeed more influential than average, they were so much more expensive that they did not provide the best value for the money. Rather, it was what we called ordinary influencers, meaning individuals who exhibit average or even less-than-average influence, who often proved to be the most cost-effective means to disseminate information. "
38 " For example, the “theory of relative deprivation” states that people feel distressed by circumstances only inasmuch as their hardship exceeds that of the people around them. "
39 " In a network of tens of millions of users, ten thousand retweets doesn’t seem like that big a number, but what our data showed is that even that is almost impossible to achieve. For practical purposes, therefore, it may be better to forget about the large cascades altogether and instead try to generate lots of small ones. And for that purpose, ordinary influencers may work just fine. "
40 " Together, creeping determinism and sampling bias lead commonsense explanations to suffer from what is called the post-hoc fallacy. "