The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. Scott E. Page. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. 448. $27.95, cloth. ISBN-13: 978-0-697-12838-2. TEL: 609-258-5714 • FAX: 609-258-1335
In the summer of 2001, Alpheus Bingham, a vice president at Eli Lilly, created a website for large pharmaceutical companies in pursuit of solutions to scientific problems. These problems ran the gamut from tracing metal impurities to assessing the risks of breast cancer to detecting organic chemical vapors.
Seekers posted their problems on Bingham’s site along with an award of up to $100,000 that they would pay for successful solutions. Anyone willing to register could be a solver. Solvers included dentists from the Far East and physicists from the Midwest. Bingham called this site InnoCentive. By 2005, more than 80,000 solvers had registered from more than 170 countries. Solvers found solutions to one third of the problems. How could these individuals and small teams of scientists find solutions that large companies with resources galore could not?
That is the question Page explores in this book. He redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups—and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity—not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.
The book argues that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page shows how using his own research.
Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you’re talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. He examines practical ways to apply diversity’s logic to a host of problems, and along the way offers fascinating and surprising examples, from the redesign of the Chicago “El” to the truth about where we store our ketchup.
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