Sometimes even a smart crowd will make a mistake.

Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that make success impossible, a reflex that of course creates a vicious cycle.

Companies often become victims of their own mythologies.

One key to successful group decisions is getting people to pay much less attention to what everyone else is saying.

Tough times have always lent themselves to nativist sentiments and closed-door policies. But in the case of highly skilled immigrants these policies are a recipe for stagnation.

The fact that industries wax and wane is a reality of any economic system that wants to remain dynamic and responsive to people's changing tastes.

The autocracies of the Arab world have been as economically destructive as they've been politically repressive.