900 Sign On to Write Wikipedia-Style Management Book

by Judith Rosen, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 11/7/2006

Some companies may have come late to the idea of harnessing online communities for customer service, sales, marketing and product development, but with the success of MySpace, YouTube and Friendster, they’re busy making up for lost time. Now Wharton School Publishing, an imprint of Pearson Education, is readying a blueprint on how Web 2.0 technologies can benefit business with the first business book to be written Wiki style—We Are Smarter Than Me (fall 2007).

Nearly 900 people have signed on to be part of the networked book collaboration in response to an e-mail that went out late last month to 10,000 students, faculty and alums at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “We slowed the process down because we were overwhelmed,” said WeAreSmarter.org cofounder Barry Libert, CEO of Shared Insights, a Woburn, Mass.-based company that helps businesses build communities. He plans to resume contacting as many as two million potential “authors” later this month. Authors will be listed on the front cover, flaps, back cover and on the Web site at WeAreSmarter.org. Royalties will be donated to charity.

Some notes to get the project going were written by WeAreSmarter founders Jon Spector, vice-dean and director of Wharton’s Aresty Institute of Executive Education; Thomas Malone, director of MIT’s new Center for Collective Intelligence; Tim Moore, v-p, editor-in-chief of Prentice Hall PTR; Jerry Wind, director of the SEI Center for Advanced Management at Wharton; and Phillip Evans, author of Blown to Bits and senior v-p in the Boston office of the Boston Consulting Group. Libert looks at these initial offerings as the “hors d’oeuvres” of the project. “People wouldn’t come to a party with no food,” he said.

Although tens of thousands may ultimately join the WeAre party, the printed book will be quite short. WordWorks founder Donna Carpenter, who has worked with a number of bestselling business writers, including James Champy, will hone the text down to 35,000 words. The print edition will be a 150-page small-format book. However, Libert hopes to continue the project indefinitely, to develop a series of Wiki books on management and community 2.0. “In effect,” he said, “we’ll be taking snapshots in moments of time.” Negotiations are also underway for several more universities to participate in the initiative.

To give writers a chance to meet in person and to share their research, Libert is planning a conference in March in Las Vegas. March is also the cut-off date for contributions for the first We Are Smarter Than Me book.