This week, Harvard Business Review published a new piece by Network member Karim Lakhani on how to avoid relying only on the highest-paid person’s opinion (HiPPO) when making decisions. The piece, “The Antidote to HiPPOs: Crowd Voting,” looks at a number of examples – including t-shirt designs at Threadless and Pebble’s smartwatch Kickstarter campaign – to show how crowd voting “can vastly improve the chances that a strategic decision, such as product selection, will lead to success.”
Indeed, rather than relying exclusively on one person’s judgment – which “is bound to lead to trouble – crowd voting “integrates the expertise, knowledge, and perspectives of many more people inside and outside the organization.” Lakhani concedes that HiPPOs are far from a thing of the past, but the examples he explores and others show that “when making important decisions, leaders would do themselves and the whole organization a favor by making HiPPOs work with the crowd.”
