All Together Now (or, Can Collective Intelligence Save the Planet?)

MIT Sloan Management Review

An interview with Thomas Malone

April 23, 2009

MIT Sloan School professor Thomas Malone addresses the mental models that impede management progress, the role of collective intelligence in solving climate problems, and his view of how wrong people are about what business is for.

Even before launching the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, Thomas Malone was trying to imagine how work could one day be done differently. A professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, he was a founding co-director of the Initiative on Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century, and in general has continuously explored how “to help society take advantage of the opportunities for organizing itself in new and better ways made possible by technology.”

Some of those ways offer interesting paths to sustainability—but the paths are to sustainability as Malone defines it, which doesn’t mean a world in which everything is built to last. “It’s often the case that good things are sustainable, but sometimes things are sustainable but not good,” he says. “And sometimes things are good but not sustainable.”

In this installment of the MIT Sustainability Interview series, Malone addresses the mental models that impede management progress, the role of collective intelligence in solving climate problems, and his view of how wrong people are about what business is for. He spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Hopkins.

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