When a business book published by Wharton hits the shelves next year, one of the authors may be Donald Trump.
And another author may be your little brother.
Partly devised by two Wharton staff members, the book is titled We Are Smarter Than Me and will be a collaborative effort written using a wiki style - meaning anyone can edit or contribute to it.
The project - which is intended to be a how-to for business leaders trying to profit from the power of communities - is a collaboration among Wharton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, the educational-publishing company Pearson Education and Shared Insights, a company that specializes in building online communities.
Wharton Vice Dean of Executive Education Jon Spector, one of the founders of the project - along with Marketing professor Yoram Wind - said the book will test the ability of mass collaboration and expects many more similar projects to be forthcoming.
"We are very interested in the power of communities and peer-to-peer learning and the role that they could play in business," he said.
Though students will be able to edit the text, the book is targeted toward more seasoned professionals: Invitations to participate will be sent to 650,000 Wharton alumni, as well as to subscribers to the school's online business journal, Knowledge@Wharton.
When told about the project, Wharton freshman Lionel Nicolau said the idea of a book written through collaboration was "really cool," though he added he is unsure how much the average student will be able to write compared to a professor or businessman.
"I think I would try, [but] I don't know how much I would contribute," Nicolau said.
Nearly 3,000 people are already registered on the site, including Marketing professor Dave Reibstein, who was among the first to volunteer.
Reibstein said he was excited by the potential for participants to learn in the process as well as contribute knowledge.
"It's a similar spirit to having a class discussion," he said.
But with that discussion being so large, Wind and Spector are not sure how this project will develop or where it will end up.
"It's a big experiment, so, at this point, we really don't know," Wind said.
Spector and Wind both added that one of the main inspirations for the project was a book by James Surowiecki called The Wisdom of Crowds.
Wisdom of Crowds opens with a description of a county fair where a crowd is asked to guess the weight of a butchered cow. When the guesses were later examined, the average of all guesses was closer to the actual weight than any individual guess, or the assessments of experts.
"The irony is that [Surowiecki] wrote it alone," Spector said. "We want to write a book that can help executives to apply this concept and test the concept."
Once completed, the final version will be fact-checked by a team of experts and will eventually be published by Wharton School Publishing.
It is expected to be on sale next year.
