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

April 23, 2009 | Operations

Even before launching the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence,Thomas Malone was tryng 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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