The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies.

• Author: Heath, Will Carrington
• Position: Book review

The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies

By Scott E. Page

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Pp. xx, 424. $27.95.

During World War II, the British brought together approximately twelve thousand people at Bletchley Park, near London, to crack the German Enigma code, which they did--not once, but twice. Francis Crick and James D. Watson discovered the molecular structure of nucleic acid, the double helix, in 1953. And in 1962 Ringo Starr joined three other young men from Liverpool, England, in a pop music group that would become the most accomplished rock-n-roll band in history. What do all of these events have in common?

In each case, diversity trumped ability. No one person would have cracked the Enigma code even once, let alone twice. Could Crick have discovered the double helix without Watson, or Watson without Crick? Most historians of science would say not. The Beatles were certainly more than the sum of four moderately accomplished musicians. You get the picture. In all of these examples, people succeeded not by being brilliantly capable individually, but by leveraging their differences to achieve much more than they could have if they were acting alone.

How exactly does this amplification happen? What are its dynamics? Scott Page considers these questions in his fascinating book The Difference (the title was originally to be "The Logic of Diversity," but Princeton University Press changed it for greater marketing appeal). This book combines analytical rigor, breadth of knowledge, empirical evidence, and amusing anecdotes in a engaging style that avoids the heaviness of the "primary" academic literature on diversity.

If I may be permitted to pick one literary nit, I found that Page's humor occasionally slips from clever to silly, like those Dummies' Guide to Einstein (or whatever) books, which are wonderful, but not necessarily owing to their humor. Unsophisticated humor does not play well alongside the otherwise sophisticated, even elegant logic of The Difference. But I digress along very subjective lines.

To move beyond anecdotes and formally argue that diversity trumps ability, we must say precisely what diversity means. (We must also define ability, but we'll do so later.) Page defines diversity as differences in how we represent or encode situations and problems (perspective diversity) and in how we generate solutions to problems (heuristic diversity). A...