10

Boardroom Markets

If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive.

—Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard

A company that can predict the future is a company that is going to win.

—Bernardo Huberman, Hewlett-Packard

RITE-SOLUTIONS, MISYS, and Best Buy are bottom-up prediction markets: questions originate at lower levels of the organizational pyramid, and market results flow upward. If a company wanted to use a prediction market on really major issues, could markets be initiated top-down, even from board level?

Lew Platt’s quote, “If only HP knew what HP knows,” became a mantra for supporters of markets. It was motivated by the most important top-down problem—the difficulty CEO Platt and his Hewlett-Packard board ...

Get Oracles now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.