Friday, January 7, 2005
Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink"
WIRED has a two-page review of Malcolm Gladwell's upcoming book "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." From what I read in the review (and from my previous experience with Gladwell's "The Tipping Point"), it sounds like a really good read.
As with TTP, Gladwell turns conventional thinking on its head a bit with his concept of "thin slicing" which refers to "people reacting to the barest of new information and arriving at smart decisions others with more information couldn't make."
The part of the WIRED piece that hit home most with me was this section:
"We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it."
I have had colleagues in the past who would shoot down the feedback of more experienced co-workers by mentioning how long he/she has been thinking about the problem (as if the amount of time somehow negates the co-workers' collective experience).
It is great to see Gladwell showing that, if you don't have the proper experience or knowledge, you can think about something for a really, really long time and still not come up with the answer (or idea) that might take those with more experience a few seconds to arrive at.
The book is set to be published on January 11th. You can preorder it from Amazon here.
WIRED has a two-page review of Malcolm Gladwell's upcoming book "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." From what I read in the review (and from my previous experience with Gladwell's "The Tipping Point"), it sounds like a really good read.
As with TTP, Gladwell turns conventional thinking on its head a bit with his concept of "thin slicing" which refers to "people reacting to the barest of new information and arriving at smart decisions others with more information couldn't make."
The part of the WIRED piece that hit home most with me was this section:
"We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it."
I have had colleagues in the past who would shoot down the feedback of more experienced co-workers by mentioning how long he/she has been thinking about the problem (as if the amount of time somehow negates the co-workers' collective experience).
It is great to see Gladwell showing that, if you don't have the proper experience or knowledge, you can think about something for a really, really long time and still not come up with the answer (or idea) that might take those with more experience a few seconds to arrive at.
The book is set to be published on January 11th. You can preorder it from Amazon here.
¶ 7:36 AM 
About Shawn Morton
Experienced web product manager, social media strategist, professional blogger and speaker, startup entrepreneur & father of 4.
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