The book is based on an interesting premise and the writing style is very easy to read, it really sucks you in. I personally REALLY like Malcolm Gladwell's books/lectures/ideas -- he's defeinitely one of my favorites.

Note that after reading this book I'm not convinced that I completely agree with the fundamental arguement it's trying to make. I also didn't like it as much as Gladwell's previous book, Tipping Point. But, I don't want to sound overly critical. What I consider high quality writing isn't based upon whether or not I agree with the arguement the author is trying to make. The ideas are unique and creative and that alone is basis enough for me to give this book four stars. One last note is that you might want to look at the rebuttal to this book titled Think! (I have not read it but if you find Blink interesting you would probably also like Think!).

Gladwell (intuition/"thin-slicing"), Coleman (emotional intelligence/"limbic high-jacking"), De Bono (lateral thinking/"water logic")... Brains within brains... Thinking without thinking... Thinking about thinking... The states of non-duality and no-mind of not thinking at all and just being...

The lotus of consciousness is still flowering, it seems... The pollen of popularization is still spreading across the printing presses... And we, the readers, violently sneeze out the allergies of oblivion as we thumb through the pages of these operating manuals for our consciousness...

Excuse the late-night reviewing poetics. Seriously: be glad Gladwell writes so well - intuiton is no simple subject matter to "thin-slice."


Pavel Somov, Ph.D., Author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, Nov. 2008)

"Blink" almost instantly made it to my shelf of favorite books of all time. I won't go into a detailed description of Gladwell's theory of thin-slicing, as other reviewers have already done this in all the detail you need to know before you decide to purchase this book (which I highly recommend you do) Instead, I'll tell you what I took away from "Blink", and why I think it's such an important read.

"Blink" is more than just a series of entertaining anecdotes that support his theory. It is a book of lessons that provide insight into our minds, and the minds of those around us. Armed with this knowledge, we are better prepared to not only understand our own decision-making process, but to see, for a blink of an eye, what others are seeing when they make decisions about us. Many of the experiments and studies he describes contain information that can be directly applied to one's life.

A good example of this is the study done in Germany that turns our idea of `feeling happy' on its head. While everyone knows that when you're happy, you smile, a team of German scientists found that it works in reverse as well. The simple act of smiling improves your mood. One could just take this interesting factoid and store it in the lumber room of your mind along with all the other trivia. I chose to make it relevant. I can't tell you how many times it's happened since reading this book that I felt angry, frustrated, impatient, or irritated in some way, and then turned my mood around just by forcing myself to smile for a little bit.

Another sub-chapter of the book ("Arguing with a Dog") describes what Gladwell calls "temporary autism", a kind of mind-blindness that occurs when one is excited or stressed to the point that the heart rate rises above 145. I found this chapter very helpful in understanding the physiological process, as my work often requires me to deal with very stressed out people. (It helped with some easily excitable friends too!)

The sub-chapter titled `The Storytelling Problem", which detailed the vast difference between what people say they want in a mate and what they are in fact attracted to, made me feel a lot better after reading it. After years of hearing women describe their "perfect man" to me, and then seeing them fall for a perfect jerk instead, I've gotten more than a little frustrated. But now I know there is a psychological reason for this insanity. I wish I could make every single woman in the country read this chapter (or at least the single women in my city!) On a similar note, I wish I could make everyone read the chapter called "The Warren G. Harding Error", which details the power of looks and our subconscious predilection for "tall, dark, and handsome" men. This chapter is especially relevant in an election year, when we are looking at our two candidates and judging them. Do we really know upon what basis we are judging? Are TRULY picking the best man for the job, or are we voting on who has made the more "presidential" first impression? As much as most people won't admit that race plays any part in their vote, mightn't it anyway, even among those people who truly DO deplore racism? Do we like a candidate because of what he or she truly stands for, or are we voting for them because they smile more often, or joke more often, or were wearing our favorite color the first time we saw them? One section of the book even describes how people can be "primed", subtly influenced to think and behave differently, at least in the short term. Are we, as voters, being "primed" by the various media? I think these are all very valid and relevant questions we need to ask ourselves.

This is what I took away from "Blink"- a deeper understanding of the decision-making process, and what factors assist or subvert it. "Paul Van Riper's Big Victory" is a portrait of a decision-making model that works. "Pepsi's Challenge" describes a situation where thin-slicing doesn't work out. "The Chair of Death" describes an interesting hiccup in the thin-slicing process, where peoples' initial reaction can be negative, not because something is genuinely bad, but simply because it is unfamiliar. And "Blink in Black and White", which not only relates the problem of automatic subconscious racial stereotyping (even of ones OWN race) but supplies a test you can do yourself, was nothing less than chilling.

OK, Gladwell is a writer, not a scientist. If you're looking for an airtight theory complete with control group testing and a detailed analysis of every possible permutation of the concept, go read a scientific journal. And, as another reviewer pointed out, he does tend to end his books with a thud rather than a conclusion. Nonetheless, I think this should be required reading in every American high school. The idea is that compelling, and the issues involved are that important.

Let me start by saying that each chapter in the book is very interesting, easy to read and engaging. A real page turner from this point of view.

Now, having said that, as a whole I couldn't see what was the author getting at through the book. The book starts with the premise that some people can make a snap decision about something and be right, which is interesting. But then, the book goes into chapter after chapter of examples on exemptions to this. Which at the end feels like the original premise is completely false. The only conclusion I could get is that some expert in something might be able to make a quick decision and be right, which is mostly chance alone.

So in essence I found this book to be mostly unimportant.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell (a journalist who also wrote The Tipping Point) examines the process of snap decision making. He suggests that we are wrong in thinking that we make decisions rationally by absorbing extensive information and experience. In the end we make decisions unconsciously and essentially instantly. This works great for most decisions because we learn to "thin-slice"-that is, to ignore extraneous input and concentrate on one or two cues. Sometimes, we don't even consciously know what these cues are, as in Gladwell's anecdote about a tennis coach who can predict when a player is going to make a rare sort of error but doesn't know how he knows. The book also explores how this process can go horribly wrong, as in the Amadou Diallo shooting. Gladwell gets the science facts right and has the journalistic skills to make them utterly engrossing.

I'm a rabid fan of these "how it all works" type of psychology books. Two others I fell in love with recently are The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book and The Impulse Factor: Why Some of Us Play It Safe and Others Risk It All

An excellent book, just as good as Gladwell's previous landmark, "The Tipping Point," "Blink" is fascinating in the confirmation that "thin slice" first impressions are more than intuitive, they are the results of subconscious factual significant experience and realities, and in many cases subconscious bias. Interesting too, is the evidence that we can think "too much" and counter our "intuitive" knowledge judgments with obfuscating factual study - "introspection destroyed people's ability to solve insight problems" and, as is quoted, "what happens is that we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preference to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason." I especially like the section on focus groups, how results on "first impressions" can be very wrong, "We like market research because it provides certainty...but the truth is that for the most important decisions, there can be no certainty" says Gladwell. I particularly like the example of how the Aeron chair by Herman Miller failed every focus group rating it took on looks, and "likely to purchase" reviews, yet became the best selling chair in the company's history (and then focus groups reversed their scores), ditto audience reaction to the best selling situation comedies of their time, "All in the Family" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." Applying the analysis to a polarizing product today in the automotive industry, as someone who is looking at the launch of the new reaction creating Ford Flex vehicle (September 23, 2008), I'm wondering whether or not what Gladwell said about the initial "looks" rating for the Aeron chair is true for the new Ford Crossover in the looks department - that is, as its very different looking, "Maybe the word `ugly' was just a proxy for `different." And when people get familiar with the `difference' time will change perception (as it did with the Ford Taurus over two decades ago). It will be interesting to see how this "real world" example of Gladwell's observations rolls out.

Definitely on my recommended book list. A must read for women in business.

Susan Bock
The Success Coach for Women in Business
www.SusanBockSolutions.com

Definitely on my recommended book list. A must read for women in business.

Susan Bock
The Success Coach for Women in Business
www.SusanBockSolutions.com

This is probably one of the best books I have read. This book is an excellent compilation of captivating studies in very different fields, carefully selected by the author to make his point. How by artificially altering your facial expressions your mood can change (for example if you put up a sad face you get grieved), how a psychologist can tell if a marriage is going to last by studying how the couple reacts in a simulated argument, etc.

We all take decisions "in the blink of an eye", even if it is only a decision of trusting a person or not. This is how our brain works, if you like it or not. Maybe we should not call them decisions, since the word decision implies some sort of reasoning and a process of weighing pros and cons, I would also not call this process thinking without thinking. Maybe we should call them judgements or pre-judgements (prejudices).

A lot of information is stored, retrieved, compared and judged in seconds in our unconscious, a process of which we are completely unaware of. So it makes perfect sense that the more experienced and educated our unconscious is, the better these pre-judgements will be. I do not believe that a lay person would detect a false work of art by pure instinct (by a feeling of "something is wrong with this work of art"), like experts did in one of the stories. Their unconscious perceived some "anomalies" quickly, by comparison with the huge amounts of previously recorded information of this period's artistic style. The experts could not explain why they felt that way, since consciously they had not noticed the anomalies yet. On the other hand, I think that a person with deep knowledge of people might have unconsciously detected that the art dealer selling the work of art was uneasy in some way, so he might have got a "hunch" that something was wrong.

This book tells you that you should trust your gut-feelings, but that you should "nurture" them with observation and expertise to make them more precise. Since these pre-judgements are influenced by our cultural environment and far quicker than ourselves and our conscious rational minds, they are also the basis of unfair prejudices that can make you act upon them and that are difficult to override (the author even claims that in situations in which time is of the essence, they are impossible to overcome, since we react upon them before thinking). Test your "racism" and "sexism" in a brief exercise in a chapter of the book, you will be surprised...

The best is probably to let our unconscious pre-judge and then we can still decide by a thinking process. Nature gave us both abilities, let's use them both.

If you have a short attention span, these short stories, loosely tied together by a few ideas is great for you. This is my favorite book of all-time. I seriously recommend this to anyone who is fascinated by the weirdness of the human mind.

This book is required reading for all incoming freshman at the top ranked engineering school in the U.S. The book is very readable, insightful, and useful.

A fascinating study of how the mind works and the effects our gut reactions can have on our decisions, "Blink" hammered Gladwell's point into me in an engaging and entertaining read. The writing is easy but intelligent, and I loved the specific examples and stories, particularly one about the war games. Not only do they help support Gladwell's notion but they're enough to create enjoyable stories by themselves.

The main idea I took away? First impressions aren't everything, but they're a lot more than you realize.

A very interesting and clever book. We know more than we might think when it comes to making judgments. Malcolm Gladwell provides excellent examples of how we can improve our decision making by paying more attention to our intuitive side. He's not suggesting that information gathering and research be ignored, only that we also consider the benefits to be derived from learning and making decsions in a different way. His examples are fascinating and the book's long term high ranking is well deserved. It's a hard book to put down.

As a person that has worked in manufacturing organizations all of my life, I often wondered how the grizzled veteran managers could always tell what was going to happen next. They didn't seem to be any smarter than the average Joe but somehow, they could predict the future. That is, the future of action or behavior A would result in item B materializing, just as sure as the sun rises in the morning.

This book is a landmark because it explains these mysteries to me. Not only is the book a highly interesting read, but it is an invaluable guide for those in managerial positions. Not only do I practice what it preaches but I also teach the concept to others.

I high recommend this book and have included it in my Amazon lists and guides. If you are in management, you need this book in your collection! Michael L. Gooch, SPHR Author of
Wingtips with Spurs

I think this is a must read, especially for those that enjoy psychology and understanding human behavior, human interaction and the reason we do many of the things the way we do. I think it is also a great self improvement tool

This is a very good book. (Sorry to repeat myself...) I really appreciate the other side of the coin. Thinking has been drilled into my head and I tend to totally ignore anything else. If it isn't a fact that I can define, it can't be not real or true. But there is some value in intuition. Some things are under the radar of our thought, (and should be, or we'd be overwhelmed), but they can be important. Intuition is our way of communicating that to ourselves.

This book has gotten some criticism - of course people should think. But there has not been much written on the power of intuition. When a person is knowledgeable about a subject, and they feel like something is wrong, they should trust, or at least acknowledge and respect that feeling. You can't just trust your intuition (make a guess) and go with it if you don't know anything about the thing you are "guessing" about. But if you do know about something, say you are an expert on US Currency (or someone who handles money alot), and you see a $20 bill that something seems wrong, should you act on that instinct, or do you say - "I can't see anything specifically wrong with it, so it must be ok."? If you were a foreigner, and came to the US, and looked at a $20 bill and said - something seems wrong about this, of course you can't go with that feeling, because you don't know anything about a $20 bill.

Anyways, read the book. It's worth it.

This book is a great buy and the seller is very good. Lightning fast shipping.

First, let me say that this is a good book. It's well worth your time to read. I don't think that it's as good as the Tipping Point though. This one seems to go a little longer than what is necessary maybe. It seems to be like Mr. Gladwell is trying to stretch it out a bit. The good thing about all of it though, is that it is a very quick read, and you won't have a lot of time invested into it. So definitely pick this one up, you won't regret it!

Gladwell offers an intriguing look at how the subconscious or intuition of a person works in different situations, as well as how it can be trained and the importance of sometimes taking a step back before acting on a situation. This is a relatively quick read with some intriguing ideas offered in it. If you like this book, you may find it useful to track down some of the writings by people he references as they go into more depth than Gladwell does.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is subtitled The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Because that pretty much summarizes my life, I decided to read it even though it's an "intellectual" book and I usually steer away from too much heavy reading. I'm glad I made an exception.

Blink had my attention from the beginning. Gladwell has assembled interesting vignettes from normal worldly life and used them to illustrate his point about the value and dangers of making snap judgments. He doesn't advise us to discard all cognitive reasoning or experience as background for coming to a decision, but he points to many past decisions that could have been better if reams of information, scientific facts, and expert opinions had been ignored. Thin slices of experience, as opposed to lengthy studies or long periods of familiarization, often produce more satisfying and productive decisions.

Gladwell presents many examples of better decisions through snap judgments. A quick analysis of couples by observers produced a higher accuracy rating in the chances of their marriages making it as opposed to lengthy studies of their compatibility, small talk patterns, and body language. A singer's music CD inadvertently fell into the hands of the co-president of a large record company who loved it and passed it around. The singer's success was almost immediate because he was thin-sliced by top executives who knew and liked good music and knew how to promote it. But then market research firms published opinions by mainstream listeners from around the country who found him lacking and unlikely to find a core audience or to gain significant radio air-play. People who had never seen him, and only listened to a couple of his songs, completely stalled his career.

Large symphony orchestras, traditionally mostly male, have improved their performance by hiring females who audition from behind screens, masking their sex. Innovative military commanders who rely on experience and seat-of-the-pants decisions have regularly trounced better prepared forces with superior equipment and manpower.

Gladwell points out that all is not good with this technique if some fundamental safeguards are not applied. Four police officers in the dark entrance of a Bronx tenement pumped 41 shots into a scared and unarmed Guinea immigrant. When heart rates go up, cognitive reasoning goes down, according to Gladwell. Only seven seconds passed from the time the officers first saw the victim, called out to him, thought they saw a gun, pulled their guns and fired 41 shots into him. Quick decisions were made with fatal results. Mind-reading abilities were probably impaired by elevated heart rates causing a series of misjudgments to be made.

I highly recommend this book for a look into the world of decisions. We have to make them every day and we have to live with those made by others. Gladwell presents a well-researched study that is fascinating.

This book is excellent on the discovery of how the subconcious works, and can work for you. It is an interesting exploration. It also compares "intuition" with more obvious forms of over-analyzation, which our culture is taken over by. A real heads-up to what is going on around you.

The Book on the Nightstand - July 08

The book falling off the nightstand this month is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The take-away from this text is why and how we make snap decisions, and to what degree these decisions should be trusted. I walked away with a solid understanding of the why and how, but less so on the trust and accuracy of snap decisions. Statistically you should go with your first "gut decision", except when you shouldn't. The text left me feeling vague in that area.

The Art of Digital Branding contrasts the Margaret Thatcher quote "I make my mind up about someone within the first ten seconds and I very seldom change it" with the research of psychologist Alexander Todorov, that "most people actually make a judgment about someone based on his facial appearance within one-tenth of a second", (page 27).

How is this used in design? A study by the Human-Oriented Technology Lab at Carleton University shows that "people can make an instinctive decision as to whether a web site is good or bad in 1/20th of a second", (page 34). An on-line consumer has made a decision to purchase within the first 40 seconds of entering a web site.

The design and balance of the first or home page of a site is critical, one of the primary metrics of Google Analytics is the "bounce rate". Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors. A high bounce rate from the main page reflects that people fled your site after a fraction of a second that your material was unsuitable for them. Like the Prime Minister, they probably won't be back.

Like someone allready said, it's a bunch of stories with no conclusion to it (and yes there even is a conclusion chapter.. but guess what.. it's another story)

A fascinating book, but as others have pointed out too many of the ideas here rely on anecdotal information. I got the feeling after a while that the author cherry-picked the stories he wanted to tell in order to bolster his thesis, and that another researcher could just as easily have formed a different thesis about decision making by selecting different stories.

Another thing about this book that struck me, as odd, was the author's obsession with a person's appearance, particularly whether the person was short or tall. Some of the descriptions are as follows.
P22, 'he is short and very charming'
P49, `he is a small and irrepressible man'
P61, `a tall, striking woman'
P73, `his bigness of frame'
P87, `who is both on the short side - five foot nine - and black'
P99, `is tall and lean with a gleaming bald dome'
P132, `is a tall man with a runner's slender build'
P148, `is very tall and strikingly handsome'
P190, `He was short and unassuming'
P197, `He was short and thick'
P202, `although he is of medium build, he seems much larger'
P251, `is tiny'

Seldom does the person's size matter to the thesis about decision making that the author presents. Even in the last example where a woman musician is described as `tiny', Gladwell admits that her size ought not to determine whether she is hired to play the French horn. Yet throughout the book he includes a person size as though it has some importance to his argument. This just struck me as perverse, and I wondered at his 'decision' for including this mostly useless information.

This book is full of promise and full of interesting stories. But ultimately, it doesn't even end up proving or disproving any of the ideas on its jacket.

Some people are good at trusting their instincts, and they end up right. Others are bad at trusting them. Other people's instincts themselves are untrustworthy. Other people don't trust their instincts. Some are right, some are wrong.

It's the equivalent of snob candy--it feels like an intellectual book, but it really doesn't say much of anything. It just makes you feel smart for a few minutes, if that.

I'd put money that no one will be talking about this book in two years. It's just the flavor of (last) month.

This book is full of promise and full of interesting stories. But ultimately, it doesn't even end up proving or disproving any of the ideas on its jacket.

Some people are good at trusting their instincts, and they end up right. Others are bad at trusting them. Other people's instincts themselves are untrustworthy. Other people don't trust their instincts. Some are right, some are wrong.

It's the equivalent of snob candy--it feels like an intellectual book, but it really doesn't say much of anything. It just makes you feel smart for a few minutes, if that.

I'd put money that no one will be talking about this book in two years. It's just the flavor of (last) month.

Blink has changed the way I think about decision-making. From an early age we are discouraged from making "snap" decisions, we are not taught to develop our natural instincts. While some snap decisions can be mistakes, if we tune up our "gut" feelings, it may be possible to make excellent decisions based on limited information and time constraints. Gladwell calls this "thin-slicing" and make no mistake about it - it is a SKILL that must be cultivated.

In a nutshell, thin-slicing is defined as "the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behaviors based on very narrow slices of experience." The most fascinating part to me is just that - as a human being, we do have this capability. If you're like me, you do a significant amount of second-guessing, and that is where the trouble starts. We have the instincts inside of us, our brains are powerful tools - more powerful than the most sophisticated computer, they tell us, right? So why do we not trust ourselves?

To be honest, the book started out great with some fascinating examples of thin-slicing and adaptive unconscious (the part of the brain that leaps to conclusions and is capable of making very quick decisions based on very little information). Towards the end I felt like it was just the same information over and over again. I got the gist of it all in the first couple of chapters. Many reviewers here indicated that it could have been an article instead of a book, but I understand why it is a book: Books are taken seriously, are reviewed, are cited, and are easy to find after publication.

Blink is worth the read, even if you only skim a few parts, if only to get you thinking differently about the way we make decisions.

Gladwell is a writer for the New Yorker so it's not surprising that this entire book could have been summed up in an article. Gladwell basically says we should follow our instinct and concludes at the end that we shouldn't be judgemental at the same time. Wow, what insight! He gives some interesting examples which are what I enjoyed. It's a quick read though so you won't waste too much time even though the book is a little drawn out.

Like the reviewer who posted just before me, I also thought the book could have made an excellent article. You can certainly skip around in this book and get the point of it. I forced myself to read the whole book even though I lost interest maybe halfway or 2/3 of the way through because the author seemed to be just supporting his main idea with more and more examples. I thought I should force myself to read the whole book in case I missed some amazing new insights, but there was nothing new in it. I enjoyed the examples though, which is why I give this book 3 stars. All in all it was truly mediocre at best.

one of he cd ()no 2
was dameged and in no shape for playing
its ashame i am not pleased at all

DR mishali moshe

Mr. Gladwell is very talented. He certainly did his homework on this one. At the end of the book though I was left wondering, "Okay...so what is the conclusion?" The book came to a rather abrupt ending and I couldn't tell if the author was for or against snap judgments.

My biggest disappointment is that there was no warning regarding explicit language. I was listening to this work on CD with my young daughters in the car when all of a sudden he starts using profane words in an effort to quote others. Was it necessary to include such language?

Started out really liking it, but it suddenly started feeling suspiciously like a self-help book. I'm not crazy into that.

Malcolm Gladwell is a "gatekeeper." In his book, Blink, he opens the gate to a room of self-discovery - a room that allows the reader, perhaps for the first time, to realize that our actions and judgments often are not as "objective" as we might think. Mr. Gladwell, through a series of examples and stories, explains that we each have our own "programming" - dare I say "prejudices" - about how we (and the cultures we grow up in) judge and respond to things we "see" and "know to be true".

He also says there are other more benign, untainted impressions that come to us in the "blink" of an eye. About these untainted impressions he says: "We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility." Implicitly he suggests that we also don't realize how powerful our "programming" is to potentially override and taint those benign and fragile first impressions.

Mr. Gladwell provides examples of what some people have done to preserve their "blink" experiences and offset their "pre-programming" - a fun read - I recommend it.

As I was reading through the book, I was reminded of two other books (both of which I highly recommend) by Ariel and Shya Kane. In Working on Yourself Doesn't Work: A Book About Instantaneous Transformation and Being Here: Modern Day Tales of Enlightenment, the authors include discussions of human mechanical behaviors - behaviors we absorb from our families and cultures at an early age. They point out that we are mostly unaware of these mechanics and until we become aware of them, they can influence and even "control" our behavior and life choices - very eye-opening and easy to read as well!

All three of these books are well worth reading - enjoy!

This review will be brief, but decisive. Like the "blink" - the book's namesake.

blink - refers to the first few seconds (really two seconds) or less - moments really - in which split-second decisions are made. Often life and death decisions. Often decisions which are - by their nature - most often based on preconceptions, prejudice, prejudgment, or ingrained - evolved - subconscious beliefs, stereotypes, and conditioning.

The book, through several cases or examples, explores split-second decision making. Decision making when you are pressed. Decision making under great uncertainty - where all the facts are not known and you don't have time to get to know them. Decision making when you don't have time to reason - or to consciously really thinks out.

It is about how time constraints impact decisions. How they impact the quality of the decisions.

Where all you really have is your "intuition". Which is often right, but is also often wrong.

Through a case study-type analysis, Malcolm Gladwell, a brilliant thinker and writer - an original and ground breaking thinker - explores the issues related to these split-second or less than split-second decisions.

If are interested in learning about the brain, decisions, and human psychology and sociology, then I highly recommend this book. If you are not interested in any of the foregoing, but want to see a brilliant thinker and writer in action (Malcolm Gladwell), then I urge you to buy and read "blink".

For me, this book was a good collection of stories, that hold some useful idea in them. And that is really exciting. But, unfortunately, as it was said above, Gladwell fails to bring the general idea (at least until the few paragraphs at the end of the book) and usually whiffle between those short stories. What's good - he gives you some ideas of what you might want to explore more seriously later.

Forgive my poor English. I would like to quote a passage on "Competing on analytics by Davenport and Harris" which wrote what I failed to express. Enjoy!

"It's ironic that a book praising intuition would arise and become popular just when many organisations are relying heavily on analytics, but then perhaps that's part of its romantic appeal. It is fun and persuasive, but it doesnt make clear that intuition is only appropriate under what circumstances. The author is undoubtedly correct, for example, that human beings evolved a capability to make accurate and quick decisions about each other's personality and intentions, and it's rare for formal analysis to do that as well. Yet even the author argues that intuitions is a good guide to action only when it's backed by many years of expertise. Any many of the author's examples of intuition are only possible because of years of analytical research in the background, such as Dr. John Gottsman's rapid and seemingly intutitive judgements of whether a married couple he observes will stay together. He's only able to make such assessment because he observed and statistically analyzed thousands of hours of videotaped intactions by couples. It's also clear that decision makers have to use intuition when they have no data and must make a very rapid decision - as in the author's example of police officers deciding whether to shot a suspect." pg13-14

Sometimes decisions need to be made quickly. All of our knowledge, education, experience, reasoning, intuition, common sense and confidence must come together rapidly.

Malcolm Gladwell calls quick decision making thin slicing in his book: Blink. Thin slicing is the ability to focus on a small set of critical variables to make a quick decision rather than consciously considering every possible variable.

Many decisions are time dependent. Weighing the amount of information needed before making a decision, against the time available is a challenge.

Examples of when thin slicing is needed: combat, avoiding a car accident, or anything requiring an immediate decision. Another common name for thin slicing is thinking on your feet.

Gladwell does an excellent job of explaining what happens in these situations. For example:

"...in interviews with police officers who have been involved with shootings, these same details appear again and again: extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. This is how the human body reacts to extreme stress..."

Besides the excellent examples given in the book, here is a classic example of using thin slicing.

Thin slicing was used on multiple occasions during the US space program. Gene Kranz (a flight controller on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs) writes about the need for quick accurate decisions in his book: Failure is not an Option.

Endless intensive simulations were run with the controllers, flight crew and others before every launch. Everyone's skills had to be razor sharp during the actual missions. Decisions had to be accurate and made in real time. There was little, and sometimes no room for error. Lives were at stake. Risk was part of their business.

Gene Kranz sums up how he gained his skills to be a top flight director when he said:

"The flight director's ultimate training comes at the console, working real problems, facing the risks, making irrevocable decisions."

Although we may not be faced with life and death decisions, we will (on occasions) have to make quick decisions. The better our skills and Critical Thinking are, coupled with training and quickness, the more prepared we will be to make sound decisions in the blink of an eye!

The Re-Discovery of Common Sense: A Guide to: The Lost Art of Critical Thinking

Blink
Is there a certain standard that keeps a very interesting essay / article from turning into a book? You see, the number of bloated books that I have been reading has triggered this question. A book like Blink, which discusses an interesting concept, could have been a great article in the NYT Magazine. A well developed article with enough evidence to convince the sceptic of the author's argument. However, to go for, what it seems like 1,000 evidence of the same concept is a waste of time and gives the book a highly 'commercial' feel.

Picking on "Blink" again, I would have paid the same $9 had it been a 50 page book. Take a cue from Ben Hogan's "Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf " an absolute classic for every golfer in less than 120 pages written some 50 years ago!

There are many examples of these books that go on and on about one single subject and prove it with 1,000 examples. For me to do that would mean that I, also, suffer from verbal diarrhea!

"I believe . . . there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis". Gladwell promises to show the reader that quick decisions can be "every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately", when we can and can't trust such snap judgments, and how they can be "educated and controlled". He fails. Entertainingly and informatively, but he still fails.

Blink analyzes decision making in everyday life, sport, crime, war, and emergencies of various kinds. Each individual case study is presented admirably, showing how experts make their decisions in that particular field. The problem is that the lessons are usually not transferable. What can we learn from the following?

-An art historian, with one glace, identifies as fake a statue that months of scientific tests had pronounced genuine. She can't say exactly why. It just doesn't look right.

-A decision tree based on a few simple questions gives better results than the expert clinical judgment of doctors in an emergency room. The tree is derived from extensive statistical analysis.

-Psychologists can make good predictions about the durability of a relationship (not perfect, but much better than chance) after watching a couple interact for only a few minutes. They do this by watching for signs they have picked up by watching hundreds of hours of slow motion videotape of other couples.

-Professional tennis and baseball players believe in and teach techniques that they do not use in practice ("roll the wrist" and "watch the ball onto the bat" - the former causes injury and the latter is physically impossible!).

-People who believe themselves unprejudiced reveal unconscious bias (with regard to race, sex etc) in word association tests and auditions.

All of the brilliant "blink of an eye" decisions are grounded on knowledge of many previous decisions and their outcomes. (With a formal decision rule, the decision maker need not possess the knowledge personally, but it is guiding their actions all the same.) It seems an almost inescapable corollary that there is no generalised skill called "good judgment". One heart attack or statue is enough like another to permit useful generalisation, but heart attacks and statues are different enough that the rules for one are useless for the other. Sometimes decisions are made quickly because they have to be, and sometimes because there is no gain from waiting for more information or analysis. Sometimes the logic of the decision can explained rationally to a non-expert, and sometimes it can't. Expertise can come from formal training, or years of practical experience, or just following the instructions, dummy. And prejudice based on irrelevant information can bias even the most expert.

(Scene: foot of bodhi tree. The Author, sitting in great serenity, is approached by a worshipful Reader.)

Reader: So, Mr. Gladwell, can I learn to make quick, accurate judgments?

Author: Of course. Just make sure that you consider all relevant information (but not irrelevant information, which might cause prejudice), and take as much time as you need (but no longer).

Reader: How do you know which information is relevant and how long is long enough?

Author: Well . . . you just know! You are an expert.

Reader: But I'm not an expert. That's why I bought the book! [Reviewer's confession: I actually borrowed it from the library.]

Author: Well, in that case I suggest you work and study hard for many years, and then you will be an expert.

Reader: In decision making?

Author: No, just in whatever subject you spent years studying.

This is just how the world is, so it might seem unfair to blame Gladwell. But the whole book is explicitly about "the power of thinking without thinking", one might say intuition for short. The promise was insight into decision making in general, not just about the authenticity of art or heart attack treatment. An impossible promise, maybe, but all the more reason it should not have been made.

While it sounds by the title like it's a self-help book for the decisionally challenged, the book is actually a compendium of information about attitudes, prejudices, information and decision making, and what constitutes an expert decision maker.

The book is interesting but somewhat rambling in character. The information seems a little disconnected, and I was at times hard put to it to decide if I were being encouraged or discouraged from using the unconscious part of my decision making apparatus for making judgments. By the end I could hear the distinct echoes of the Delphic Oracle's famous "Know thyself" reverberating through my mind.

Like so much offered advice, in the end the distillation of all the information the author provides us is that sometimes it's a good idea and sometimes it's not. In the sometimes it's a good idea I can definitely find a resonance. As a college student I found that if I didn't do what I thought I "should" be doing I didn't do anything at all. By the time I had gotten to graduate school however, I had discovered that my subconscious mind was able to dictate when I needed to get busy with classroom projects, and it was always right too. I finally decided that it knew what I had to do, how much time I had, what my resources were, what the likely expectations of the professor were, and what my abilities were. Once I grew to rely on this subconsious sense of "do it now," I no longer felt guilty about doing other things and got a whole lot more done in the bargain.

Certainly the author's information on the research into default setting prejudices like black equals bad and white equals good was an eye opener. I have no doubt that despite my pleasant interactions with black individuals as friends and coworkers I also harbor an embarrassing default setting. When I realize how much a part the media play in this programing, I am amazed that race relations aren't worse than they are. It would appear that most of us are able to deal rationally with our irrational prejudices, thank God. Definitely the sketch of the disastrous death of an innocent black man in New York City at the hands of the police was a horror story about rational thinking short circuited. The tragedy was so appalling, it's difficult to realize how complex and physiological it all must have been and how totally out of control. Likewise the description of violence that occurred in Florida was also frightening and makes one understand how group behavior can so thoroughly take over. That the frenzied speeches of Adolph Hitler and the charged mass behavior could lead to a world war is not quite so surprising when one realizes that crazy things can happen with as few as four or five people under unusual conditions. What's truely sad is that much of the data on predjudice and group think and authority figures has been known for decades with very little done to change it.

More surprising still was the study of military fact finding and its effect on decision making. The Red-Blue war game was especially informative. That the complexity of war should make it unpredictable should hardly be surprising. Murphey's Law should see to that, goodness knows. I was surprised that the author didn't discuss emergent properties or some of the findings on chaos theory. Surely Stuart Kaufman's or Per Bak's names should have arisen at least once, but--as I recall, anyway--they didn't.

All in all, while the book seemed like a string of observations rather than a coherent whole, I found the information of great interest.

Intriguing.

This book is a really quick read and easy to read. I enjoyed the anecdotes that pulled Gladwell's premise together. The ten million dollar Kouros fraud and the serial dating actually have something in common. Both use split second analysis to decide if the statue or the prospective date are phonies.

Why is it some people turn everything they touch into gold while others can never make a go of something?

We have all had those hunches about someone or something and then later when it all comes to light, we say we knew that the moment we laid eyes on someone or something; we just knew they were no good or we just knew we liked them from the start.

Gladwell writes that we very often make very important decisions within a few minutes and often in just seconds. He helps you see how just being aware of these split second decisions can make a positive influence in those decisions.

He also points out how easily we can be persuaded by subliminal messages for good or for bad. He made me realize I need to quit listening to National Public Radio as my radio alarm clock. It really puts me in a funk and now I know why... It is depressing and it really does flavor my day and up until now all without my being aware of the influence... "The Dow Jones was down today, gas prices were up, cost of living soared to record highs, the entire planet is heating up and we are all going to die because of it." CLICK!

This book was extremely well written and the overall premise was quite interesting.

However, the author gets mired down in his own thoughts at times, lacks a cohesive centralized point, and the end result is a bunch of scattered writings that are well-written but unnecessarily verbose and leave you wondering whether you should continue reading.

I forced myself to continue reading this book simply because I enjoyed the author's writing style. Plus, I thought his individual articles about the possiblities of the mind making rational/irrational decisions was quite fascinating. In essence, the subject matter was great, but the book really lacked in conveying a centralized meaning. It did whet my appetite to learn more about this subject, so I suppose that is a good thing.

I give this book 2 stars simply because Gladwell is an excellent writer and his theory, in general, is great. My recommendation is to skim through the book's chapters and not invest a great deal of time reading (unless you enjoy feeling like you are trapped in a verbose nightmare.)

This book is a far cry from "The tipping point", another book by the same author.

I only read the first few chapters and can hardly believe it is from the same author of "The tipping point".
I stop wasting my time. You probably should too.

Here the author of the groundbreaking, "The Tipping Point," has again "tapped into" an underlying human ability of the mind to do amazing things, that upon first impressions appears all but impossible -- or at the very least, highly improbable. This book is filled with anecdotes (from the arts, psychology, statistics, business, and everyday life) of "analyses at a glimpse" (that the author refers to as "thin slicing"), which turn out to be almost as good as detailed, longer-term, more in depth analyses.

This human ability to perform instantaneous "background mental processing" is presented here as if it is not just special, but also uncanny and even mysterious, and indeed it is. More appropriately, it is human pattern recognition analysis, an acutely human ability which has evolved in man over eons and in parallel with his ability to reason and to become conscious of his own actions, and thus to be able "to preview" things in his conscious environment before they happen. As a result of "being conscious", the human brain has had to learn to process prodigious amounts of information at the subconscious level in the background.

One of the most obvious of these abilities (of these formidable background calculations) is the ability of humans to recognize each other by facial characteristics, which although we humans take it for granted, as a formal scientific process, is exceedingly difficult. Scientists have discovered, for instance, that babies as young as only a few days old can distinguish between their parents and others. So, clearly, this ability must have tremendous survival value.

But also, if one remembers some of Picasso's "minimalist sketches," of Shakespeare, (and there are equally famous computer-generated ones of Einstein and Abe Lincoln, and Marilyn Monroe, in addition to the famous bard) traced out of no more than five or six disconnected lines, the image of these famous icons emerge with unexpected but unmistakable clarity. Picasso, obviously is using the brain of a highly sensitive master artist; in the latter case, the computers are using "computer generated algorithms," which by all calculations, is a crude approximation to what Picasso does. Those who have studied pattern recognition analysis and are already familiar with these minimalist iconic images know that they are the result of sophisticated data compression techniques (mostly complexly manipulated Fourier Transforms coupled with other information reduction algorithms). They also know how difficult it is to create algorithms to reproduce these precise images as a formal scientific process.

In my own work many years ago at the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), among other problems, I used similar data compression techniques to distinguish between the seismic signatures of earthquakes and nuclear explosions. The objective of course was to develop an algorithm (or a set of algorithms) that preserved the maximum amount of discriminatory information that could be used to separate the signatures of the two phenomena with a high degree of reliability, and of course using the minimum amount of information. In most cases, algorithms that even approach the skill of humans at recognizing such patterns, to the extent they exist at all, are very, very complex indeed.

Thus, as was the case with "The Tipping Point" (in which non-linear processes having points of discontinuities readily explained by Rene Thom's Calculus of Catastrophe Theory), again it seems that the mystery here, can also be explained thorough the formal scientific process of "Pattern Recognition Analysis."

But this revelation of the mystery makes this book no less interesting or less important. Again, Gladwell is on to something. Five Stars

The basic idea of the book, repeated over and over again, is that sometimes people make decisions in the blink of any eye. Some of the decisions are good, and some are bad.

Profoundly superficial throughout, but well-written and kudos to Mr. Gladwell for trying.

The book is interesting but not too awakening. It makes you think about your subconscious and instincts when making decisions. If a book is really good, I find it hard to put down. That was not the case with this book.

I read this book aloud to my friend while he did the driving on one of our road trips. It not only was a great read; the words were absolutely glorious when read aloud. Mr. Gladwell has cleverly combined a necessarily impressionistic study with some hard "research" of a sort.
I frequently evaluate books by their transformative power. After reading Blink, I'll never think the same way about ciminal due process or belittle my own (if unconscious) prejudices.

Gladwell's "Blink", a fantastic follow up to "the Tipping Point", reveals what most of us have known since the dawn of Creation, but ignore none the less. Trust your gut. We can all know, in the blink of an eye, what's "really going on" in a situation or circumstance - if we'll take the time to be receptive to what's happening around us. This isn't New Age drivel, this is using your brain. He would have gotten 5 stars out of me, but the one missing component was the "how to blink for dummies" manual at the end of the book. Malcolm defines the problem with conviction and shares the solution with wit, but never really puts a finger on exactly how you can put it to work in your life. Then again, that's the beauty of it - it's there for you to find, you just need to use your brain a little more to get it. Great for business and for life, Blink is worth the read.

"Blink" reads more like a review of studies of the consequences of making snap decisions. Guess what? Sometimes you're right and sometimes you're not. How enlightening.
Nevertheless, the experiments that are discussed are fascinating, and will give you insight into when to trust your intuition.

Snap judgments are arrived at by a ruthless pruning of information, which our brains process without our being aware of it. A good snap judgment occurs when the information which has been discarded is irrelevant to the matter in hand; a bad one when it is not. An overload of information leads to a paralysis of judgment, which is why information-gathering bureaucracies are often not merely inefficient but grotesquely error-prone.
Gladwell's book, which starts well enough, meanders and begins to go off the point about halfway through. This is probably because the subject cannot sustain a full-length study without digression. His style is conversational and easy to read but (for me at least) too colloquial.