blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
15th February 2006 by Sean
| Author: Malcolm Gladwell |  |
I really liked this book. It is all about rapid cognition or thin-slicing. Malcolm Gladwell goes into how we as people have the innate and effective ability to rapidly take in what is around us and make sense of it, understand it, and take action on it without consciously thinking about it.
This book isn’t about intuition though, what Gladwell calls thin-slicing is a skill that can be examined, understood, learned and our innate ability to use it can even grow through continual effort.
As with Gladwell’s other books, he has all sorts of pertinent stories and examples that drive his points home. Not directly a business book, but has all sorts of business applications.
What Publisher’s Weekly says.
Gladwell’s conclusion, after studying how people make instant decisions in a wide range of fields from psychology to police work, is that we can make better instant judgments by training our mind and senses to focus on the most relevant facts—and that less input (as long as it’s the right input) is better than more.
What a reader says.
Some of the insights provide building blocks for understanding how certain professionals (people who practice a subject or skill for many years) are able to develop an additional sense about things — gamblers, art curators, policemen. They are essentially seeing something that doesn’t register at the conscious-level but provides them a gut-feel about the thing. Actually, I should say that these articles are how this MIGHT be happening - it’s more speculation based on the diverse theories of a number of different researchers.
March 17th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
[…] In the review snippets there is a link to Wikipedia’s entry for the book, which goes over these and other topics in a bit more detail. Also, from what I can tell, Wisdom of Crowds reads a lot like a Malcolm Gladwell book. […]