Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am a great admirer of Malcolm Gladwell's writing, having read him for years in "The New Yorker" and loving "The Tipping Point," his earlier book. But "Blink" is no "Tipping Point." The idea here is that people often have intuitive first impressions that are more valid and valuable than carefully considered, well-thought-out, researched conclusions. Except when they aren't, because first impressions of individuals, for example, can be clouded by (and Gladwell even discusses this) such matters as attractiveness, gender, race -- and even height (what Gladwell calls the "Warren Harding" error). And how are we to know when our quick-as-a-blink reaction is valid and when it isn't? Well, that's the problem with the book. Ever experienced love-at-first-sight and then realized the person wasn't really everything you thought s/he was...? This entire book flies in the face of an excellent article Gladwell wrote in 2000 called "The New-Boy Network" [...] about how worthless the typical job interview is (because it relies too much on gut impressions) and how "structured interviews" are the only worthwhile ones (an excerpt from the article: "This interviewing technique is known as "structured interviewing," and in studies by industrial psychologists it has been shown to be the only kind of interviewing that has any success at all in predicting performance in the workplace. In the structured interviews, the format is fairly rigid. Each applicant is treated in precisely the same manner. The questions are scripted. The interviewers are carefully trained, and each applicant is rated on a series of predetermined scales.") Even examples he uses in this book are not very on-target, such as the Red/Blue military exercise he spends a considerable amount of time discussing. He implies repeatedly that the victory of the Reds was due to thin-slicing and their quick judgments, but by his own description a lot of well-thought-out strategic decisions about communications, etc., really were at the heart of the victory, not intuitive decisions made in the blink of an eye. On the other site of the intuition vs. analysis coin, a very good read is Michael Lewis's "Moneyball." Central to that book, with applications well beyond its baseball setting, is the realization that the gut reactions of seasoned baseball scouts are often unreliable, being clouded by how a player looks rather than his actual on-field accomplishments. A more analytical approach has helped Oakland make the playoffs repeatedly with a salary a third (now a quarter) that of the Yankees -- and also was at the heart of general manager Theo Epstein's player moves that helped the Red Sox win the World Series. Gladwell certainly loves the social sciences, and runs all over the landscape discussing various experiments, theories, etc., but it doesn't really come together here like it did in "The Tipping Point," or in many of his articles. My "thin slice" (as Gladwell would say): a disappointment.