| Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | 
 enlarge | Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
Buy New: £3.73
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Avg. Customer Rating:  67 reviews
Sales Rank: 532
Media: Paperback
Edition: New title
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0141014598
EAN: 9780141014593
ASIN: 0141014598
Publication Date: February 23, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New Unopened light shelf wear
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| Customer Reviews:
 A Critical Decision Making Tool! July 24, 2008
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
A new way of seeing July 17, 2008
27 out of 30 found this review helpful
In the blink of an eye we gather huge amounts of information. The author, Gladwell, likens our brains to giant computers capable of processing lots of data in a flash. I found it fascinating how we can use this information either for survival purposes and / or we can apply our intuitive knowledge to any given situation. The author coins the term "thin slicing" to explain the process of applying one's intuition. He states that we are often suspicious of trusting this intuition because it's so quick and easy, even when it's on target. He relays experiments where instantaneous "thin slicing" has amazing results, sometimes in life and death situations, but also explains what can cause the skillto fall short. The reason often being that we are not truly living in the present moment.
Two books that easily guide one into the present moment are Ariel and Shya Kane's "Being Here: Modern Day Tales of Enlightenment" and "How To Create A Magical Relationship". These refreshingly fun and practical books effortlessly get the reader into the present moment where enlightenment resides. In an instant life can become brilliant and magical. Both of these intelligent books have shown me that life needn't be hard work in order to be amazing.
 Enjoyable read July 7, 2008
17 out of 18 found this review helpful
Gladwell's prose is effortlessly readable and the reader is constantly entertained by his anecdotes. I don't think he is a great thinker, but he presents his concepts very clearly and you immediately see how they are reflected in your own life. What the book lacks is a structured argument -by the end you feel as if it hasn't really gone anywhere. Nevertheless it's a very enjoyable read. Along similar lines, I would recommend Steve Taylor's excellent Making Time Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It, which 'unpacks' why we perceive time passing at different speeds in different situations and shows how we can become free of it.
 Doesn't this guy understand irony May 19, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am sorry but a book that discussing making good judgemnts on minimal information that then goes into page after page of repeating the same tired old examples and gives too much information. As the book says I knew it was right in the first few pages - why would I need the rest of it - now thats ironic
An enjoyable read May 16, 2008
26 out of 30 found this review helpful
I really enjoyed reading the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell. It is an easy read yet very profound. I said to myself "wow! How many times have I known in an instant that I was right about something but because it was inconvenient at the time to acknowledge it, I disregarded what I knew". In the end my initial hunch was correct!
I really enjoyed the chapter "Seven Seconds in the Bronx: The Delicate Art of Mind reading". It was about the NYPD's encounter with Amadou Diallo but it really hit home the concept of "the judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people". In the case of Amadou Diallo the policemen's "mind reading" was way off base. Many times people rely on past experiences to dictate how they should act NOW and ignore the
information right in front of them. Simply put, they were not present.
A book I really enjoyed about being present is Ariel & Shya Kanes, "How To Create a Magical Relationship". One powerful chapter in the book was "You are not the story of your life". It reminded me of all the times that my expectations of how something should turn out caused it to turn out exactly as I had expected, as if it were a self-fulfilling prophecy. I realized it was my unconscious expectations that determined the outcome of something, rather than seeing what was truly in front of me and making the appropriate choices. I highly recommend both of these books.
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