MALCOLM GLADWELL

WORDS BY PAUL MUNGO

SECOND SIGHT

When planning business strategies, does your company take advantage of clients’ and customers’ inexplicable split-second decisions, made in the blink of an eye? Well, Malcolm Gladwell thinks it should.

Malcolm Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, described how ideas, products and behaviors become ubiquitous within a culture, spread by trendsetters he dubbed “influencers”, “mavens” and “salesmen”.

Not surprisingly, the book was adopted with ferocious enthusiasm by the public relations and marketing industries. The Tipping Point spent 28 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and more than two years on the Business Week list, enabling Gladwell to make the jump from magazine writer to marketing guru. He now charges $40,000 for corporate speaking appearances and has paraded his ideas before companies as diverse as Genentech, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Hewlett-Packard.

In a profile of Gladwell, business magazine Fast Company noted that the 41-year-old writer had been transformed by product developers and promoters into a sort of marketing pop icon. “He’s a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud,” the magazine drooled.

Certainly, the term “the tipping point” entered the American consciousness in a way students of the book would recognize. “Influencers” and “mavens” seized upon the phrase: it was used as the title of a hip-hop album;
a tech company named itself TippingPoint Technologies; even Donald Rumsfeld used the term “the tipping point” to describe the situation in Iraq.

Now Gladwell is back with a new book, Blink (Little, Brown & Company, $26), and a whole new collection of catchphrases—“thin-slicing”, “rapid cognition” and “the Warren Harding error”.

Blink is the all-encompassing term for instantaneous, subconscious decision-making. Most of us would probably call that “intuition”, but that’s not a word that Gladwell uses. Intuition, he says, is “emotional reactions, gut feelings, thoughts and impressions that don’t seem entirely rational”.

Rapid cognition, on the other hand, is rational. What happens in the initial two seconds of meeting someone, for instance, is “the kind of thinking that happens in the blink of an eye. It’s thinking—it’s just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with thinking.”

When we leap to a decision or have a hunch, Gladwell argues, our unconscious sifts through the information in front of us—a person’s appearance, say, or his mannerisms—then throws out everything that’s irrelevant and hones in on the stuff that really matters. In Gladwell-speak, that’s “thin-slicing”, or the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

According to Gladwell, thin-slicing can often deliver a better conclusion than more deliberate, contemplative thought. “Snap judgements are an awful lot more important and powerful than we think,” he says. “It’s incumbent on us to learn how to use them. And that’s the challenge ; we haven’t done a good job on that. We can confuse the things we know at a given moment with what we should know.”

Given how powerful a tool rapid cognition is meant to be, it’s striking how much of Blink is about snap decisions that go badly wrong. Gladwell calls that the “dark side” of thin-slicing; when we succumb to biases or visual traps.

The “Warren Harding error”, for instance, refers to our 29th president, a man so distinguished-looking that once, at a banquet, a supporter cried out, “Why, the SOB looks like a senator!” Though he radiated presidential gravitas, Harding was actually best at playing poker and golf, drinking and chasing women. Gladwell calls him one of the worst presidents in American history.

So what does that tell us about first impressions? It tells us that a person’s appearance can be deceptive, which is hardly news. But it also suggests that businesses, in their hiring, could well be falling into the so-called “dark side”.

One of the more interesting statistics Gladwell cites is that 58% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are over six feet tall—yet only about 14.5% of all American men are that tall. Even more strikingly, in the general population, just 3.9% of adult males are six feet two inches or taller, but almost a third of CEOs are.

What does that mean? According to Gladwell, “Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature. We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like, and that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations.” So when it comes time to pick a new CEO, we often succumb to the Warren Harding error and promote the candidate who just looks like a leader.

Equally, first impressions can cripple ideas and innovations in business. Focus groups, Gladwell argues, are inherently biased against the unfamiliar. It is the new and different that “is always most vulnerable to market research,” he says. Ignoring customers’ prejudices has its dangers, of course, but Gladwell insists that “only by accepting the risk of failure will you ever hit a home run”.

Blink is a bit short on advice on how to tell rational, insightful rapid cognition from its irrational twin on the dark side. But Gladwell himself offers some pointers: “There are a couple of guidelines we can follow. If we have training and experience, we can avoid becoming prey to our biases. Second, we can actively intervene in our environment by, for instance, removing visual signals.”

Gladwell is so keen on eliminating misleading visual stimuli that he advocates preventing juries from seeing the defendant in criminal trials. “It only serves to complicate the matter,” he explains. “Trials where the defendant’s replies to questions are emailed would be a much fairer system.”

Trial by email? Well, why not? It’s an idea that might reach tipping point.