Have you ever thought about how people make judgments and decisions? This book goes against traditional wisdom of analyzing too much about how we make decisions as human beings, and questions the benefit of analyzing our decision making rationale.  “Blink, the power of thinking without thinking,” by Malcolm Gladwell makes a case for snap judgment rather than overanalyzing every decision we have to take.  It is a book about rapid cognition, which is the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye.

This book builds on a previous book of his called “Tipping Point,” which offers theories of how world fads, business and non business, catch on or fail and why.  Blink is more about how people make decisions using the unconscious maybe as well if not better than using their conscious objective judgment.  While tipping point did not explore how to utilize the theories it endorses, Blink does and in a very nice way explain how the findings in the book can be used.  It gives valuable case studies from real life where subconscious decision making outsmarted fancy and sophisticated decision making models.  In Blink, the writer talks about how human beings make decisions based on gut feeling, how to get in touch with a person’s inner self, and when and how to use snap judgment versus using decision making objective techniques.

There are many provocative concepts in the book that describe how people think and react to things.  These include how prejudices are built and overcome, and why prejudice exists at the subconscious level, not conscious level.  It also talks about the importance of the environment one lives in and how it subconsciously affects his behavior.  The examples and proofs he brings up in the book are nothing short of amazing.  He also provides a very useful way to test if someone has a certain prejudice or not in a very simple technique.  Another theory that goes completely opposite to traditional thinking is that too much information about a situation is worse than having too little information when making a decision.   The rationale is that the overwhelming amount of data clutters the mind and causes delays and even blocking of good common sense judgment.

There is a dangerous notion in the book, which is that many of the “how to” books out there  by expert authors might be useless.  Like books on how to make profitable investments, make money, select real estate, improve athletic abilities, etc.  The author brings great real examples from real life, where experts gave advice on sports, business, and personal life issues that turned out to be completely wrong.  One funny example he brings up is how tennis coaches tell there trainees to roll their wrist as they hit a ball in a serve.  Micro second analysis of how the best tennis players play showed that there is not such thing and that the benefit of the roll is just a myth.  Observations, using slow motion, prove that the roll actually happens long after the ball departs the racquet.

The end of the book brings up detailed case studies about making judgments in real life and help the reader come to grip with the difference between objective decision making and blink decisions, and in which situations is each appropriate for use. 

The book comes in close to 300 small pages and was published in 2005 by little brown and company it has been on several best sellers lists since it was published.  Malcolm Gladwell also writes for the New Yorker and his articles have become required reading in some MBA classes.  Some fortune 500 companies made his book “The tipping point” a recommended reading for their marketing teams.