Book examines the art of intuition

[Ankur]

New York: Malcolm Gladwell, whose best seller The Tipping Point explored how minor events can lead to momentous changes, got the idea for his next project simply by letting his hair grow long.

"I started getting speeding tickets for the first time in my life and getting pulled aside for security at airports," recalls the 41-year-old Gladwell, who also cites a time a couple of years ago when New York police stopped and questioned him because he supposedly resembled a rape suspect - a man taller, heavier and 15 years younger than the author.

"I decided at that point that I wanted to write a book about first impressions," says Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker.

His new work, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, has just been published by Little, Brown & Co.

Like The Tipping Point, Gladwell's current book is a study of small things with great consequences, in this case snap decisions that can prove uncannily correct or tragically wrong. In Blink, which has a first printing of 250,000, Gladwell details the importance of instincts in a wide range of professions.

"I wanted to get people thinking about how we make decisions," says Gladwell, whose previous book has 800,000 copies in print and has been cited by everybody from former President Bill Clinton to Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz. "We think what's on the surface is all we need to know when, in fact, there's so much going on under the surface that we don't know about."

In the book's introduction, Gladwell cites a debate from the art world in the 1980s: The authenticity of a marble statue of a nude male youth, or ‘Kouros,’ that supposedly dated back to ancient Greece.

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles had agreed to purchase the Kouros after an extensive investigation. Stanley V Margolis, a geologist from the University of California at Davis, concluded that the statue was at least hundreds, if not thousands of years old, based on the presence of calcite, a mineral that could only exist after a centuries-long aging process.

Bureau Report

[Editor]

Tipping Point by Gladwell is really an inspiring book and a worth read...would sure like to read this book on intuition by the same author, Ankur.

Instincts are signiicant factors in a wide range of professions as we had already discussed in the following thread long back http://gutfeel.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=66.

Anyone who has read the book is welcome to share his/her views on the same.