Posted August 10, 2009

Malcolm Gladwell has written a terrific and thought-provoking book on human decision making and the power of the instantaneous impression and decisions, as well as the scientific basis for how it is actually done. It is not magic, but the astonishingly rapid processing of information that the educated human brain is capable of. 

            

Corporations labor over decisions. It is their duty to their shareholders to be able to document their decision making processes. Entrepreneurs make gut decisions. This is the subject of the thesis of the book Blink. 

            

These instant and intuitive decisions can be shown to be no less informed by fact, experience, and observation than those that are labored over for hours, days, weeks, or longer. And  they are no less accurate, in fact, more so in many of his anecdotal recountings.

            

A funny bit of toy history has to do with a long defunct Cincinnati toy company executive in charge of product testing. He was very successful at delivering key insights on which a certain company made decisions on products being brought to market. He was let go for reasons long since lost in the dust of time, but afterwards they found many uncashed checks in his drawer, made out to what was found to be a fictional product testing company. 

            

Aside from the fact that the toy testing facilitiy didn’t exist, they provided a great deal of good research results that enable this major toy company to reign for a number of years as one of the most successful in the biz.

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