The Accidental Guru

In the Blink of an Eye

"The first thing that started happening was I started getting speeding tickets. . . . I wasn't driving any faster than I was before, I was just getting pulled over way more."

The impetus for Blink started with Gladwell's hair (as did his brief splash in the gossip pages when he got "a little too close to some candles" and it ignited during a recent literary event, according to the New York Post's Page Six). For most of his adult life, he had worn it closely cropped, but several years ago decided to let it grow out into a woolly Afro. "The first thing that started happening was I started getting speeding tickets. . . . I wasn't driving any faster than I was before, I was just getting pulled over way more." Then there was the day Gladwell was walking around New York and cops surrounded him, mistaking him for a rape suspect. "I'm exactly the same person I was before," recalls Gladwell, who's half black (his mother, a therapist, is Jamaican). "But I just altered the way someone makes up very superficial, rapid judgments about me." Rather than merely grouse -- legitimately enough -- about prejudice, Gladwell, who has the tendency to look in on his own life as a case study, was inspired to try to understand what happens beneath the surface of rapidly made decisions. "The idea that something that is extraordinarily harmful in society could be exactly the same in its form as something that's incredibly useful is really interesting to me."

The "useful" that Gladwell advocates in Blink is the idea that we can teach ourselves to sort through first impressions to "figure out which ones are important and which ones are screwing us up." While most of us would like to think our decision making is the result of rational deliberation, he argues that most of it happens subconsciously in a split second. This process -- which Gladwell dubs "rapid cognition" -- is where room for both error and insight appears. Many of the snap judgments we make are based on previously formed impressions and are competing with subconscious biases such as emotions and projections. Once we become aware of this, Gladwell argues, we can learn to control rapid cognition by extracting meaning from a "thin slice" of information.

Hiring is one area where we tend to fall into the "dark side" of rapid cognition, says Gladwell. He conducted a study to showcase how we often succumb to what he calls the "Warren Harding error" (Harding being, he says, "one of the worst presidents in American history," who nevertheless radiated "all that was presidential"). Polling about half of the Fortune 500 companies, Gladwell discovered that the vast majority of their CEOs were at least 6 feet tall (only about 14.5% of all American men are 6 feet or taller). What does this say about the way we hire? "We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like," he writes. "And that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations."

Similarly dangerous is how first impressions cripple breakthrough ideas and innovation. Gladwell tells the story of furniture maker Herman Miller Inc. in the early 1990s, when it created a new office chair. It was made of plastic and mesh, and while it was created as the "most ergonomically correct chair imaginable," he says, it was just plain ugly. Focus groups, facility managers, and ergonomics experts all despised it. Why? "They said they hated it," writes Gladwell. "But what they really meant was that the chair was so new and unusual that they weren't used to it."

Gladwell argues that it's a mistake to rely on the first impressions of customers who are inherently biased against the unfamiliar. Herman Miller execs went against the market research, stuck with their instincts, and created the Aeron, which eventually became the company's best-selling chair ever. "What once was ugly has become beautiful," he writes. Unless you're willing to take that kind of leap, he says, you're condemned to doing knockoff, me-too chairs.

For every Herman Miller "going with your gut" success story, though, there are 100 flops by companies that didn't listen to customers. Gladwell acknowledges this, but notes, "only by accepting the risk of failure will [a company] ever hit a home run." Relying on the good judgment of your staff, he believes, is the key ingredient for a new kind of decision-making environment, and judgment is what companies should be screening for when hiring. With the right people in place, companies can liberate themselves from their obsession with data-driven decisions.