Blink different: Two seconds, minutes, centuries or millennia, don't self destruct

BACK OF THE BOOK

The back of the book describes Blink as a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that appear to be made in seconds. As an individual who has constructed his life on the edifice of intuition, I was quite charmed by the proposition. So someone was going to make us gut-guys look sensible.

The fact that Malcolm Gladwell authored it made matters even more seductive. Gladwell had some years ago bestowed upon us The Tipping Point. If my memory serves me right, it was the buzz phrase of 2000. There is other good in Gladwell as well. He has the unique distinction of being both the business and science reporter at the Washington Post. Not many are intellectually so ambidextrous.

The basic premise of the book is very simple: what goes on in the human brain in the two seconds in which a person reacts to or decides upon something. In his own words, Gladwell states, "Blink is a book about those first two seconds." Six pages later, he adds armoury to the argument. He says, "Blink is not just the celebration of the power of the glance, however. I am also interested in those moments when our instincts betray us." Mind it, this was page 14.

BLINK By Malcom Gladwell Little, Brown Press PP: 288 Price: Rs 686

Something in my bones told me that the book ended there. Gladwell had glorified the glance. I thought the book would be a ferocious battle between the blinking and thinking, but the first cracks in the logic were already appearing on the pages.

Finally, there was one last purpose that Gladwell wished to serve. He wanted to convince the reader that one's snap judgements and first impressions could be educated and controlled. At this point, the book reminded me of Los Angeles: it had a permanent fault line. What was this book all about? Was it about the blink or the thought-out blink? Is it good to blink or good to think?

It is this fundamentally unanswered question that makes the book suspicious. What makes it readable is the array of examples that Gladwell merrily borrows from. Indeed, the landscape of the journey is captivating.

It's just that no one knows where the destination is. The book commences with a fake kouros at the Paul Getty Museum. It then swerves into card decks observed by scientists in Iowa. It cruises along couple-compatibility and then stops at a red light called tennis, where you read about Vic Braden who instinctively knows when a player will double-fault in a game of tennis. It also reveals a little known but somewhat important fact about George Soros. Apparently, he changes his position on markets each time his back aches. (I mean, how reassuring is that!)

The book is also richly peppered with sweet little tests. There's a 'scrambled sentence test', a priming experiment that apparently wrecks your adaptive unconscious. Then there's the IAT (Implicit Attention Test) and the even more staggering race IAT. Of course, there's also the Harold for all you theatre-junkies.

Gladwell also pontificates on 'sensation transference' and how it was applied in the marketing of margarine. He throws a car salesman into the argument and then lures a lady who plays the French horn at The Metropolitan Opera in New York. As I said earlier, the landscape of the book is richly rewarding. And that is precisely the point I wish to state.

Gladwell's Blink is a series of examples for an argument that inherently blinked.

On Page 118, Gladwell echoes the words of a management guru called Kevin Kelly who once said "The first thing I told our staff is that we would be in command and out of control."

Pretty much sums up the book for me.

-Swapan Sethi

BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY By W. Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne HBS Press PP: 240 Price: Rs 1,232

If marketers can use all manner of imagery to get messages across, why not professors of subjects much less fathomable? In Blue Ocean Strategy, insead strategy gurus Kim and Mauborgne advise businesses to give up the 'red ocean', the known market space (turned bloody by competition), and plunge into the 'blue ocean', the unknown market space (that remains uncontested). Adopt, thus, a strategy otherwise known, less vividly, as 'market creation'. It involves focussing on non-customers instead of customers to create an entirely new value proposition that can make waves (for how, look up the Four Action Framework).

All too familiar? Then skim through their stories of how new needs are fulfilled. Swatch, a reskin expert, has done it. It unveiled watches designed for the fashion market. Cirque du Soleil, an entertainment format acrobat, sired a new business by taking the lowbrow circus to highbrow theatre (even daring to ascend the musical curve towards opera-like sophistication). And Curves, a no-frills fitness chain, merged the cost and privacy benefits of home fitness packages with the disciplined workouts of health clubs. It's high risk, sure. But so long as there's even a razor edge to traverse between the devil and the deep blue, it's high reward too.

NOT ALLOWED TO CRY By Ingrid Albuquerque-Solomon Berean Bay Media PP: 191 Price: Rs 400

This is a touching account of how business magnate Aditya Vikram Birla and his family stoutly refused to succumb to the debilitating effects of the sad proliferation that was to claim his life: prostate cancer. A study in tear control Not Allowed To Cry certainly is, as the title suggests, but the book also nudges the reader into deep reflection, a tone set by John Haggai's tragic tale of a child delivered by a drunken obstetrician (an empathetic tale in terms of apportioning 'blame' on earth and above). A man-made tragedy? If not, then whodunnit? Albuquerque-Solomon takes on the poser with elegance and grace, starting with The Chaos Of Clutter, and closing with Answers From Beyond The Blue, the epilogue. In all, a gentle book that works in mysterious ways.