“The Tipping Point” author Malcolm Gladwell grew his hair long and found himself being hassled by cops, getting more speeding tickets and generally being treated like a second class citizen–all because of his looks. Based on these non-subjective and intensely scientific experiences he wrote one of the most useless business books of all time, “Blink: the Power of Writing a Book Without Saying Anything Meaningful” or something like that. For reasons I cannot fathom, I just listened to the book on tape version of it and can say with certainty that I was able to take absolutely nothing from the 6+ hour experience. His basic premise is that in the “blink of an eye” people make judgements–sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong. His examples are preachy, boring, irrelevant and often just plain off the mark.

For example, he references the amazing trained ears of record company A&R people who know what is good music. He doesn’t explain why these musical geniuses are wrong 95% of the time other than to blame the market research that music companies do. He talks about how one artist was receiving lots of college radio airplay without understanding that in the real world of music business this means less than zero. It’s as if he sat down with a record company employee over coffee and then wrote knowingly how the ups & downs of one artists are evidence of his ‘blink of the eye’ premise. Huh?

Gladwell talks about how people who’ve dedicated their lives studying something can pick up nuances in a fraction of a second. If you aren’t one of these people then you are basically screwed. He doesn’t bother telling us about when these super-humans are wrong or about when market research actually works. He doesn’t tell us how we might use this information in our jobs or lives.

I kept listening waiting to hear at least one thing that I could take away to improve absolutely any aspect of my life. In the first few minutes I thought his premise was a load of crap and now I’m sorry that I didn’t trust my judgement and toss the entire set into the waste basket. Hey, I did learn something. The next time a book starts off as bad as this one I’m going to trust my judgement and use it as kitty litter. Thanks Malcolm, I did learn a valuable lesson, just not the one you intended.

(Also file under “crapy ass business books”)

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 12:09 am by Insider and is filed under How Not To Succeed In Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.