The Magic of Thinking Big

The Magic of Thinking Big Review

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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Review

The Book Review: Blink Vincent


This book is about those first two seconds. Two seconds does not necessarily mean you have to decide things just in two seconds, it means you have to choose from all the alternatives and make your decision in a short time. The author (Gladwell) expresses the idea that our brain uses two different ways to sense the current situation. The first one is, many of us are familiar with, the conscious strategy. And the second one is the adaptive unconscious. From this book, Gladwell wants to tell us some good points: Sometimes, we should convince ourselves that the adaptive unconscious is way too better than the traditional conscious strategy. Also, we need to know when to use the conscious strategy and when to use the other one. If a person uses the wrong strategy under an unsuitable situation, the outcome may turn out badly. What is more, the snap judgment and first impressions can be trained and controlled (most important point).

In my opinion, what makes Gladwell's books so well-known is that he uses many examples in daily life in order to inform his audiences about his notions. Fortunately, I have met some examples in my life, which related to his ideas.
1 In Gladwell's Nissan case, the dealer is doing a really awesome job because he has two characteristics: He uses the customer-centric method and treats every customer equally. He doesn't judge people by their appearances (fight the Warren Harding error). When I was in China one year ago, I saw a man wearing shabby clothes went into a BWM store. It seemed that he was poor and could not afford even the cheapest BMW in that shop. When he laid his fingers on a BMW X5, one salesman forbade him to do so and said some unrespectable words to him. However, a female saleswoman came out and treat this man like a potential buyer. She gave the man a cup of coffee and introduced all the detailed information about that BWM with smile on her face. The man thought for a while, and then he made a call. After ten minutes, his son came in with two huge briefcases. When his son opened these two briefcases, what were inside made me surprised: they were about three million cash (RMB). His father bought two BMW X5 by cash and this activity made the female saleswoman gain a lot of commission. From this case, I get to know that "Warren Harding error" is common and it is especially harmful for a salesman/saleswoman.

2 Around two years ago, the luxury brand - Louis Vuitton wanted to open a shop in Nanjing (my hometown city). However, the marketing people in Louis Vuitton were not sure about whether citizens in Nanjing could afford this expensive bag. One top manager, who was in charge of affairs in China, arrived in Nanjing. He didn't bring with him a professional team and order them to do analyses that would last several months like many other managers. He just stood near Xin Jiekou (a famous business circle in Nanjing), felt the surroundings, and counted the amount of luxury cars like BMW, Benz, Lexus, and so on. He finished counting after several minutes. After five months, Louis Vuitton opened its Nanjing store. You know what? The first year's revenue of this store was about 100,000,000 RMB and it meant this store sold nearly 30 bags in each day (this is amazing in China). In my opinion, this was a "blink" method although it took several minutes. The manager used his initial feelings about Nanjing and made a successful decision.

After reading this book, I will consider the incoming problems from a different angle. I always hear the saying "haste makes waste" and think it is true. However, I will use the "blink" method to solve some problems when circumstances permit in future.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Feature

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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Overview

In his #1 bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. In BLINK, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. How do we make decisions--good and bad--and why are some people so much better at it than others? That's the question Malcolm Gladwell asks and answers in BLINK. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, examining case studies as diverse as speed dating, pop music, and the New Coke, Gladwell shows how the difference between good decision making and bad has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but rather with the few particular details on which we focus. BLINK displays all of the brilliance that has made Malcolm Gladwell's journalism so popular and his books such perennial bestsellers as it reveals how all of us can become better decision makers--in our homes, our offices, and in everyday life.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Specifications

Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.

Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. --Barbara Mackoff

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Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life

Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life Review

This is a terrific book written by two prominent researchers in the field of game theory who decided to bring their area of expertise to the masses. It fully deserves its bestseller status for distilling many of the most important concepts from game theory into a math-free format, with plenty of salient applications. Anyone who enjoys this book should be able to take something useful from it.

Thinking Strategically was required as a supplementary text in a game theory course I took as an undergrad; while I enjoyed the notation-heavy textbook, Osborne's An Introduction to Game Theory, Dixit and Nalebuff are beyond comparison in their ability to distill complicated problems into simple, intuitive solutions.

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Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life Overview

The international bestseller—don't compete without it! A major bestseller in Japan, Financial Times Top Ten book of the year, Book-of-the-Month Club bestseller, and required reading at the best business schools, Thinking Strategically is a crash course in outmaneauvering any rival. This entertaining guide builds on scores of case studies taken from business, sports, the movies, politics, and gambling. It outlines the basics of good strategy making and then shows how you can apply them in any area of your life.

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Six Thinking Hats

Six Thinking Hats Review

De Bono has written and conceptualized a book with great ideas and actions that teach us to look at different angles of a decision making process. In the western culture we tend to argue for what we believe is correct, but De Bono states that we should seek all angles of attack. Everyone (whether for or against the situation) approaches the statement with a total of 6 different mindsets all working towards one goal. With this approach, all topics have been explored and everyone is "thinking on the same page". In doing so, the best decision is typically made with a significant amount of time saved for other topics of discussion.

Highly recommend this book if someone is seeking a more efficient way to run meetings and organizations. Instead of the typical argumentative approach, it now transforms into a cooperative thinking that lays out all scenarios. In turn it reduces the drama affiliated with the art of debate.

Other than that, The Six Thinking Hats is an enjoyable read that is easy to teach to others who are unfamiliar with the technique presented. The only downfall to this book is the excessive use of examples which become a little overwhelming that could persuade an individual to begin "skimming" the book. However, this is so small as compared to the theories that can help any team save time and effort.

Six Thinking Hats Feature

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Six Thinking Hats Overview

Using case studies and real-life examples of his "six thinking hats", de Bono shows how each of us can become a better thinker through deliberate role-playing.

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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage Review

The Design of Business: Why design thinking is the next competitive advantage, by Roger Martin was a positive surprise as it was a quick read, well structured, delivered several interesting concepts and some in depth cases on business model innovation. Even though several of the cases are familiar for many readers (such as P&G, Apple, Cirque du Soleil, McDonalds and RIM) Roger, who is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, professor of strategic management, and author of the book The Opposable Mind, adds interesting perspectives and sometimes information from behind the scenes working as a consultant and advisor. The book is an extension of Roger's popular article (free download via [...]) from 2004 with the same name.

The book in three bullet points:

* It introduces and explores the concept of the "Knowledge Funnel" describing how knowledge advances from mystery to heuristic, to algorithm for businesses to gain efficiency and lower costs, and the activities of moving across the knowledge stages (exploration) and operating within each knowledge stage (exploitation).

* To accelerate the pace at which knowledge advances through the Knowledge Funnel, it presents the concept of design thinking as the necessary balance between analytical thinking using deductive and inductive reasoning (with the need for reliability and the ability to produce consistent and predictable outcomes), and intuitive thinking (with the need for validity and to produce outcomes that meet a desired objective).

* It discusses challenges (primarily the results of proof-based analytical thinking) faced by organizations, CEOs and individuals within organizations, to build structures and processes that foster, support and reward a culture of design thinking, and how different CEOs have used different approaches to generate successful outcomes.


A brief summary of the different chapters:

1. The knowledge funnel: How discovery takes shape
The introductory chapter starts with a story about McDonalds journey from mystery (how and what did Californians want to eat) to algorithm (stripping away uncertainty, ambiguity, and judgment from almost all processes). It briefly discusses analytical thinking, intuitive thinking and design thinking, to solve mysteries and advance knowledge, and the fine balance between exploring new knowledge and exploiting existing one.

It introduces and explores the concept of the "Knowledge Funnel" describing how knowledge advances from mystery to heuristic, to algorithm for businesses to gain efficiency and lower costs. This is explored also in later chapters: "Mysteries are expensive, time consuming, and risky; they are worth tackling only because of the potential benefits of discovering a path out of the mystery to a revenue-generating heuristic", "The algorithm generates savings by turning judgment... ...into a formula or set of rules that, if followed, will produce a desired solution" and "Computer code - the digital end point of the algorithm stage - is the most efficient expression of an algorithm".

It also addresses the need for organizations to re-explore solved mysteries, even the founding ideas behind the business, and not get too comfortable focusing on the "administration of business" running an existing algorithm.

In addition, the first chapter presents abductive logic, and some ideas originated by philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce; that it is not possible to prove a new thought concept, or idea in advance and that all new ideas can be validated only through the unfolding of future events. To advance knowledge we need to make a "logical leap of the mind" or an "inference to the best explanation" (or "Leaps of Faith" that John Mullins and Randy Komisar calls it in the book Getting to plan B see review/summary at[...]) to imaging a heuristic for understanding a mystery. Free preview of Chapter 1 (link at [...])

2. The reliability bias: Why advancing knowledge is so hard
The second chapter focus on the distinction between reliability (produce consistent, predictable outcomes by narrowing the scope of a test to what can be measured in a replicable, quantitative way) and validity (produce outcomes that meet a desired objective, that through the passage of time will be shown to be correct, often incorporating some aspects of subjectivity and judgment to be achieved). Roger's main point in the chapter (or even in the book) is that today's business world is focusing too much on reliability (due to three forces: demand for proof, an aversion to bias and the constraints of time), with algorithmic decision-making techniques using various systems (such as ERP, CRM, TQM, KM) to crunch data objectively and extrapolate from the past to make predictions about the future. "What organizations dedicated to running reliable algorithms often fail to realize is that while they reduce the risk of small variations in their businesses, they increase the risk of cataclysmic events that occur when the future no longer resembles the past and the algorithm is no longer relevant or useful" With the turbulent times we live in, where new mysteries constantly spring up that reliable systems won't address or even acknowledge, businesses risk being outflanked by new entrants solving old and new mysteries developing new heuristics and algorithms. "Without validity, an organization has little chance of moving knowledge across the funnel. Without reliability, an organization will struggle to exploit the rewards of its advances... the optimal approach... is to seek a balance of both"

3. Design thinking: How thinking like a designer can create sustainable advantage
Chapter three starts with an interesting case of Research In Motion (RIM) that leads into the discussion of what is really design thinking. Roger uses the quote by Tim Brown of IDEO, "a discipline that uses the designer's sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity" and adds himself "a person or organization instilled with that discipline is constantly seeking a fruitful balance between reliability and validity, between art and science, between intuition and analytics, and between exploration and exploitation". That designers live in the world of abductive reasoning, actively look for new data points, challenge accepted explanations to posit what could possibly be true (in contrast to the two dominant forms of logic - deduction and induction, with the goal to declare a conclusion to be true or false).

The chapter ends with the first discussion on roadblocks to design thinking (many more to come), with one being the corporate tendency to settle at the current stage in the knowledge funnel, and another how "highly paid executives or specialists with knowledge, turf and paychecks to defend" has the company's heuristics in their heads with no interest in advancing to the algorithm stage, making the executives less important. This leads nicely into the forth chapter about the transformation of Procter & Gamble.

4. Transforming the corporation: The design of Procter & Gamble
A.G. Lafley's transformation of Procter & Gamble from an incumbent in crisis to an innovative and efficient organization in just a few years has been widely covered in the business literature. As a student some years back I made an internship in P&G's Connect & Develop (connect with innovators outside the company and develop their ideas for P&G products), and have since been reading up on everything I can find about the transition and why other companies have not been able to make the same transition. Roger adds interesting perspectives, from his work with the company and its first vice president of innovation strategy and design, Claudia Kotchka, to develop "a comprehensive program that would provide practical experience in design thinking to P&G leaders". One of the top-down efforts being to drive brand-building from heuristic (in the minds of scarce and costly senior executives) toward algorithm, providing less senior employees the tools needed to do much of the work previously done by high-cost elites who then could then focus on the next mystery in order to create the next brand experience. The chapter also covers the Connect & Develop initiative and how it bulked up P&G's supply of ideas in the mystery-heuristic transition where it was thin, enabling it to feed more opportunities into its well-developed heuristics and algorithms of development, branding, positioning, pricing and distribution.

Another highly interesting topic covered in the chapter is the change of processes within P&G, including the strategy review, at P&G. Lafley recognized that the existing processes was a recipe for producing reliability, not validity, "so risky creative leaps were out of the question". A transition from annual reviews with category managers pitching, "with all the inductive and deductive proof needed to gain the approval of the CEO and senior management" to "forcing category managers to toss around ideas with senior management... to become comfortable with the logical leaps of mind needed to generate new ideas".

5. The balancing act: How design-thinking organizations embrace reliability and validity
The chapter focuses on the need to balance reliability and validity, and the challenges to do so (foremost all structures, processes and cultural norms tilted towards reliability). "Financial planning and reward systems are dramatically tilted toward running an existing heuristic or algorithm and must be modified in significant ways to create a balance between reliability and validity". Roger presents a rough rule of thumb "when the challenge is to seize an emerging opportunity, the solution is to perform like a design team: work iteratively, build a prototype, elicit feedback, refine it, rinse, repeat... On the other hand, running a supply chain, building a forecasting model, and compiling the financials are functions best left to people who work in fixed roles with permanent tasks". The chapter feels somewhat repetitive, in the uphill battle for validity, and more obstacles of change are presented:

* Preponderance of Training in Analytical Thinking
* Reliability orientation of key stakeholders
* Ease of defending reliability vs. validity

In this chapter, Roger also discusses how design-thinking companies have to develop new reward systems and norms, with an example of how to think about constraints. "In reliability-driven, analytical-thinking companies, the norm is to see constraints as the enemy", whereas when validity is the goal "constraints are opportunities" and "they frame the mystery that needs to be solved".

6. World-class explorers: Leading the design-thinking organization
In chapter six several interesting cases, and approaches of different CEOs, are presented, one being the widely covered case of Guy Laliberté, and his Cirque du Soleil. Again Roger adds to the existing body of knowledge with the twist of reliability vs. validity in creating a new market, and the knowledge funnel taking a one-off street festival into an unstoppable international 0 million-a-year business with four thousand employees. Laliberté has reinvented Cirque's creative and business models time and time again, "usually over protests that he was fixing what was not broken and that he could destroy the company". Other CEOs and cases covered in the chapter are James Hackett of Steelcase, Bob Ulrich of Target, and Steve Jobs of Apple.

The role of the CEO and different approaches to build design-friendly organizational processes and norms into companies are discussed referring to the different cases presented.

Again, Roger returns to the reliability vs validity battle, now from a CEO perspective with terms such as "resisting reliability", "those systems-whether they are for budgeting, capital appropriation, product development...", and "counter the internal and external pressures toward reliability".

7. Getting personal: Developing yourself as a design thinker
In the final chapter the focus is on how a non-CEO can function as a design thinker and develop skills to individually produce more valid outcomes even in reliability-oriented companies. Roger refers back to his previous book The Opposable Mind, and the concept of a personal knowledge system as a way of thinking about how we acquire knowledge and expertise. The knowledge system has three components:

* Stance: "Who am I in the world and what am I trying to accomplish?"
* Tools: "With what tools and models do I organize my thinking and understand the world?"
* Experiences: "With what experiences can I build my repertoire of sensitivities and skills.

Roger then presents the design thinker's stance, key tools (observation, imagination, and configuration), and how to obtain experiences by trying new things and test their boundaries.

Roger also presents five things that the design thinker needs to do to be more effective with colleagues at the extremes of the reliability and validity spectrum:

* Reframe extreme views as a creative challenge
* Empathize with your colleagues on the extremes
* Learn to speak the languages of both reliability and validity
* Put unfamiliar concepts in familiar terms
* When it comes to proof, use size to your advantage


This is a great book and I recommend business developers and business model innovators to buy it, as it is a quick read with several important concepts and interesting cases to learn from. I believe design thinking has the potential to help managers break out from the Matrix they live in and again realize the real world behind the existing algorithms.


Disclaimer:
I read the book at the beautiful cliffs of Vernazza in Italy, and was in a very good mood. I actually read the book twice.

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage Feature

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• Condition: New
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The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage Overview

Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a game-changing innovation like Apple's iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative-they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results.


Why? In The Design of Business, Roger Martin offers a compelling and provocative answer: we rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo.

To innovate and win, companies need design thinking. This form of thinking is rooted in how knowledge advances from one stage to another-from mystery (something we can't explain) to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides us toward solution) to algorithm (a predictable formula for producing an answer) to code (when the formula becomes so predictable it can be fully automated). As knowledge advances across the stages, productivity grows and costs drop-creating massive value for companies.

Martin shows how leading companies such as Procter & Gamble, Cirque du Soleil, RIM, and others use design thinking to push knowledge through the stages in ways that produce breakthrough innovations and competitive advantage.

Filled with deep insights and fresh perspectives, The Design of Business reveals the true foundation of successful, profitable innovation.

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