Sometimes your gut feel is right, sometimes it is not: how to choose

Malcolm Gladwell says he was prompted to write Blink because he grew his hair long and found as a result that he was being stopped by the police more.

“It used to be cut very short and conservatively. But I decided on a whim to let it grow wild as it had been when I was a teenager. Immediately in very small but significant ways my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines. And one day as I was walking in downtown Manhattan a police van pulled up on the sidewalk and three officers jumped out. They were looking for a rapist and the rapist, they said, looked a lot like me.

“They pulled out the sketch and the description. I looked at it and pointed out to them that the rapist looked nothing at all like me. He was much taller and much heavier and about 15 years younger. All we had in common was a large head of curly hair. After 20 minutes or so the officers finally agreed with me and let me go.”

A master story teller, Gladwell turned this pavement encounter into an engaging book on how people make a decision in the blink of an eye. Other African-Americans suffered far worse, he noted. In Illinois, a black person in court for a drugs offence has a 57 times greater chance of being jailed than a white person. And in the case of Amadou Diallo, out taking a midnight breath of air by his front door, being gunned to death by four passing coppers.

Gladwell uses these tales to illustrate his point: That sometimes people make good decisions in an instance and sometimes they make bad decisions.

For an independent retailer Gladwell provides at least two great ideas that could help you operate better. The first is that too much information leads to poor decision making. The second is that people often say they don’t like innovation simply because they don’t understand it.

The first point is underscored by lessons from the US military and from Cook County hospital, the model for the TV show ER. A retired US general Paul Van Riper was hired by the Pentagon to play a rogue middle eastern enemy in a $250million war game held in August 2002. The good guys had analysed every single thing that Van Riper could do. But he still surprised them and sank 16 American warships in the Persian Gulf. The good guys pulled the plug on the game, refloated their ships and proceeded to win.

The head of Cook County hospital used an algorithm based on four measures to determine if patients were having heart attacks or not. Doctors were used to asking if people smoked, were overweight and exercised and so on. But this extra information made their decisions less accurate.

Similarly, if you are managing 4000 SKUs then you may be better off with less information and not more.

The good thing about Gladwell’s books is they get you to think about how the world works and how people work. Essential stuff if you want to be a great retailer. Blink is perfect for the impulse retailer. Read and enjoy.

For more, see www.betterretailing.com

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