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
Comments
Post a Comment