Top 5 articles I like about

I’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s previous work also, the Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and so I was very excited to get a hand with the new book – What the Dog Saw.

Warning: Contains some Spoilers.

I was a little bit disapointed in this one, the collection of articles are originally written for the New Yorker.  I’m not sure if it’s because it was written as short articles, the investigations are not as thorough as his previous books.

Anyhow, the top 5  articles from this book:

1. The ketchup conundrum : mustard now comes in dozens of different varieties and why has ketchup stayed the same?

The idea is, that originally there was only one type of mustard, and then Grey Poupon came along, and started changing the way food is being marketed by making mustard as a high-end confection.  Since then, there are  so many types of mustards.  People tried to add more types of ketchup also, but failed miserably.  The reasons for this is because Ketchup was considered a “comfort food” when Americans are raised.  Nobody messes up the comfort food.

Congee, a popular chinese comfort food, is much the same way too.  You can have a few varieties, but nobody serves them overly outraged.

2. Blowing up : how Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy.

Talked about the author of Fooled by Randomness, and how he has been suffering in the investment world the last 10 years, seeing his counterparts earning so much profit by selling short calls,  only to lose it all in the ONE DOWNFALL.  Boy, it must be tough to stake through those lean years, now that he can finally redeem himself.

Interestingly, that book Fooled by Randomness, was on my audiobook list  at the time I was reading the Gladwell book. (Yes, I like to read several books at the same time, helps me connecting the dot)

3. The pitchman : Ron Popeil and the conquest of the American kitchen

An insight to sell.  There is the pitch, the turn, and repeat. Let people make small commitments first.  I  never realize this, in the best selling pitch, the salesman will sell his/her product to 60% of people wanting to buy.  And then when the selling is done, he will talk to the 30% of people remaining, “sheepishly” telling them that there are additional uses for his/her product.  These 30% will become the core group for the next sales presentation, and the cycle continues.

This is probably where in Hold’em poker, the term, “Turn” as the 4th card being handed to you, came from.  You are committed in the pot, and will want to continue on.

4. Most likely to succeed : how do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job.

Talks about how in most occupations, you don’t really know if the person is fit for the job. NFL quarterbacks’s success rate, according to  Gladwell, is about 20%. Meaning the top 5 college quarterbacks, there  is  only about 1 that will make a successful career.

The moral has to do with the  changing of the systems. It makes more sense  if putting in our daily term, that what you learned in university, may not resemble anything you would do at real work afterwards.

5. Connecting the dots : the paradoxes of intelligence reform

Talks about how everything is easy to spot, as an after fact.  This section actually changed my way of thinking quite a bit, that when I make decisions, I don’t call it a straight black and  white answers – YES or NO.

It is more appropriate to call it  as a probability – that  it is 95% probable.  The probability thinking allows room for risk mitigation, and make the system more durable because people have an expectation that things may not be correct.  One application can be a doctor telling the patient that he/she has a high/medium/low (or better, percentage) of probability that they have cancer.

Malcolm Gladwell is going to speak in Vancouver’s F5-Expo on April 7. I wish I can go, but I have a 1 week course to go to, and absolutely cannot skip out.  Maybe it will be on youtube later.

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