The Technic Alley

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell
This is Malcolm Gladwell’s second book after “The Tipping Point.”  In The Tipping Point, Gladwell writes about how sometimes things considered little and insignificant can unexpectedly cause big changes. Blink is about something very different; it is about how much information processing is done by our mind at [...]

In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell coins the term “maven trap.” Mavens are experts in a particular field who are always trying to help others with their knowledge. They are the kind of people you turn to for advice when you want to buy a car or a HDTV, book a trip to [...]

In his book “Blink,” Malcolm Gladwell writes about “Sensation Transference.” He describes what a beer manufacturer realized when they tried to figure out why their competitor’s beer was always doing better in the market, in spite of their beer being of good quality, having good advertisements, and having been priced competively. After a series of [...]

In his book, “Predictably Irrational,” Dan Ariely describes what he calls the IKEA effect.  This concept has been selected as one of  Harvard Business Reviews’  Breakthrough Ideas for 2009.
The essence of this effect is to make us “love what we build.” It’s what you feel when you go to IKEA (or Home Depot, or whatever [...]

Outliers: The Story of Success

by Malcolm Gladwell
This book, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, focuses on something completely different from his earlier ones, “The Tipping Point,” and “Blink.” The Tipping Point is about how small factors can add up to cause a big change, or, to tip something over. It’s about the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back.” Blink [...]

I have been listening to the audio-book “How Doctors Think” by Dr. Jerome Groopman for the last few days. I will write a review when I have listened to it fully — and may be one more time — but something  I heard today kept me thinking.
Dr. Groopman describes how doctors sometimes are influenced by [...]

I just completed listening to the audio-book “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell and started listening to “How Doctors Think” by Jerome Groopman (review coming soon). I have been reflecting on what both these highly insightful authors have to say about how our mind works during a crisis.
Critical Thinking In a Crisis
Gladwell says that a well-trained mind [...]

Looking at my audio-book library that I have collected from my almost 2-year subscription to audible.com, I am pretty sure that if I had bought print versions of these books, most of them would have been sitting on my shelf, partially read, due to lack of “quality time” to sit down and read them. My [...]

Now that I have been listening to audio-books for almost 2 years, here are some tips that might help you enjoy yours.

Be patient – If you are new to listening to audio-books, you might find it a bit hard to concentrate the first couple of times. Stick with it, and you will soon get the [...]

I just created a Collection of Book Reviews at the portal site, using links to all the book reviews in this blog. Once again, the “book” feature of Drupal proved quite handy.