Malcolm Gladwell

Author Malcolm Gladwell was often miscast as "incog-negro" during the years he kept his hair cut close. Born in England and raised in Canada, Gladwell, 41, is the son of a White British mathematician father and a Black Jamaican mother, who's a therapist and the author of a classic memoir, Brown Face, Big Master. His second New York Times best seller, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, examines the importance of first impressions. Yet Gladwell is so low-key about his A-list status as a sought-after speaker in corporate America--reportedly paid $40,000 an engagement--that the business magazine Fast Company dubbed him "the accidental gum." Black Issues Book Review simply calls him "one deep brother."

How people responded to me based on my hair was really my motivation for writing Blink. I cut my hair after college to make myself "presentable" to the workforce. Then I said, "The hell with it! I prefer my hair long." But my Afro more clearly marked me as Black, so I also got this little reminder of what it means to be Black in America: I was frequently stopped by the police.

The way we organize our ideas is something that really interests me. I come from a family of writers and explainers and teachers, so what I do now is not a big stretch from my upbringing. Human beings have two ways of thinking. In one approach, we very consciously, deliberately and methodically go through all factual elements to reach a conclusion. In the other, we use the unconscious part of our minds to sift all the information on the table very quickly to get to a conclusion "in the blink of an eye." Each way of thinking has its strengths and weaknesses. What I wanted to do was zero in on the kind of thinking that I believe we have often ignored, which is the subtle, unconscious kind.

The kind of thinking we sometimes call intuition comes from experience. Once experience truly becomes expertise, it allows us to move decision making from the conscious level to the unconscious. But we get into trouble with our instincts when we don't have experience and expertise. That's where we make dangerous decisions that are incorrectly based on gender, race or any number of things, including weight and height. I'm not sure there are any great differences between Blacks and Whites in how well we assess the reliability of our own gut instincts. It's more a question of how well we as individuals learn to judge our own idiosyncratic experiences. Human beings tend to jump to conclusions on the basis of very narrow slices of experience.

Colin Powell is my cousin. His great-grandmother and my great-great-grandmother were sisters. He has spent a lifetime fighting wars and giving counsel in military matters, so you would do well to pay attention to his gut feelings about war. His feeling was that the war in Iraq was going to be long and messy. Bush tried to sell us on his gut instincts about the Iraq war--that the war would be short and American troops were going to be warmly greeted for "liberating" Iraq. But this wasn't based on anything. Bush hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about military issues. He ran a baseball team. And that's a crucial difference.

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