Malcolm Gladwell Is a Blinking Idiot

Blink readers are being misled.

So say Kevin J. Clancy and Peter C. Krieg in their essay "The Power of Intuition and Why It's the Biggest Myth in Business Today" posted on ChangeThis.

They decry Gladwell's Blink phenomenon as the crest of 25 years of work that suggests management decision-making should be more about intuition â€" gut feeling -- than informed, data-driven decision-making.

Poppycock, say Clancy and Krieg, who run Copernicus, a marketing research and consulting firm , and have written a book, Your Gut Is Still Not Smarter Than Your Head. They argue that few examples of pure intuition have paid off. They debunk the myth of the hunch behind the Dodge Viper, noting that it didn't get the go ahead until a concept car version got raves (they also argue that the dull mini-van was probably more important for Chrysler's turnaround).

They even tweak Jack Welch's From the Gut as being a title concocted title by someone who didn't want people to know that a focus on numbers like six-sigma were really what made General Electric go.

This essay is both smart and a fun read, though as someone whose ability to earn a living depends indirectly on a healthy advertising market, I found their statistics on marketing horrifying: they say that the average ROI of most marketing programs is zero to negative. Worse, one study they cite found that it takes a 100 percent increase in advertising spending to get a 1 percent increase in sales (I should really spin that to say that if you take $1 dollar in advertising and make it $2, you'll get a full percentage point return on your investment. So pump up the ad volume. )

Their point being that marketers, who love to trust their gut, should keep their eyes wide open â€" every time they blink, they're wasting money. Marketers are their main target, in fact, and their skewering of marketing by the gut will have chief marketing officers running for their data warehouses to try to prove their worth.

In the end though, Clancy and Krieg back off their main message. They have to -- very rarely can executives paint by numbers. Indeed, the authors dun data people for gathering data that doesn't tell anyone anything, noting that one recent survey found that only 14 percent of executives at large companies got any value from a market segmentation exercise. Malcolm Gladwell isn't completely wrong to trust his gut, and neither are executives.

In the end, they draw the obvious conclusion: good business decisions need to come both from information and from the gut. If that sounds counter-intuitive, you better read the essay.