Blink – The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Haisong gave me a book – Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. It is from Malcolm Gladwell, the same author of the Tipping Point.

It is a nice book of getting information in the first 2 seconds. I was so amazed that someone can record the video of a couple and decode the behaviors into a 1800 line of codes, and analyze it. That is the major difference between western culture (quatitive thinking) and the eastern culture (qualitive thinking).

Recently, I consistently amazed by the difference people in China think and the way people in U.S. think. China is a sociaty driven by “business instinct” instead of data. Some companies are moving that way, hoping to be successful, but I don’t see many successful cases yet. The majority are still using the old Chinese ways of thinking.

I believe there must be equality nice wisdom within the Chinese culture, and we must learn it in a way people in China learn it. To survive in this market, we need to be very good at “Chinese thinking”. The sad thing is, many people think “Chinese thinking” is bad, which I don’t think near the truth.

If the majority of the decision makers make decision using “blink”, do is still make sense to make decision only based on data?

4 thoughts on “Blink – The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

  1. One thing very interesting is many western business people use ‘quantitive thinking’ to think (or to analyse) ‘Chinese qualitive thinking’.

    There are many books teaches western company how to do business in China. It gives us some fresh idea about our own culture, as we start to think it without inside it.

    They collect datas, build model to analyse and make decisions.

    I saw a book called “YES MEANS NO IN CHINA”, you can see the idea from it’s name.

    (anyway, thanks for answering my question about Kijiji)

  2. I cann’t agree more. Many people are over emphesis western data analysis method. While I think Chinese thinking is equally important, if not more, especially in Chinese market.

  3. Yes, western bizmen sometimes fail to land a project or profit in China simply because they don’t understand that the Chinese way of doing things. I remember a few years ago I did some translation for a Danish bizmen who wanted to find an agent in Shanghai to see shrimps from Denmark. All the interested Chinese bizmen, the first thing they wanted to know, asked about the price for one ton. The Dane didn’t understand and I explained to him for some small and medium sized businesses in China the priority is to cut costs, and buy low sell high. So you see in doing business there are many subtle things at work: geographical conditions, cultural factors….

    By the way, I want Mr. Wang to know that I saw your radio blog on http://www.kqed.com. KQED is one of my favorite online radio stations. Good for you to let people know what you are doing.

  4. For software developing domain, it is obvious the quatitive thinking would be better than qualitive thinking. If a software product can not be tested by quatitive measure, it shall be a failed one.

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