Predicting Success in the draft !

[Auntie.Gerald]

If you havent read much of Malcolm Gladwells books or writings you may thoroughly enjoy this one ........relevant to drafts in football etc etc

Predicting success in football and teaching : The New Yorker

[laughingnome]

Great article, AG. It's no secret that clubs try to shore up on Big Men in the hopes that one will become a KPP. How can you tell at 18 when they haven't even stopped growing yet?

[Xie Shan]

Malcolm Gladwell is great, I just finished reading 'Blink' and he's brilliant at getting us to see things from a different perspective.

Reading that article, it looks like the Swans had the right idea in casting the net wider in search of potential talent.

[liz]

Malcolm Gladwell is great, I just finished reading 'Blink' and he's brilliant at getting us to see things from a different perspective.

Reading that article, it looks like the Swans had the right idea in casting the net wider in search of potential talent.

Haven't read "Blink" because the idea he is trying to push is flawed IMO (under most circumstances). But I have read The Tipping Point and Outliers and quite enjoyed them. His most recent publication - What the Dog Saw - was the one I enjoyed the most. It's different from the others in that it is an anthology of pieces he has written over the past decade and a bit, most of which (maybe all?) were originally published in the New Yorker, and includes the piece that the OP links through to. it's a bit of a grab bag of topics but I enjoyed reading even those whose subject matter I didn't think would particularly interest me.

[Xie Shan]

Haven't read "Blink" because the idea he is trying to push is flawed IMO (under most circumstances). But I have read The Tipping Point and Outliers and quite enjoyed them. His most recent publication - What the Dog Saw - was the one I enjoyed the most. It's different from the others in that it is an anthology of pieces he has written over the past decade and a bit, most of which (maybe all?) were originally published in the New Yorker, and includes the piece that the OP links through to. it's a bit of a grab bag of topics but I enjoyed reading even those whose subject matter I didn't think would particularly interest me.

Haven't read What the Dog Saw, but enjoyed The Tipping Point and Outliers. From Gladwell's summary of 'Blink', he focuses on snap judgements and how we make decisions (in particular, how our prejudices influence the decisions we make).

I didn't really 'get' the message of Blink until the final chapter/case study about the female trombonist, which fit in with the idea that we make better judgements when we set aside our prejudices (This tells the story in much greater detail - for the short version, go here).

How do you think the idea of Blink is flawed? I understand the notion that we can 'drill down' to a few, key success factors in making decisions, e.g. when predicting whether a marriage will last (this example is discussed in Blink, where a marriage therapist explains how he looks for four main signs), or whether a footballer will make it (assuming that the person has experience in analysing relationships or recruiting footballers). Gladwell does admit that it's hard to describe the decision-making process involved in making snap/instinctive judgements (one example he gave was of a tennis coach who instinctively 'knew' when a player was about to double fault, but couldn't explain it).

We do get it wrong sometimes -- the orchestra might not always pick the best musician for the job, or a recruiter might not always make the right choice between Player A or Player B at the draft table, but the point I took away from the final case study was that after the introduction of screens (that eliminated the orchestra's prejudices against women), it resulted in a better orchestra -- so by casting the net wider in recruiting (whether for an AFL team or a large firm) you might not always pick the right person, but you at least improve the odds of ending up with a better team (at least in theory).

That was a lot harder to explain than I thought -- so not sure if this makes sense -- but his books often have the underlying theme of how we can change things to result in a better world, and sometimes when I read through the case studies it's hard to take a step back and see the bigger picture, but I could see what he was trying to get at.