What the dog saw Malcolm Gladwell
What the dog and other ventures saw
Malcolm Gladwell wrote the book what the dog and other adventures saw with the collection of the articles that he has made since 1996 in the prestigious newspaper The New Yorker. This book, rather than being dissemination of science, is about life things and observations from a very personal point of view.
Gladwell brings us stories from all corners of the modern world: investigate the bittersweet lives of minor, bold and obsessive geniuses such as Mr. Heinz, responsible for only one type of ketchup in front of dozens of mustard varieties;He reveals the importance of the evolution of capillary dye in the history of the twentieth century;He compares the search methods of mass destruction with cancer detection.
Author of three best sellers who have turned a turn to our way of understanding the world, Gadwell has chosen those who considered his best articles, scattered in different numbers of The New Yorker magazine and new sample of his insatiable curiosity.
The following questions come to light, can someone be blamed for the Challenger explosion? Can we catch a criminal from his psychological profile? Why do we identify precocity with genius? Gladwell brings together his best reports here for The New Yorker magazine. Just putting himself on the skin of a dog, Gadwell thought, he could uncover the secrets of César Millán, the "dog charming", capable of calming the most restless or enraged animal with a simple gesture.Investigate the stubborn paper survival, he wonders if we live in a society that overvalues intelligent people and reveals the best saved secret of work interviews: What can you know about a stranger after an hour of conversation?. The author of this book says it is easy to make difficult decisions if you know how to take it. It is a book to learn to decide and hit.
This book invites readers to see things from another perspective, like that of a dog that is being educated. Therefore, in the text, reference is made to César Millán, the protagonist of the television series The Dog charming, who is able to control the most aggressive dog with a simple body and gesture position, among many other characters that are part of hisstories.
What the dog saw and other adventures guarantees you to read surprising facts and research that will help you contemplate reality in a different way and open your mind to evaluate the facts in another way. Its tempting proposal makes it impossible to get bored because this compilation of articles will hardly leave you indifferent.
This book, although it is not a productivity book itself, is a good collection of stories that can give you, as manager, ideas and guidelines for improvement in the management of your teams. Every 2 or 3 pages, this book guarantees you to read some surprising fact that you had never read before, or a mixture of multidisciplinary research to afford the world in a completely new way (for example, admitting that people who succeedIt does not have it because it is better than the others, or that sometimes intuition is more useful than the conscientious analysis, or that people are not bad or good, but juguea and Buenamala according to the circumstances).
The themes they speak are of the most varied, from contraceptives, through the fall of Enron to traffic safety. For example, it stands out that people who risk are attracted to us. There is more heroism in challenging the human impulse than to undertake the painful but useful steps to shield against the unimaginable.
Jeffrey Skilling, found guilty in 2006 of multiple crimes of fraud, related to Enron’s financial collapse, said having regrets for what had happened, since good friends of his, according to him, had died;But he declared himself innocent of all the charges that were imputed to him.
Security expert Georgy Treverton has made a division between two concepts: enigmas and mysteries. An enigma is something whose answer we do not know or know with the information we have;A mystery was a complex problem, but you had the information.
If things get ugly in an enigma, the culprit is the one who retains the information;But in the mysteries it is not so simple, because one has different foci of information and can reach wrong conclusions there are those who qualify the case of Enron as an enigma. But really, Enron was a mystery. The basic problem was that nobody understood what they did. In 1998 a group of six business students from the University of Cornell decided to do their job on the Enron key. They reviewed the accounting by analyzing their businesses after others. The conclusions of those students were that Enron pursued a much more risky strategy than their competitors and had to sell.
In Denver 5% of circulating vehicles produced 55% of the pollution emitted by cars. Only that data to think. Joann Elmore, epidemiologist at the Medical Center of the University of Washington Harborview once asked ten experienced radiologists to examine 150 mammograms, 27 of which had developed breast cancer, while the remaining 123 were healthy. The results were somewhat surprising in the disparity of diagnoses. For example, while a first radiologist detected 85% of cancers another detected 37%. A certain mammography was somewhat disconcerting, because three of the radiologists considered that it was normal, two considered that it was abnormal but probably benign, four were not able to decide and the last one was convinced that it was cancer. The patient was perfectly normal. So we still have much to learn in this regard.
Gilbert Welch warned that given the current breast cancer mortality rates, 9 of every 6000 60 -year -old women will die for this cause in the next 10 years. If each of these women made a mammogram every year the number would be reduced to 6, which would mean that the radiologist who attends to those 1000 women would have to examine about 10.000 radiographs throughout a decade to save 3 lives. It is a fact that gives to think.
It also explains how human beings manage risk. For example, when it was discovered that the Challenger had exploded for a design problem and the design was modified and the joints that they took later were much better. Now, it seems unquestionable that the probabilities of accident were much lower. Is it really so?
On September 3, 1967, Sweden went from driving through the left lane to the right. Everything pointed to that during that time there would be more accidents. But no, people compensated for the lack of familiarity driving more careful and, in fact, traffic victims fell by 17%. Then talk about types of geniuses, sometimes we have despised people and they have been considered geniuses after they died. With that I already say a lot, right? Even so, I like the way in which the book has been treated. For all these reasons, I conclude by remembering that it is not a book of dissemination of science, but rather of life learning. For all audiences.
Development of book ideas
These are some of the main ideas that Malcolm Gladwell exhibits in his book:
- In a first part, it deals with the obsessives, and those who Gladwell calls minor geniuses. The author tells the experiences of different obsessos of work, pioneers and other characters of interest. It presents for example Ron Popeil, who achieved success by selling instruments for the kitchen through a television, and Cesar Millán, who with his skills can control any type of dog. For example, he does not speak of Einstein, but about the inventor of the cooking pots of the television or those who tried to revolutionize the world of ketchup, trying to dethrone Heinz.
- In the second part theories, predictions and diagnoses are addressed. Should an accusation of plagiarism ruin your career? How can we think about improving the situation of those who have no home? What position to adopt before a financial scandal?. Refers to the ways of organizing experience. How should we think about the homeless, financial scandals or a disaster such as the Challenger fire?
- The last block of the book deals with personality, character and intelligence and raises a debate about the ease we have to acquire an opinion about another. How can we know if a person is good or bad? Who to choose when we don’t know who to choose? Are the ready are overvalued? Malcolm Gladwell raises issues of interest to reflect and we can get the best out of ourselves. In short, the third section is aimed at questioning the predictions we make about people. How do we know if someone is bad, nice or capable of doing something really good?
Finally, "What the Dog Saw" is a set of excellent articles that Gadwell has published in The New Yorker. For this reason, it is easy to skip one chapter to another since each of them covers different issues. Although I did not always agree with the author, I think many of his ideas are interesting even if they serve only as a topic of conversation.
What do I think of the different chapters?
- The good ones: Nassim Taleb’s chapter is a very good summary to the book by “Foold by Randomness.”If someone does not have time to read the book, this is a good alternative since it explains the main idea of this book. "Connecting The Dots" and "Blowup" seem interesting to me since one shows the difficulties of creating an efficient intelligence system and the other mentions the type of errors to which we must get used to living in such a specialized society. The “Dangerous Minds” chapter makes experts in “criminal propiling” be seen how individuals similar to those who read our fortune. In the chapter of the interviews I think the author is right and has given me several ideas on how to improve.
- Los Malos: "Late Bloomers" and "The Art of Failure" for some reason did not seem so interesting to me. The "Most Likely To Sucede" begins well but ends without learning or an idea that you remember.
- The ugly: in The War of Talent chapter, I don’t agree with Gladwell. I do not agree for the fact that Gadwell criticizes McKinsey but for the fact that his only foundation is to mention the case of Enron and praise Procter & Gamble. Although the author certainly mentions two cases that give evidence of exceptions to the rule, I think Gadwell ignores in his analysis an infinity of companies in which talent certainly makes a difference.
By the way, the title of the book ("What the Dog Saw") is the title of a chapter that is based on "The Dog Whisperer", a Mexican dog coach who is very famous in the United States. In fact The New York Times published an article about him some time ago.
In conclusion all its articles, Gladwell does not only seek the truth, rather, we try to analyze reality from another point of view, and above all that we are able to get into the minds of such striking characters as César Millán, the presenter of TheDog Whisperer.
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