Product Description

Outraged by the downward spiral of intellect and culture, Michael LeGault offers the flip side of Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling phenomenon, Blink, which theorized that our best decision-making is done on impulse, without factual knowledge or critical analysis. If bestselling books are advising us to not think, LeGault argues, it comes as no surprise that sharp, incisive reasoning has become a lost art in the daily life of people everywhere.

Somewhere along the line, the Age of Reason morphed into the Age of Emotion; this systemic erosion is costing time, money, jobs, and lives in the twenty-first century, leading to less fulfilment and growing dysfunction. LeGault provides a bold, controversial, and objective analysis of the causes and solutions for some of the biggest problems facing Western culture in the 21st century. From the over- load of reality TV shows and gossip magazines that have rendered curiosity of the mind and spirit obsolete to permissive parenting and low standards that have caused an academic crisis among our children, LeGault looks at all aspects of modern lives and points to how and where it all went wrong.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11069 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781416531555
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Review
"[For] those concerned about America losing touch with its intellectual traditions . . . Think! could not have emerged at a better time."-- The Washington Times

About the Author
Michael R. LeGault is an award-winning editor and writer, and a former columnist for the Washington Times. His reviews, opinion columns, and features have appeared in newspapers, journals, and magazines across North America. An American citizen based in Toronto, LeGault has worked for and been a consultant to major U.S. companies on health, safety, environmental, and quality issues. He received his B.S. from the University of Michigan and his M.S. from the University of Miami, Florida. LeGault is currently an editor at the National Post. He and his wife, Anneli, have two children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Don't Blink, Think

The company, a medium-sized automotive supplier based in Ohio, was already spinning in the upper regions of a vortex heading directly down the tube. What the company did sounded simple enough. It took glass windshields, put a strip of rubber around the perimeter, and shipped them to major automotive manufacturers. An operator placed the glass into a machine, and the machine injected melted rubber around the edge, then quickly cooled it to make it stick. The problem was this: The glass was breaking. The scrap rate mounted -- 10 percent, 20 percent. Little bar graphs posted in the cafeteria illustrated the amount of money the company was losing each week. Employees blinked uncomprehendingly when the figure reached a million dollars. Was anyone doing anything?

The company was doing all it could, or at least it felt it was. It hired a young, dynamic, university-educated plant manager. Intuition their guide, the plant manager and his team of floor supervisors and engineers attacked the problem. They pulled the dies -- large steel molds into which the glass was placed -- from every machine and scanned them with lasers to confirm dimensions to a thousandth of an inch. They ran quality control checks on all shipments of glass they received from other companies. They installed new process control software on the machines to continuously monitor the internal condition of each machine. Day and night, one or more engineers paced the factory, poring over printouts, making adjustments to the machines. Some days, on a few machines, there appeared to be progress, then just as quickly, things spun out of control and it seemed every other windshield was being devoured by mad machines determined to put the company out of business. Hunches about the cause of the problem were getting the company nowhere.

The head office called an emergency meeting. They were giving the plant one last chance to fix itself. They slid the plant manager the business card of a guru. His fee was $1 million. It seemed cheap.

The guru asked for the scrap rates of each machine operator. The company had the scrap rates for each machine, but not for the operators, who were rotated on machines on a daily, or even hourly, basis. The guru spent one month gathering the data. He spent an equal amount of time plotting and analyzing the numbers. Engineers at the plant still intuitively believed the problem was somehow related to the equipment, but the guru, examining the plots and data, noticed something odd -- the women operators had much higher scrap rates than the men. But there was an anomaly: Two male operators also had high scrap rates. He asked to meet the two men. They were both slightly built and on the short side. A million-dollar light went on inside the guru's head.

The windshields weighed twenty to forty pounds, depending on the model. The operators had to lean over and into the machines to place the windshields into the molds. The workstations were set up in a one-size-fits-all mode. The guru watched one woman strain to place the heavy windshield in the mold so that it would line up properly with the guiding pins. The machine closed and the windshield shattered. The woman loaded the next part and the guru told her to wait. He ran his hand along the top edge of the windshield. The part seemed to be loaded properly between the guiding pins; however, he noticed one edge rode out a little farther on the pin than the other. He gave the edge a push. He told the woman to run the machine. The large steel jaws clamped together, then opened to reveal a gleaming windshield looking for all the world like a Van Gogh.

The company modified workstation ergonomics, redesigned the die guiding pins, and trained staff workers. Scrap rates fell below 5 percent. The guru was feted and paid. A sigh of relief was heard around the plant. Only the plant manager was somewhat chagrined. He was embarrassed he had to rely on the critical thinking skills of someone else to fix his plant.

He could, if he wished, console himself. Sharp, incisive, clever thinking is steadily becoming a lost art, more and more the domain of specialists and gurus. The trend is troubling and raises the question, Is America losing its ability to think? If, for argument's sake, we define thinking as the use of knowledge and reasoning to solve problems and plan and produce favorable outcomes, the answer is, apparently, yes.

Consider the sober assessment of John Bardi, a lecturer at Penn State who has been teaching university students a variety of philosophy and cultural study courses for over twenty-five years. In a 2001 essay about the decline of critical thinking, Bardi states, "The intellectual qualities I see displayed in my classes . . . are getting worse every year, with the current crop [of students] being the worst." Critical thinking is a cognitive skill that permits a person to logically investigate a situation, problem, question, or phenomenon in order to make a judgment or a decision. Bardi argues that the collapse of critical thinking skills in this country may be "systemic and historical, even inevitable," although he allows that many of his colleagues have a simpler explanation -- that the problem is not history or culture, but today's students, who, for whatever reason, "lack the critical thinking skills necessary for higher learning."

Certainly our universities, especially the upper tier, still attract many diligent, gifted students who can knock off a set of differential equations as if they were a connect-the-dot drawing. If Bardi's and his colleagues' harsh assessment annoys some, think of it as applied "on average." Of course, this still means that the critical thinking skills of even the top college students have, on average, declined. If this is the case, it is not surprising, as independent testing on our schoolchildren has confirmed deteriorating performance in reading, math, and science for many years. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducts a triennial evaluation of the math, reading, science, and problem-solving skills of fifteen-year-olds living in the primary industrialized countries. In PISA's 2003 assessment, American students ranked twenty-eighth out of forty countries in problem-solving ability. The performance was on par with that of students from Serbia, Uruguay, and Mexico, and well below that of fifteen-year-olds from Japan, France, Germany, and Canada. The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress has measured some improvement in the reading and math scores of fourth- and eighth-grade students since 2000. Overall, however, the unvarnished results show that more than two-thirds of our nation's fourth and eighth graders are not performing at their grade levels in either math or reading.

If a decline in thinking skills were limited to unmotivated or hungover university students hell bent on frittering away their parents' money, we could probably muster a shrug, perhaps in the naive belief that the stringent standards of academia will inevitably weed out the deadwood. Poor thinking and nascent idiocy, according to this optimistic view, will be nipped in the bud, contained safely on campus, before they reach the real world. It is obvious, however, that this cannot be the case. Many of these students have become adept at muddling through their curriculums, finding a smorgasbord of courses they can pass, and picking up their degrees. One by one these graduates are transporting their limited knowledge and deficient thinking skills into the fields of their chosen professions, as the next generation of teachers, nurses, sales representatives, and company managers. Thus we have teachers, health care workers, and managers with historically inferior critical-thinking skills teaching, caring for patients, and managing businesses.

At least one high-level automotive executive, General Motors' Robert Lutz, has lamented the inferior problem-solving skills of U.S.-trained engineers. Other refined mental skills crucial to workplace performance also appear to be deteriorating. A 2004 report released by the National Commission on Writing, a panel of educators assembled by the College Board, brought to light the growing disgruntlement of businesses with employee writing skills. The report, Writing: A Ticket to Work . . . or a Ticket Out, included a survey of chief executives from the nation's top corporations. The results were not pretty -- about a third of the companies said only one-third or fewer of their employees knew how to write clearly and concisely.

Predictably, as if filling a growing market niche, a new-age, feel-good pop psychology/philosophy has sprung up to bolster the view that understanding gleaned from logic and critical analysis is not all that it's cracked up to be. This outlook, which sounds especially appealing after a couple of beers in a loud bar, suggests that the rational model is often unnecessary, and may even be obsolete. Malcolm Gladwell has recently set the high-water mark for this philosophy with his book Blink -- The Power of Thinking without Thinking. In Blink, Mr. Gladwell argues that our minds possess a subconscious power to take in large amounts of information and sensory data and correctly size up a situation, solve a problem, and so on, without the heavy, imposing hand of formal thought.

As a demonstration of the omnipotence of instantaneous, Blinklike snap judgments, defined as an understanding arrived at "in the first two seconds," Mr. Gladwell relates a story about a forged Greek statue purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1984. The sculpture was a nude male youth, claimed by the art-dealer-seller to be one of the stylized statues known as a kouros produced in ancient Greece. Officials at the Getty were apparently suspicious of the origins of the statue from the start, as it radiated "a light colored glow" not typical of ancient statues. Nonetheless, after extensive scientific tests showed that the marble from w...

Customer Reviews

Two Sides Of The Same Coin And A Good Book
Many of the reviewers here criticize this book because it isn't Blink (which by the way I think is an excellent book) but in my opinion, that is the wrong comparison. This is a book about critical thinking, Blink is a book about intuitive thinking.

The path to superior thinking is using both sides of the coin.

This book is a great look at critical thinking particularly as it relates to may of the not-thought-through group think decisions that many people make.

This is a great book for breaking down the critical thinking process and encouraging people to start thinking again in an age where many would have us not stop and question the avalanche of messages we get on a daily basis.

Read this book and Blink, you'll be a better thinker.

Too long and sometimes inconsistent.
The author has some good points but he drags on for way too long. The book could have been easily shorter as he often enters in long winded descriptions - borderline rants - which add nothing to the points already expoused. I haven't yet read Blink!, so I cannot tell on whether he's correct or not in his assessment of the book. I do however feel strongly that this book is not immune from the typical polarization of much discourse in the US today. I share his dislike for "political correctness" when it becomes a hamper to the free flow and discussion of ideas, nonetheless his cartoonish depiction of the liberal left is a poor service to the critical thinking he aims to promote. He fails his own litmus tests. A couple of examples. He's extremely critical of global warming and says that the majority of scientist is unconvinced or not against it. Actually the majority of relevant scientist world wide is convinced that man made global warming is real although they may still disagree on the overall impact and best mitigation -if any - policy. Also he uses rethorical arguments which are the negation of critical thinking. Again in the case of global warming he criticizes those who "believe that carbon dioxide (a non pollutant) causes global warming". This is intellectually dishonest as it is meant to instill in the reader the equivalence non-pollutant=harmless. In other term since co2 is a not a pollutant - which is true - it cannot cause anything as dangerous a global warming is supposed to be. Too bad that pollution potential and ability to reflect electromagnetic radiation - and therefore have the potential for global warming - are absolutely unrelated. He's disonest because if he belives that co2 does not cause global warming, should argue that and not using unrelevant rethoric to bias the readers in a desired direction. That is a cheap trick that doesn't belongs to a book on critical thinking and demeans the whole argument he set forth to promote.
The author says rightly that while we all have our own ideology and our bias, critical thinking should allow us to see behind it and avoid ideology to become a screen that obfuscates our interpreation of the world. Sadly, I feel that several times he fail to heed his own advice and in doing so he's doing a disservice to his own message and several nonetheless relevant points raised by the book. Eventually once again those - like me - who are disenfranchised with the monopoly of debate held by the liberal left and the conservative right, will find scant comfort in reading this book.

Don't Be Fooled
Despite the title and the packaging, this book has little to do with critical thinking or with Malcolm Gladwell's book, BLINK. Former Washington Times columnist Michael LeGault's THINK is a thinly veiled rehash of familiar neo-con rants about the decline of American culture. The old villain in Allan Bloom's THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, relativism, is recast as impulse or emotion. Unfortunately, THINK really pales in contrast to Bloom's already deeply flawed book. In Bloom's CLOSING, there were at least conceivably real identifiable "villains" arguing for relativism. Here, you have the privilege of reading an entire book attacking non-existent "straw men." Ask yourself: who would actually suggest that we should make important decisions based solely on impulse or emotion?

Malcolm Gladwell? On the surface, he would appear to be the villain in the piece. But where in BLINK does Gladwell suggest anything like making decisions on impulse or emotion? Gladwell gives examples of where intuition seems to outperform the straight science (or where intuition can be effective and useful). But all the examples deal with professionals and experts, eg, art experts, firemen, policemen, doctors, etc. Their experience trains them to make fast decisions. This is not the same as making decisions based on impulse or emotion - not even close.

Experts can draw correct conclusions based on very small data sets. Look at Gladwell's discussion of the psychologist who was able to figure out which couples would eventually divorce by observing them for extremely short durations. Why? Well, a trained expert is able to recognize a significant pattern of behavior in that first minute or so. The expert can safely draw his conclusion based on a small sample b/c the rest of the data will likely be redundant. That is, the husband will be the same jerk at minute 30 as he was in minute 1. It's not that complicated.

LeGault takes a stand against irrational decision-making. Well, good for him, but who the hell takes a stand in favor of irrational choices? No one.

Really, his heroic stand is nothing more than his attempt to attribute reason and objectivity to his conservative agenda. And guess who gets to look nutty and irrational? Those wacky environmentalists, those leftist extremists (ala Noam Chomsky), etc. Our society is imperiled by emotional and impulsive liberals and environmentalists; our salvation is in the being objective and rational. And that surprisingly coincides with a conservative and libertarian agenda. Amazing.

Don't buy this book to look at where Gladwell's BLINK goes wrong. It's not a book about psychology or about critical reasoning. Read it if you want to jump back into the culture wars.