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: #166440 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-24
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
"[For] those concerned about America losing touch with its intellectual traditions . . . Think! could not have emerged at a better time."

-- The Washington Times

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 exten...

Customer Reviews

It could have been a good book...
The right person could have taken this theme and written a really valuable and useful book. Legault's attempt is a poorly organized mish-mash tainted by his own biases. Someone on the political left could have written a book with the same flaws and with mirror image biases and blind spots. And it would have been just as bad.

Legault makes the case for critical thinking and this is good, but then he shows himself to be blinded by his ideology.

Enhance creativity and improve reasoning
"We have become a society in which the first instinct is not to think clearly, it is the protection of one's backside "(pg 29) The book explores why the use of reason is declining and the ones to blame for this.
Despite Blink being a best-seller, and having great reviews, I was never persuaded to read it. However, Think! caught my attention and I am pleased to have read it. I can't comment on the comparisons Le Gault makes to Blink, but I recommend this book to those who have and have not read Blink. Le Gault is a master of words and a clever thinker. The majority of his arguments are valid and the ones you may disagree with just open the door to insightful thinking. This book will make you feel guilty about watching TV and engaging in non-intellectual activities or "passive entertainment" as he calls it but nonetheless it will encourage you to become a critical thinker. Le Gault is definitely a conservative and expresses his right-wing views throughout the book but after all, aren't challenging views necessary to become critical thinkers?
"It is not luxury, or corruption, or invasion per se that ultimately threatens and weakens a society, but moral decline, spiritual decline, ennui, or some sort of intellectual lethargy". (pg321)

Don't Blink, Think!
In light of the present housing crisis and pending recession, this book could not have been written at a better time. Obviously upset at the flawed, subjectivist logic of Malcolm Gladwell, Michael LeGault has responded in kind with this well-written book.

Essentially, LeGault believes that the reason why people in the West are in trouble is due to their inability to or unwillingness to think their actions through before deciding on their course of action.

A prime example of people not thinking their actions through until its too late is the housing slump and pending recession. If people had taken the time to think and use logic before signing on to the mortgages with which many are now in default, the so-called housing crisis and recession we are seeing would have never happened. Now, as a result of illogical behavior, the taxpayers may soon be looted to bail these people out or the lenders will be forced to freeze their actions on people in default of their mortgages.

What many people need to start doing is re-learning how to think and stop conducting themselves in a subjectivist, touchy-feely manner. Unfortunately, many times it takes things to get bad before people realize the mistakes they make. This methodology needs to change and I believe it can and will since people mostly learn from their mistakes.

This is not to say people should never take risks or that feelings are irrelevant. However, an objective, consistent, logical and well-thought out course of action is needed before taking major decisions in one's life. Logic grounded in subjectivism, which is what Gladwell advocates, is nice on paper but is lousy in practice.