As seen in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink--the modern, groundbreaking
classic on effective decision making.
How people really make decisions: drawing on prior experience and
using a combination of intuition and analysis.
We have all seen images of firefighters rescuing people from burning
buildings and paramedics treating bombing victims. How do these
individuals make the split-second decisions that save lives? Most
studies of decision making, based on artificial tasks assigned in
laboratory settings, view people as biased and unskilled. In this modern
classic, Gary A. Klein proposes a naturalistic approach to decision
making, which views people as gaining experience that then enables them
to use a combination of intuition and analysis to make decisions. To
illustrate this approach, Klein tells stories of people--from pilots to
chess masters--acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure,
high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions.
Since its publication, Sources of Power has been enormously
influential. The book has sold more than 50,000 copies, has been
translated into six languages, has been cited in professional journals
that range from Journal of Marketing Research to Journal of Nursing,
and is mentioned by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. Author Gary Klein has
collaborated with Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and served on a team
that redesigned the White House Situation Room to support more effective
decision making. The model of decision-making Klein proposes in the book
has been adopted in many fields, including law enforcement training and
petrochemical plant operation.
