Dear Bob ...I read and liked Blink [see this week's Keep the Joint Running, "Don't Blink at Blink"]. I have corresponded with Mr. Gladwell for several years (e-mail). I get him and get this life of IT too. Years ago, I would have saved an agency countless work and untold dollars by buying Oracle instead of Ingres. I should have stayed with an AS400 platform 2 years ago instead of recommending UNIX. I would Dear Bob …I read and liked Blink [see this week’s Keep the Joint Running, “Don’t Blink at Blink“]. I have corresponded with Mr. Gladwell for several years (e-mail). I get him and get this life of IT too.Years ago, I would have saved an agency countless work and untold dollars by buying Oracle instead of Ingres. I should have stayed with an AS400 platform 2 years ago instead of recommending UNIX. I would have never worked for a dot.com. I would have left MicroAge the very first time I heard rumors of financial misdeeds instead of two years later. I would have never sold my Honeywell or GE stock. The thing is that the older we get, the more convinced we are that what we know to be to be true cannot be true any longer. We don’t trust our gut; we listen to experts on everything from personnel to accounting packages. Oh no, we need to act first from what we really know in our gut. Warren Harding notwithstanding, I’m not utterly convinced that we really deal honestly with ourselves about what we know and what we feel.We act on what we think other people know and how we think they feel about us. Mr. Gladwell’s field is not IT either, but a funny kind of marketing. What he says in person is that no one reads or gets into the deep notions about facts unless it is 100% necessary. It applies to passing information along in IT. I have given Blink to lots of people to jolt their thinking. I want them, unless they are going to be 100% interested, to “blink” and that’s it. When it comes to making a decision, make it. If you haven’t prepared yourself all along for the decisions that face you, you are only running on luck anyway. It’s something I learned a long time ago from a grand old lady of Shakespearean studies. She used to say if we could not party hearty the night before her final, we couldn’t pass it. We never knew what she would ask and a 3-4 hour essay exam isn’t a walk in the park. However, if a student had attended class, read the tremendous amounts of material and spent 16 weeks in study, it was easy to get a top grade.If when someone asks you what you would recommend on a given IT issue, you cannot answer in a blink, you need to not be a part of the decision process. You are already too late to be prepared. You will inevitably “blink” but say you spent time making the decision and in deep study.You often remind me of those Puritans who said “hard equals good.” It doesn’t but there is something terribly American in thinking that it does. The book is only a book and makes a lot of people wake up. It is a counterbalance to folks like Peter Drucker. Blink more.– BlinkerDear Blinker … I guess you and I are destined to disagree on this one.As a consultant, if a client asks, “should I go with Oracle or DB2?” I’m comfortable suggesting they flip a coin, not because Blinking is the answer but because whichever one they choose they’ll find things they like and things they don’t like. For the most part, either DBMS will work in a given situation.But, if they ask me, which ERP suite they should buy, a Blink response would simply disqualify me as a useful advisor. ERP suites come packaged with assumptions about business processes; without careful analysis of how well each package’s assumptions fit the realities of the individual client, the selection is almost certain to be poor, wasting huge amounts of money. I’ve been asked whether the current head of IT is the right person to take the company forward. If I answered in a Blink I’d ignore just about everything important about the person – for example, his or her credibility in different sectors of the business; what the IT staff think; technical knowledge; leadership ability. What I’d be basing my decision on is dress, haircut, firmness of handshake, voice, and their reaction to entrusting their career to the reactions of an outside consultant.I’d say that if you’ve prepared yourself fully for the decisions you face, it’s possible you aren’t putting yourself in harm’s way enough. If you aren’t constantly stretching, it’s possible you’ll be able to be right by Blinking.But you won’t be going anywhere interesting as you do. Just my opinion.– Bob ——– Technology Industry