The title of Gladwell’s previous book, The Tipping Point, quickly made its way into the business lexicon. That highly entertaining book combined engaging writing with genuine insights and startling examples. His new book, Blink, is sometimes as entertaining, but weaker in content. Gladwell has once again coined catchy terms, such as “rapid cognition,” “thin-slicing,” the “Warren Harding error,” and “momentary autism.” These label ideas surrounding his central concern, which revolves around the strengths and limits of snap judgments, or judgments made in the blink of an eye.

Gladwell wants to convince us that decisions made very rapidly can be just as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. This perspective structures the book, along with two accompanying concerns: figuring out when we can and cannot trust our instincts, and convincing the reader that rapid cognition and first impressions can be educated and controlled. Blink argues that we make most of our judgments in the first two seconds of looking. In that, Gladwell is probably right. The tougher task lies in demonstrating the superiority of this approach. While he gestures at the research into the “adaptive unconscious” to support the general reliability of rapid cognition, Blink provides far less background, less theoretical sensemaking, and less support than Gary Klein’s Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions.

Sometimes the book is frustrating. The introduction is a case in point. Gladwell introduces us to the power of blinking by relating the case of the acquisition by the Getty Museum of a type of Greek statue called a kouros. After extensive forensic investigation by geologist Stanley Margolis, the museum concluded that the kouros was genuine. At the same time the institution had become uneasy because of a growing number of instant judgments by statue experts who sensed something was wrong. In the end, the expert glances turned out to be correct.

Before the mistake in acquisition had been confirmed, the Getty’s curator had believed that scientific opinion is more objective than esthetic judgments. “Now I realize that I was wrong,” he says. This assertion confuses objectivity with accuracy. It also ignores the possibility that the Getty’s scientific expert didn’t do his job terribly well. In the end, the episode might show that the Getty—and other organizations—could benefit by making more use of rapid cognition by true experts in situations where it can be applied, but it does nothing to demonstrate that more deliberate decision processes should be abandoned.

Blink is an entertaining read, but executives will be able to extract more practically applicable information from Klein’s book, mentioned above, along with other sources that you can find related to this commentary.