{"id":4341,"date":"2011-03-01T20:38:46","date_gmt":"2011-03-01T10:38:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=4341"},"modified":"2011-03-01T20:45:06","modified_gmt":"2011-03-01T10:45:06","slug":"tfw-book-club-what-the-dog-saw-by-malcolm-gladwell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=4341","title":{"rendered":"What The Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When I was visiting some friends in London last year, a boyfriend of a friend recommended an author to me by the name of Malcolm Gladwell.\u00a0 At the time, I was appallingly drunk and had to ask him to repeat the name of the author no less than seven times.\u00a0 After that, it must have stayed in some dormant part of my memory.\u00a0 About five months later, I was browsing a bookstore back in Brisbane and spotted the author’s name which triggered the memory.<\/p>\n

I’m glad that guy, who’s name I forget, told me about Malcolm Gladwell because this was one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had in ages.\u00a0 I talk about excerpts from the book all the time and it’s challenged me to rethink and reassess how I approach my job.\u00a0 How many books can you say that about?<\/p>\n

What The Dog Saw<\/em> [2009] is a series of articles published originally in The New Yorker <\/em>by this guy Gladwell.\u00a0 The articles are divided into three subsets.\u00a0 Obsessives, Pioneers, and other varieties of Minor Genius<\/em> studies various people who excel in their line of work.\u00a0 Theories, Predictions, and Diagnoses<\/em> is a pretty self-explanatory section that explores a range of true stories that are thematically tied together by concepts of hypothesis.\u00a0 Lastly, Personality, Character, and Intelligence<\/em> explores various sociology topics such as talent recruitment and personality profiling.<\/p>\n

Some of the content in this last section of the book around job interviews and developing people’s skillsets were directly relatable to my line of work as a people manager.\u00a0 That said, I found the whole book to be a wonderful assortment of concepts that challenge the way you think.\u00a0 Gladwell’s study of people who achieve great things or unusual real life events that warrant exploring in depth are not groundbreaking ideas as such.\u00a0 What makes his writing so good however is that he has a knack for articulating the mentality and thought process behind ‘out-of-the-box’ behaviour which can be very difficult to do.\u00a0 And he achieves it using clear and relatable language that makes subject matter as obtuse as ketchup taste testing and hair dye advertising seem interesting and relatable.<\/p>\n

You don’t actually have to take my work on how good this book is.\u00a0 You can read all the chapters from the book online.\u00a0 For free.\u00a0 Gladwell’s archive of The New Yorker<\/em> articles can be found here<\/a>.\u00a0 You can find the aforementioned ketchup article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I look forward to reading more of Gladwell’s work in future.\u00a0 For now however, I’m moving onto Water For Elephants<\/em> a book by Sara Gruen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was visiting some friends in London last year, a boyfriend of a friend recommended an author to me by the name of Malcolm Gladwell.\u00a0 At the time, I was appallingly drunk and had to ask him to repeat the name of the author no less than seven times.\u00a0 After that, it must have …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,230],"tags":[2399,798,799],"class_list":["post-4341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-book-club","tag-book-club","tag-malcolm-gladwell","tag-what-the-dog-saw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4341"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4347,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4341\/revisions\/4347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}