What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures QUOTES

41 " Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind of writing that you’ll find in this book, anyway. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head — even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’d really like to be. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

42 " Modern systems, Perrow argues, are made up of thousands of parts, all of which interrelate in ways that are impossible to anticipate. Given that complexity, he says, it is almost inevitable that some combinations of minor failures will eventually amount to something catastrophic. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

43 " There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

44 " What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

45 " A typical five-year-old consumes about 60 percent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

46 " self-consciousness is the enemy of “interestingness. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

47 " You’re in a situation where you have two very important responsibilities that both have a deadline that is impossible to meet. You cannot accomplish both. How do you handle that situation? "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

48 " They believed that it was a mistake to separate product development from marketing, as most of their contemporaries did, because to them the two were indistinguishable: the object that sold best was the one that sold itself. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

49 " Popeils had been doing for most of the century, and what all the experts said couldn’t be done in the modern economy. He dreamed up something new in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

50 " You have to explain the invention to customers — not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

51 " to succeed in the world he could not be just a dog whisperer. He needed to be a people whisperer. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

52 " The report gives the strong impression that if you fired those forty-four cops, the LAPD would suddenly become a pretty well-functioning police department. But the report also suggests that the problem is tougher than it seems, because those forty-four bad cops were so bad that the institutional mechanisms in place to get rid of bad apples clearly weren’t working. If you made the mistake of assuming that the department’s troubles fell into a normal distribution, you’d propose solutions that would raise the performance of the middle — like better training or better hiring — when the middle didn’t need help. For those hard-core few who did need help, meanwhile, the medicine that helped the middle wouldn’t be nearly strong enough. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

53 " I’ve tested half of them. And of the number I’ve tested I have disqualified one pit bull because of aggressive tendencies. They have done extremely well. They have a good temperament. They are very good with children.” It can even be argued that the same traits that make the pit bull so aggressive toward other dogs are what make it so nice to humans. “There are a lot of pit bulls these days who are licensed therapy dogs,” the writer Vicki Hearne points out. “Their stability and resoluteness make them excellent for work with people who might not like a more bouncy, flibbertigibbet sort of dog. When pit bulls set out to provide comfort, they are as resolute as they are when they fight, but what they are resolute about is being gentle. And, because they are fearless, they can be gentle with anybody.” Then which are the pit bulls that get into trouble? “The ones that the legislation is geared toward have aggressive tendencies that are either bred in by the breeder, trained in by the trainer, or reinforced in by the owner,” Herkstroeter says. A mean pit bull is a dog that has been turned mean, by selective breeding, by being cross-bred with a bigger, human-aggressive breed like German shepherds or Rottweilers, or by being conditioned in such a way that it begins to express hostility to human beings. A pit bull is dangerous to people, then, not to the extent that it expresses its essential pit bull-ness but to the extent that it deviates from it. A pit-bull ban is a generalization about a generalization about a trait that is not, in fact, general. That’s a category problem. 4. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

54 " ...all of us, when it comes to constructing our sense of self, borrow bits and pieces, ideas and phrases, rituals and products from the world around us — over-the-counter-ethnicities that shape, in some small but meaningful way, our identities "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

55 " Specht says, "It meant I know you think I'm worth it , because that's what it was with the guys in the room. They were going to take a woman and make her the object. I was defensive and defiant. I thought, I'll fight you. Don't you tell me what I am. You've been telling me what I am for generations. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

56 " a group of people were told to imagine that they had $300. They were then given a choice between (a) receiving another $100 or (b) tossing a coin, where if they won they got $200 and if they lost they got nothing. Most of us, it turns out, prefer (a) to (b). But then Kahneman and Tversky did a second experiment. They told people to imagine that they had $500 and then asked them if they would rather (c) give up $100 or (d) toss a coin and pay $200 if they lost and nothing at all if they won. Most of us now prefer (d) to (c). "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

57 " I know how to ask for the money.’ And that’s the secret to the whole damn business. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

58 " Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

59 " The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

60 " S.J.’s second wife, Eloise, decided to have him killed, so she hired two hit men — one of whom, aptly, went by the name of Mr. Peeler. At the time, she was living at the Popeil estate in Newport Beach with her two daughters and her boyfriend, a thirty-seven-year-old machinist. When, at Eloise’s trial, S.J. was questioned about the machinist, he replied, “I was kind of happy to have him take her off my hands.” That was vintage S.J. But eleven months later, after Eloise got out of prison, S.J. married her again. That was vintage S.J., too. As a former colleague of his puts it, “He was a strange bird. "

― Malcolm Gladwell , What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures