Something profound has happened to us as a nation. Our challenge now is whether we make a healthy adaptation or an unhealthy one.  We can wait for the crisis to pass and go back to business as usual or we can seize the opportunity to change the fundamental way our system works.  
 

 
Malcolm Gladwell is on a roll.  All three of his books have been New York Times number one best sellers, and his latest, Outliers:The Story of Success (Little, Brown & Company, 2008) may be his most ambitious and thought provoking effort to date. Like The Tipping Point (2000) and Blink (2005), Gladwell has that rare ability to make us see the world a little differently.
 
While Outliers is getting most of the attention these days, I went back to re-read Blink and found it particularly resonant for the way we think about opportunity in business. Blink is largely about a concept called thin-slicing. Gladwell defines it as "the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience."