Trở lại với ví dụ hôn nhân, Gladwell nói với làm thế nào một nhóm các nhà tâm lý học một số cặp vợ chồng video của Gottman và cho thấy họ nonexperts. Không có gì đáng ngạc nhiên, khả năng của các nonexperts để dự đoán kết quả là rất hạn chế. | 54 GREAT PEOPLE DECISIONS enormous opportunities for improvement in these decisions and I wanted to help others take advantage of those opportunities with or without our firm s professional help. Writing about the topic seemed to be the obvious way to go and I had chosen as my first priority to get an article published in the Harvard Business Review HBR generally considered the most influential business journal in the United States. Of course I knew that this would be an uphill slog. HBR s acceptance rate on unsolicited proposals ran at an infinitesimal 2 percent. I had never published anything anywhere up to that point. A good friend of mine who happens to be one of the world s bestselling business authors had recently shared with me the hurdles he had leaped over the previous 18 months working with HBR editors to shape and polish his piece which finally had been published. Back to the meeting The senior editor who had punctured my balloon began looking for a polite way to wrap up the conversation. Fighting for authorial survival I came back hard. I said forcefully that I strongly disagreed that my global experience told me that even the best organizations in the world made all sorts of mistakes when it came to people decisions. She wasn t impressed. I started citing examples both from my personal experience and from the public domain. None of these gambits worked. It became painfully clear that I was only treading water and I was failing to bring the editor around to my point of view. So I changed tactics. I asked her What about your own personal experience What about here at HBR It was like one of those moments in a Hollywood film from Way Back When when the clouds part and the column of sunlight breaks through and everyone gets dewy-eyed. I had touched a nerve The editor was a brilliant person who having graduated with high honors from a top MBA program had accumulated impressive experience in a top management consulting firm before joining HBR. Accepting my .
