Did Malcolm Gladwell Cause Lehman to Fail?

University of San Diego professor Frank Partnoy, in an interview about delaying decision-making, said recently:

I interviewed a number of former senior executives at Lehman Brothers and discovered a remarkable story. Lehman Brothers had arranged for a decision-making class in the fall of 2005 for its senior executives. It brought four dozen executives to the Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue and brought in leading decision researchers, including Max Bazerman from Harvard and Mahzarin Banaji, a well-known psychologist. For the capstone lecture, they brought in Malcolm Gladwell, who had just published Blink, a book that speaks to the benefits of making instantaneous decisions and that Gladwell sums up as “a book about those first two seconds.” Lehman’s president Joe Gregory embraced this notion of going with your gut and deciding quickly, and he passed copies of Blink out on the trading floor.

The executives took this class and then hurriedly marched back to their headquarters and proceeded to make the worst snap decisions in the history of financial markets. I wanted to explore what was wrong with that lesson and to create something that would be the course that Wall Street should have taken and hopefully will take.

Felix Salmon wrote to Gladwell to ask him if he thought he had effectively caused the recession. He replied:

First, Blink was not a book about the benefits of making instantaneous decisions. It was a book examining the power of instantaneous decisions–and a good half of the book (the last half) is devoted to all the ways that snap judgements can go awry. (The last two chapters, for example, are about how gut reactions caused the Diallo shooting and how gut reactions resulted in women being discriminated against in orchestras). The talk I gave to Lehman was along those lines: it was a talk, arising out of the book, about the “fragility” of gut decisions–and about how if they are to be useful they have to be defended against bias and corruption. Of the many journalists who have reported on that talk, you are the first to actually ask me what I spoke about. The others, I suppose, just made an instantaneous decision about what I must have said.