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Whether you've read Blink in its entirety, skimmed it, read last Sunday's New York Times Book Review, saw Gladwell in the current issue of Fast Company, or just hung around the water cooler, you've probably already made up your mind about its usefulness.

After all, The Tipping Point is a hard act to follow. Gladwell's infamous mavens and connectors became part of advertising lexicon and still continues to provide a theory and framework for consumer targeting. Blink, on the other hand, is less likely to make its way into an ad agency's pitch presentation, but still deserves shelf space.

Blink is about "how we think about thinking." Through a diverse set of case studies, Gladwell shows us the successes and failures of decisions that are made in an instant - "in the blink of an eye." In other words, what's happening in our brains pre-cognition ends up in an entirely different place after we process, perceive and interpret information.

In Blink, he argues that by distilling the first few seconds in which we interact with a person, product, or idea into what is useful information and what is misleading, we can learn to make better decisions (like deciding whether Blink is a success or failure without ever reading it).

Gladwell's gift lies in his ability to translate academic 'gobbly goop' into bite-size pieces for those of us less patient to do our homework. When he applies cognitive science to the everyday, he manages to make the complexity more manageable. He makes it easier for marketers to read culture.

But... is Blink useful?

At a recent San Francisco event we attended, Gladwell was quick to point out what mattered most to a room full of marketers - Chapter 5: The Right and Wrong Way to Ask People What They Want. This could have easily been re-titled, Why Focus Groups Suck. Nothing earth-shattering here, just a friendly reminder through all too familiar case studies (New Coke, The Aeron Chair) that a company can't generate new ideas in two hours with eight strangers and a 1-way mirror.

Yes, we know. But what we secretly desire is for someone to tell us how to sell that through to our clients so we can pull back on the default focus group. I want someone to write a book called, Being Brave in Marketing in a Risk-Averse Society.

From the perspective of those who have an insatiable appetite to understand and analyze cutlure, Blink is an interesting dive into, well...thinking. As a business how-to, it fails to deliver what The Tipping Point gave us - a foundation to argue why reaching certain consumers can turn an idea into a phenomenon.

Thought-provoking? Yes. New terms or ideas to import into Power Point? No. Have you just made up your mind on whether you'll read this book? Probably.