alcolm Gladwell, a slightly built, unlikely celebrity who looks more like an earnest schoolboy than a raging star speaker, theorizes that being short is probably as much of a handicap to corporate success as being a female or black.

"We have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like," he writes in his latest book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. "And the stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other considerations."

Gladwell, SHRM's keynote speaker today at 8:30 a.m., is a master at introducing novel ways of looking at how people make decisions. He's also the author of the best-seller The Tipping Point and has become a wildly popular business consultant and speaker who addresses subjects ranging from how executives make hiring decisions to how people make choices about whom to marry—in the blink of an eye.

He studied CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, for example, and learned that the overwhelming majority are just a shade under 6 feet tall. But, only about 14.5 percent of American men are 6 feet tall.

The engaging, 41-year-old sage is not only at center stage on the lecture circuit, he's also a sought-after consultant working for such companies as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Hewlett-Packard. Gladwell is a former business and science reporter for The Washington Post and now is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Some insights from Blink:

On learning to make better decisions
Gladwell believes that people can manage their unconscious reactions and teach themselves to sort through first impressions to "figure out which ones are important and which ones are screwing us up." No matter how much people like to cling to the idea that decision-making is the result of rational deliberation, he says that most of our thinking happens subconsciously in a split second.

The task of Blink "is to convince you of a simple fact: Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately."

On decision-making
He argues that many of the snap judgments people make are based on previously formed impressions that stem from subconscious biases and unconscious reactions. Once we become aware of this, Gladwell says, we can learn to listen to our "onboard computer," and know when to be wary of it. We can extract meaning from a "thin slice" of information.

Relying on the good judgment of employees is the key ingredient for a new kind of decisionmaking environment, he says. And it is judgment that companies should be looking for when interviewing job candidates. With the right people, companies can rid themselves of their obsession with data-driven decisions.

On going with your gut
Herman Miller did not heed market research when it created the Aeron chair, the company's best seller ever. Company execs stuck to their instincts and were able to change the customer’s notion of what a chair is supposed to look like.

To be successful, companies have to be willing to make that kind of mental leap, he says. It's "only by accepting the risk of failure (that a company will) ever hit a home run."

On hiring
Gladwell writes about Warren Harding: "... One of the worst presidents in American history," got the job not because he was smart, but because he appeared presidential. The way he looked—tall, handsome and distinguished— "carried so many powerful connotations that stopped the normal process of thinking dead in its tracks.

"The Warren Harding error is the dark side of rapid cognition," Gladwell notes.