SIMON CHEN says:
Very much alive. Much to a lot of people’s amazement. And still very, very effective. But with the volume of email now, and the relentless offensive activity of corporate and personal SPAM filters, the actual job of engagement and grabbing attention is getting harder.
From The Times (24 November):
The British subsidiary of the world’s biggest direct-selling group may be closed by the Government as a result of an investigation into its business practices, The Times has learnt.
Amway, which has 12,000 agents in Britain and worldwide sales of $6.4 billion (£3.1 billion), will face a High Court petition on Monday to wind up its activities.
The group, which arrived in Britain in 1973, has been accused of being more interested in selling motivational books, tapes and seminars to its sales staff than pushing its merchandise.
“In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative original thinker unless you can also sell what you create. Management cannot be expected to recognise a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesman.”
In the recent book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer makes the case for intuition.
Curiously, many assessments of the book took for granted that his arguments, familiar to readers of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, cut against conventional wisdom–that trusting intuition is, in fact, counterintuitive. As one friendly interviewer, casting Gigerenzer as a contrarian, put it: “In modern society, gut thinking has a bad reputation.”
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