Malcolm Gladwell to Keynote Tableau Customer Conference in November

Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw, and staff writer for The New Yorker, will be speaking at our San Diego Customer Conference in November. We're thrilled - Gladwell is one of the most sought-after and highly lauded speakers out there.

If you've read his books or seen or heard him speak, you know he's provocative, funny and insightful.

Rather than try to describe why he makes a great speaker for our conference, I thought I'd share a few quotes that demonstrate how he'll add a relevant and interesting point of view to our conference.

• “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”
• “We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.”
• “Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.”
• “Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.”
• “We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken.”
• “We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it...We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible an depending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world."
• “There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.”

We put a good amount of effort into picking all of our speakers for our conference. Sometimes unexpected things happen (e.g., cancelling Jonah Lehrer) that give us the possibility to aim higher (e.g., getting Malcolm Gladwell). If you're keeping track, you know that we've still got one more keynote to announce. Thanks for the great suggestions. Stay tuned...

And if you're not registered, get registered! Tickets are going fast. We're expecting a sell-out crowd.