Gladwell's thoughts on being blamed for Lehman's failure:
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.
The Dish 