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About Louis Javell
Louis Javell serves as the Project Coordinator at Chicago-based restoration and catastrophe management firm Blackstone Restoration Group, Inc. Louis Javell was promoted to this position within three months of joining the company.
Louis Javell’s duties at Blackstone Restoration Group include managing the logistics of restoration projects while also ensuring that the requirements of the client, insurance company, and municipal codes are met. Louis Javell also interacts with clients and maintains accounts receivable and payable.
Affiliated with several professional organizations, Louis Javell is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the Better Business Bureau (BBB), and the National Association of The Remodeling Industry (NARI). Louis Javell is also a member of the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI).
Louis Javell attended Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, from 1990 until 1995. At Wayne State, Louis Javell studied accounting and received a Bachelor of Science, graduating with multiple scholarships as a dean’s list honoree. While studying, Louis Javell also organized a holiday charity fundraising event for children at St. John Hospital and Medical Center, sponsored by the Wayne State University School of Business Administration.
Louis Javell's Publications
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Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Louis Javell
December, 2010
By: Louis Javell
I deeply enjoy the work of Malcolm Gladwell, particularly his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Published in 2005, Blink includes a variety of disciplines and centers on what Gladwell calls “rapid cognition.” The book draws its title from the phrase “in the blink of an eye” and Gladwell describes the judgments we make within the first few seconds of encountering a subject, like the first thing that pops into your head when your friend calls and announces that he plans to get married. In Blink, Gladwell explores the cognitive activity during those few seconds. He seeks to evaluate the conclusions we come to within that short period of time and compares the quality of near instantaneous judgments to decisions made after long consideration. Though Gladwell honestly acknowledges and explores the cases wherein the judgments arising from rapid cognition turn out worse than carefully-thought-out conclusions, I found it astonishing and exhilarating to discover that, in many cases, split-second decisions turn out to be the best. While many people might want to apply the label “intuition” to the tendency for humans to judge accurately despite having little time for traditional thinking, Gladwell steadfastly refuses to adopt the term. Instead, he argues that the cognitive process that occurs during those two seconds serves as truly logical thinking, despite its extreme rapidity. Just because we are not as fully conscious of our thought processes during this spit-decision making as we are of slow, deliberate reasoning, does not mean that our cognitive process lacks rationality. Most of us grew up in a culture that encourages sustained, logical reasoning and careful consideration, but Gladwell presents many compelling examples of snap judgments consistently delivering superior results, as when some emergency room doctors in a Chicago hospital received instructions to gather only a minimum of critical information about patients, ignoring larger concerns such as medical history, when diagnosing chest pain. While most people would be shocked by such instructions and insist that more information can only help doctors to make accurate assessments of a patient’s condition, statistics show that this Chicago hospital improved its chest pain diagnosis success rate after adopting these measures. If you want to learn more about rapid cognition and read further startling examples of highly successful split-second decision making, I urge you to pick up Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. [www.gladwell.com/blink]
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