The Other Revolutionary Malcolm: Malcolm Gladwell and Winning Uneven Fights

Malcolm Gladwell will have a new book out this fall, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. 

Here's the bumph from his publisher Little, Brown. "Malcolm Gladwell,...

uncovers the hidden rules that shape the balance between the weak and the mighty, the powerful and the dispossessed. Gladwell examines the battlefields of Northern Ireland and Vietnam, takes us into the minds of cancer researchers and civil rights leaders, and digs into the dynamics of successful and unsuccessful classrooms–all in an attempt to demonstrate how fundamentally we misunderstand the true meaning of advantages and disadvantages."

Sounds fascinating, and right up Gladwell's alley, which usually involves a well-researched message that is aimed in part at the business world, but which can be read in a most subversive manner. 

Maybe it’s not surprising that someone like him who had a poster of Ronald Reagan in  his dorm room at the University of Toronto is making a lot of money today. His last book Outliers: The Story of Success sold for around $4 million, while it and his two others The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference  and  Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking  were all  on The Globe and Mail and The New York Times best seller lists for months.  He reportedly makes $30,000 a pop for telling conferences of business types how to improve performance and foster innovation, too.  Nevertheless if you read just a little beneath the surface of the books and his articles in The New Yorker, you’ll see that he’s really calling for society-wide change nearly far reaching as what that other Malcolm, Malcolm X, advocated.
 
The Tipping Point started out as in The New Yorker as “The Cool Hunt,”  an examination of how trends start, how styles race through society like epidemics.  “A must read for any marketing professional" according its lead review on Amazon.com,  the book can be read as a guide to getting people to buy or to act: small groups work best, pick plugged-in spokesmen, work to make your message “sticky.”

Blink considers how we’re hard-wired to react instantaneously, which was great for our ancestors back on the savannah when a lion might suddenly roar nearby. In our fast-paced life today that’s not so good: culturally-engrained prejudices can trump reasoned evaluations in tight situations. Gladwell, whose father is a white Englishman and whose mother is an African-Jamaican, says the idea for the book came to him when he grew an Afro and started getting ticketed for speeding.  Social contexts should be changed so we’re not forced to rely on first impressions, he writes.  That’s good for creativity—and also social justice.

 The Outliers argues that success itself is based on a mixture of chance and hard work.  Change the rules to make the playing field more level—don’t throw all the kids born in a calendar year together when they start a sport, for example, because that gives the ones born in January a big leg up over those born in December.  Then tweak the cultural context to value hard work, and you increase the chance of success exponentially.  The result will be more “outliers,” people whose accomplishment is extraordinarily high, Gladwell says.

He, of course, is an outlier, and the story he tells about his own family in Outliers illustrates nicely his arguments.  But he could also  point to a man who called himself an outlier long before Gladwell’s book was published: Barak Obama (p. 18 in the Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.  If you look at Obama and his electrifying campaigns for the US presidency, you see Gladwell’s fingerprints everywhere—the kitchen meetings, the great slogans, the hard work, the hope held out.  Whether the  president has read Gladwell’s writing himself isn’t clear, but you can bet the farm his staff has.

Which probably makes Gladwell smile as he rakes in the royalties and the speaking fees.    The marketers and business types may not have noticed, but he’s intended a social revolution all along  “The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible,” he writes on his website. “With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.”

 Right on, Malcolm!  Can't wait to read what he has to say this time.

The photo, BTW, is of the high point of his running career when he beat Dave Read, "the greatest Canadian miler of his generation" in finals of the 1500 meters at the Ontario 14-year-old championships. Gladwell writes "I "retired" from competitive running a year later, in large part because I realized that the particular statistical fluke represented by me beating Dave Reid was unlikely to ever be repeated. "

Obviously he's a man who's been considering the odds and what it takes to be successful for a long time.