April 30, 2008

Gladwell 3

Malcolm%20Gladwell.jpgFollowing in the wake of The Tipping Point and Blink, Little, Brown and Company has announced Malcolm Gladwell's third book. Entitled Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't, it is set to be released in November of this year. I haven't been able to track down much information about it online, but the publisher catalog reads:

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band. Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

The catalog also includes this intriguing excerpt from the book itself:

Outliers.gif

OUTLIERS is a book about success. It starts with a very simple question: what is the difference between those who do something special with their lives and everyone else? In OUTLIERS, we're going to visit a genius who lives on a horse farm in Northern Missouri. We're going to examine the bizarre histories of professional hockey and soccer players, and look into the peculiar childhood of Bill Gates, and spend time in a Chinese rice paddy, and investigate the world's greatest law firm, and wonder about what distinguishes pilots who crash planes from those who don't. And in examining the lives of the remarkable among us--the brilliant, the exceptional and the unusual--I want to convince you that the way we think about success is all wrong.

November can't come soon enough.

Posted by dylan at April 30, 2008 1:12 PM | TrackBack
Comments

The release is perfect for me considering the fact that my birthday is in November! It will definitely be on my wish list for my birthday this year.

Posted by: Brian Francis Hume at May 1, 2008 8:47 AM

I REALLY can't wait for this book to come out. I honestly wish it was out right now and I could buy it.
Definitely pre-ordering...

Posted by: BIanca at May 20, 2008 2:13 PM

This should make an interesting reading. I would very much like to compare what Malcolm Gladwell has to say vis-a-vis the view of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life"

Posted by: Udayan at May 28, 2008 5:46 AM

If Gladwell is writing about Gates then I wonder if he'll include Gary Kildall in his account.

Kildall was the inventor of CP/M, an operating system that by some accounts should have been the operating system for the first IBM PC. While there are conflicting accounts why Kildall's company Digital Research failed to close the deal, history tells us that Bill Gates licensed 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, rechristened it PC-DOS, thereby creating the foundation for what we now know as Microsoft. Kildall apparently never quite got over this, and apparently every new MSFT invention (Windows, Office, etc.) was an additional dagger through his heart.

Previous studies of genius suggest that we have gone through cycles ever since the Reformation: there are a series of inventions which lay the groundwork; young people, generally from smaller towns, are inspired by these inventions and move to larger city centers; they meet each other and start a firefly-like maelstrom of ideas and concepts; and from that both great innovators and almost-woulda-couldas are borne. When you look at the last three hundred years it is amazing to see how these cycles have played out: for example, the American Revolution and the French Revolution appear to be much more tightly related than one would initially surmise.

We often hear bromides that the enemy of great is good enough. It may be that when it comes to the success of Gates over Kildall, or Edison over Tesla, that the same killer instinct that propels us to creative genius, also drives us crazy by convincing us to overthink the market.

In my blog, I talk about such cycles of history and how the early creative burst that gave us television mirrors the development of the Internet, and how Twitter's woes had been presaged by CB radio:

http://connectme.typepad.com

Posted by: Brian Hayashi at June 28, 2008 12:48 AM

"...why Asians are good at math..."

Asians aren't _innately_ better at math than other groups. The latest studies indicate that Asians _lag_ _behind_ other groups as far as the genetic contribution to problem-solving is concerned.

Good news is that they make up for it by studying longer hours.

Posted by: tndal at June 28, 2008 11:13 AM

@Brian: This reminds me of the piece in Senge's The Fifth Discipline, where he talks about the DC-3 Dakota, and the 'component technologies' - the groundwork - that combined to make it one of the most successful airplanes ever. The point being is that those 'technologies' had been around for years, but some clever genius was able to combine them in new ways, or see an opportunity to 'glue' them together in an effective way to solve specific aerodynamic/economic issues.

In the same way, I guess successful people in Gladwell's take are those that can see those new combinations AND have the innate ability to execute a plan of action, a la Bossidy and Charan's book.

Another riff on this, is the ability to see figure/ground in the McLuhan sense...maybe I should turn this into a blog post :)

Posted by: Simon de Haast at June 28, 2008 12:20 PM

I love genius chasing and reading about success. It give me inspiration and hope, sort of like drinking, or religion. I think the pre-marketing of this book is pretty genius as well. I just ordered it. Nice job.

www.workbenchcreative.com

Posted by: greg Scott at June 28, 2008 2:24 PM

This book sounds absolutely ridiculous and I can't believe it is receiving such BS hype...

"It starts with a very simple question: what is the difference between those who do something special with their lives and everyone else?"

Just the way the promotional text is worded indicates it will be lopsided...the term "outliers" refers to people like the Beatles...it should not be describing people who do something "special" (as defined by Gladwell as $).

Does Gladwell consider writing BS business books to be 'something special with his life' ?

Posted by: elliott johnson at June 29, 2008 1:15 PM

The University of Minnesota has already published a lot of data on this issue as they had collected a lot of data over the years based on their IQ testing. (University of Indiana also has a lot of info on the subject). One can most of this information doing a google search-you don't need to wait until November for the book to come out. The University of Minnesota studies show that it isn't high IQ that makes one successful, but rather determination and persistence in following an idea or in pursuing an intellectual course of study. Persistence does indeed pay apparently. The issue is more complex than my quick post, persistence seems to be at the heart of success.

Posted by: Paul Mills at June 29, 2008 8:56 PM

@Elliott: the reason the book gets attention is not because of it's title or description, it's because Gladwell's previous two books are brilliant.

You can get an idea of what the book will be like here:

http://gladwell.com/2008/2008_05_12_a_air.html
http://gladwell.com/2007/2007_12_17_c_iq.html

/Gary

Posted by: Gary Meeg at June 30, 2008 5:15 AM

gladwell writes books that tease us into believing we can all know the secret of success. he rarely delivers anything worthwhile.

he did not invent the concept of the tipping point and it has already been proven wrong.

Posted by: ari goldberg at July 3, 2008 4:49 AM
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