Blinking at Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point

An old joke defines a consultant as someone who borrows your watch and then charges you to tell you what time it is. Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has raised this racket to a new level: In three recent best-selling works of pop sociology, he has persuaded thousands of people to pay him $25 or so to tell them things they already know.

In The Tipping Point (2000), Gladwell informed us that little changes can have big effects. That is, when small numbers of people start behaving differently, that behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or "tipping point" is reached (for example, when enough people buy The Tipping Point to land it on the best-seller lists, everyone else will buy it, too).

In Blink (2005), Gladwell concluded that less input is often better than more— that a single bright individual's gut reactions yield better results than the collective wisdom of a large and unwieldy committee whose minds are cluttered with technology, bureaucratic hierarchy and best-selling books by New Yorker staff writers. For example, a committee of famous art scholars failed to identify a forged painting even after weeks of meticulous inspection, whereas a single great art detective spotted the fraud in an instant (an instant that excludes, of course, the several preceding decades he had spent marinating himself in the company of famous art scholars).

Bill Gates in junior high school

Gladwell's latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, is surely his most valuable contribution to date. Here he makes the remarkable discovery that overachievers like Mozart and Bill Gates were not self-made men, but enjoyed special advantages of background, education and just being in the right place at the right time. In other words, no one makes it alone!

Bill Gates, for example, had the good fortune to attend junior high school in 1971, at the dawn of the computer age— and not just any junior high school, but one of the few that actually had a computer on the premises. So you see, Gates had a head start in his chosen career as a software gazillionaire, whereas Barack Obama, a man with a very high IQ, never got anywhere because he lacked good timing and the supporting network of a privileged family.

The tragedy of Martin Van Buren

This strikes me as a valid point, although Gladwell could have provided stronger examples. Consider the poignant story of the multi-talented Martin Van Buren, who grew up on a farm in upstate New York in the late 18th Century. From his earliest years, Van Buren's sports-crazy father made him spend several hours each day throwing a ball at a target painted on the side of a barn. As a result, by his teens Van Buren possessed a blazing fastball, a deceptive curve, a wicked slider, and several varieties of spitters (which hadn't yet been outlawed). Unfortunately, Major League Baseball hadn't yet been organized; indeed, the game of baseball itself hadn't even been invented. Consequently, young Van Buren reached maturity without a marketable skill and was forced to enter politics in order to survive.

By contrast, the young Vladimir Lenin, as a boy, dreamed of becoming a Communist revolutionary and dictator of a very large country. In his case, all the necessary career building blocks were already in place: Karl Marx had written his manifesto a generation before Lenin was born, and when the Russian Revolution came along, Lenin just happened to be living there. Do you think anyone today would have heard of Lenin had he grown up in, say, Sweden?

Jesus vs. Osama bin Laden: Success and failure

The effect of background, timing and luck is even more telling when we compare the careers of aspiring messiahs. Both Jesus of Nazareth and Osama bin Laden were passionate, charismatic and forceful. Yet one man achieved his ambition while the other failed. Why?

In retrospect we can see that Jesus enjoyed certain advantages— "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky," as Gladwell puts it. Although Jesus came from an ordinary family, his parents had the good sense to make sure that he was born in a manger— on Christmas Eve, yet. And his antagonists, the Romans, obligingly granted Jesus a very conspicuous martyrdom that was easily replicated in small trinkets people could wear around their necks. Had Jesus preached his gospel in, say, colonial Philadelphia, the Quakers would have sentenced him to six months' community service, and that's the last anyone would have heard of him.

Osama bin Laden, by contrast, had more money and relatives than he knew what to do with— big drawbacks for a potential messiah. To fulfill the major messianic prerequisite— martyrdom— Osama launched an attack on the greatest military power on earth, which promptly vowed to catch him and kill him, just as he had hoped. How was bin Laden to know that this satanic power was actually run by bunglers and incompetents? So instead of being spectacularly blown to kingdom come, Osama spent a few years in the headlines and then just sort of faded away, to the point where today his videotapes are remaindered on eBay.

You might say he missed his tipping point. Or blinked. Gladwell will doubtless advise us in his next best seller.





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