MJ’s blog

Last week I read, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book: Outliers. As you might suspect it has much the same approach as his earlier books (The Tipping Point & Blink). His latest offering is about the nature of success – and, in typical Gladwell fashion, he details why we’ve got it wrong.

We like to believe that if you work hard success will come (the American dream), but Gladwell is proposing that our equation isn’t quite right. Maybe the people who have experienced incredible success (business professionals, intellectuals, athletes, rock stars, etc.) aren’t born with vastly superior abilities, they simply made more of the opportunities that they were given in their lives.

I think Gladwell is popular because he’s easy to read and he’s a good story teller (although at times a little repetitive). He’s generalist too – which I can certainly identify with – so he tends to paint with a very broad brush (e.g. one or two psychology studies must describe some meta-trend for the entire Western world). I’m sure that there are a considerable number of counterarguments to his thesis, but for me that doesn’t matter. Outliers actually got me thinking about some of the assumptions I’ve made about success, so in that sense it was a great read (a success?).

I suppose there is the temptation to be disappointed that the American dream may not be a reality, but I think there’s a reason for optimism too. We all are given opportunities – Gladwell is just arguing that it matters what you do with them.

As one of my colleagues asked me recently, “why bother reading The Wisdom of Crowds, the premise seems pretty obvious from the title, doesn’t it?” While it’s true that you can anticipate James Surowiecki’s argument, it doesn’t make the book any less timely. The claim is that given the right circumstances a group or crowd of people will outperform the smartest individuals in the group. The diversity of the group actually harnesses more information than any one person can contribute.

His examples include prediction markets, traffic networks, political ballots, and search engines. For me, the crux remains: it is the circumstances that matter. Given the wrong circumstances, the crowd can still perform miserably. As I found out, there is actually much more to this book than the title suggests. Besides, The Wisdom of Crowds made the Business Week bestseller list, the crowd can’t be wrong, can it?

Choice is good right? Er… um… yes? Our culture offers endless choice: strawberry jam, shampoo, used cars, schools, careers… You name it, there are more options than you ever dreamed of. We’re supposed to want such choice, to thrive on such choice, to be empowered by such choice – yet Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice counters our conventional thinking. The text is peppered with (sometimes simple) examples, anecdotal observation, and basic psychology to demonstrate how choice can overwhelm just as easily as it can empower.

Schwartz ends his book with some advice for coping with choice and managing stress associated with endless options. While this section is helpful, I thought this book was interesting mainly because it takes a moment to question the cultural notion that choice is always good. There are thousands of books to occupy your time, but maybe you should choose this one as a change of pace.