Malcolm Gladwell
Author of four bestsellers, What the Dog Saw, Outliers, Blink and The Tipping Point
are taking the business world by storm.
Phenomenal best-selling author.
Malcolm Gladwell has an incomparable gift for interpreting new ideas in the social sciences and making them understandable, practical and valuable to business and general audiences alike.
-
He’s become so successful at this that, in 2005, Time Magazine named Malcolm one of its 100 Most Influential People. He was chosen for Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers 2010 and 2009 list and is ranked number ten on The Thinkers 50 2011. And Newsweek chose him for the "Top 10 New Thought Leaders of the Decade."
Malcolm has a new book coming out 3 Oct 2013 called David And Goliath, in which he explores the concept of the underdog. What makes for a successful underdog? And why are underdogs so successful? David and Goliath has all the hallmarks of a classic Gladwell book: arresting, thought-provoking examples, insightful analysis, and a ground-breaking new perspective on something all around us.
Malcolm's previous book, Outliers, has had an even greater impact than his first two books, generating lively debates about the nature of success in fields from education and music to sports and business. In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm suggests an exciting new approach to helping people succeed by using the factors that really foster success. Outliers debuted as a #1 bestseller for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, Barnes & Noble, and Publisher's Weekly.
He is the author of two other New York Times #1 bestsellers—The Tipping Point and Blink.
-
With his first book Malcolm embedded the concept of The Tipping Point in our everyday vocabulary and gave organizations new tools for understanding how trends work.
In Blink he analyzed first impressions—the snap judgments that we all make unconsciously and instinctively—and he explores how we can master this important aspect of successful decision-making.
-
He was previously a reporter for the Washington Post.
Outliers
The secrets of success can be decoded—and copied and reconstructed.
Why are people successful?
In his stunning book, the bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Blink reveals the real—and mostly overlooked—secrets to extraordinary success. As in his earlier books, Gladwell builds his case with stories of real people, brilliantly told from an all-new perspective.
He reveals that we pay far too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where successful people are from: their culture, their family, and their generation. Gladwell explains what Bill Gates, the Beatles and other world-class successes have in common, how culture affects their careers and performance, why Asians are good at math and what drives the so-called “achievement gap” in American education.
Along the way, Gladwell overturns many of our conventional notions about what makes a person successful. He creates an entirely new model for nurturing success and suggests ways to give people the best opportunities to succeed.
Because we so profoundly personalize success, we squander human potential. We miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
In the Blink of an eye, the unconscious mind decides lots of (often very important) things for us without our even knowing what we know or how we know it. In his bestseller Blink, Malcolm describes how we make these decisions—both the good ones and the bad—why some people are so much better at it than others, and how we can improve our skill at interpreting these details correctly to become better decision makers—in our homes, in our offices, and in everyday life.
Blink examines the smallest components of our experience, the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that bubble up whenever we meet a new person, or confront a complex situation, or have to make a decision under conditions of stress. If we paid more attention to these fleeting moments, it would change how we do a lot of things. If you combined all these little changes together, you’d end up with a different and happier world.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference
Over 400 weeks on the The New York Times bestsellers list.
The Tipping Point is a book about change, in particular, a book that presents a new way of understanding why change happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it so often does. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us.
In The Tipping Point, Malcolm describes how trends work and he helps companies apply this knowledge to their own business strategies. Using the principles of epidemiology—the study of epidemics—to understand the movement of ideas, he explains how trends start and spread and he offers tools for igniting, steering and/or sustaining the trends— "positive epidemics" —that matter to his audiences.
Credentials
- Staff writer for The New Yorker
- Author, The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw
- Member of the Order of Canada
- Honorary doctorate of letters, University of Toronto
- Former science and medicine writer for The Washington Post
- Winner, National Magazine Award
Picasso vs Cezanne
Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso revolutionized the world of art, but they represent two distinctly different ideas on how to innovate. Picasso was a conceptual innovator who revolutionized art with transformative ideas, whereas Cezanne used a trial-and-error approach and worked slowly. Malcolm applies this intriguing paradigm to business and business problems, with his usual insight and eloquence.
The grand idea often has more appeal and seems to promise quick results. But many problems are just too complex for a grand idea to work. Healthcare reform, for instance, is a Cezanne problem, not a Picasso problem. It cries out for experiments that will help us decide what works.
Puzzle or Mystery?
Puzzles can be solved if you have the right information. Mysteries, on the other hand, remain mysteries no matter how much information you have. They require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, not a simple, factual answer.
These differences matter. If you approach a problem as a puzzle, you are likely to seek more information, but if it’s a mystery, that will only make matters worse. You will want to make qualitative changes in your approach instead: improve your analysis, cross-fertilize, employ more thoughtful and skeptical people. Accountability works differently, too: puzzles come to satisfying conclusions and if it goes wrong, blame the one who withheld information. Mysteries sometimes don’t get answered at all and it can be hard to tell who’s responsible.
Some examples: The whereabouts of Osama bin Laden is a puzzle; so was Watergate. Enron, on the other hand, wasn’t a puzzle, as the prosecutors in the case against its principals claimed. It was a mystery—no Deep Throat, no cover-up, there was too much information available. Likewise, the motivations of the perpetrators of 9/11 are a mystery.
~ Fast Company