Malcolm Gladwell is possibly one of the most famous journalists in the US. It's not surprising then that his latest work tries to explain the very nature of success, writes CONN CORRIGANin New York
MALCOLM GLADWELL says that the phrase "I like to tell intellectual adventure stories" best describes his work. Two of these stories, The Tipping Point, published in 2000, and Blink, from 2005, have sold millions of copies and lead to him being placed on Timemagazine's 100 Most Influential People issue in 2005. Now, with his new book Outliers: The Story of Success- which New Yorkmagazine reports earned him a fee rumoured to be $4 million - Gladwell has embarked on his latest intellectual adventure.
In The Tipping Point, Gladwell used sociology and epidemiology to look at certain patterns and trends. Why, he asked, did Hush Puppies suddenly become popular in New York in the 1990s, and why did crime suddenly drop in the same city in the late 1990s? In Blinkhe used social psychology to examine the process behind spilt-second decision making. His latest book seeks to explain success, and it's his most sociological to date.
"You can't really understand success just by looking at a successful person," Gladwell says, explaining the thesis of Outliers. "You have to look around that person, and see where they are from. And in a way that's quite a conventional premise. But it takes you to all kinds of unexpected places. So I am trying to rebut the idea of the self-made man."
As print journalists in the US go, Gladwell must surely be one of the most famous. His friend Sarah Lyall, the New York TimesLondon correspondent, tells a story about how Gladwell was having lunch with Leonardo DiCaprio to discuss a possible movie adaption of Blink. "Two different women came up to them both at the table," says Lyall. "And both of them said: 'Are you Malcolm Gladwell?' Neither of them noticed DiCaprio."
Gladwell has been a staff writer at the New Yorkersince 1996. Henry Finder, his editor there, says, "Since coming to the New Yorker, he's evolved a new genre of journalism - ideas-driven narratives, which interweave argument and story in an interesting way."
"He had none of the conventional interests," says David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, of their time together as young reporters at the Washington Post. "He had no interest covering the White House or investigating the corrupt senator. Instead, he was always interested in ideas, in how trends develop and in all sorts of phenomenon that are fascinating but do not fit the usual journalistic cubby-holes."
Canadian hockey is one of the unexpected places that Gladwell takes his readers in Outliers. Why, he asks, are so many professional Canadian hockey players born in the first few months of the year? The answer, he argues, drawing on research carried out by social psychologists, has to do with the eligibility cut-off date for age-class hockey: January 1st. Because of this date, young boys born in the first few months of the year, who are stronger and more developed than their counterparts born in the latter months of the year, are regarded as being "good" players early on. And because of this, they get all kinds of advantages that help them develop as players: they might, for instance, get more intense coaching or get placed in elite academies. Because of these kinds of advantages, they then become better players - which helps explain why a disproportionate number of professional Canadian hockey players are born in January, February and March.
It's these kinds of interesting little puzzles that Gladwell delights in telling his readers, and delights in talking about. He says that the idea behind the book came from one such puzzle: "I had a friend whose father was a very successful Jewish lawyer, who would tell me stories about his childhood," he says. "I kept coming back to the fact that all the top lawyers had that childhood - they all came from the same place. And I thought that was either a coincidence or it was tremendously interesting and important. I went from there, and went to see if you could see something about success by looking at the lives of successful people."
Like his two previous books, Outliershas a number of snappy buzzwords which seem destined to become annoyingly hackneyed. Although he didn't coin the phrase "the tipping point", he did much to popularise it. And with this book, it seems a likely bet that the phrase "the 10,000 hour rule" - the number of hours Gladwell says it takes to become a true master at something - will soon be bandied about at dinner parties, classrooms, and board meetings.
Gladwell - of whom no newspaper or magazine profile is complete without reference to his "distinctive bloom of spirally brown hair" as Timemagazine puts it - is 45. He looks, and dresses, considerably younger. This week, at a promotional talk at a Barnes Noble store in Manhattan, he arrived wearing red trainers, jeans, with a shirt and blazer but no tie, and clutching a bottle of water. Were he not one of the most famous journalists in New York right now, the 400 or so people who came to hear him speak could easily mistake him for a PhD student from nearby New York University.
Since the spectacular success of The Tipping Point, Gladwell has become a seriously sought-after speaker, earning a reported $80,000 per engagement. And it's not hard to see why. He speaks in much the same way he writes: with an almost effortless degree of clarity, weaving in and out of academic studies with transitional phrases such as "Now that's just weird!" and "Now let me take that one step further" which neatly sew together the various puzzles he uses to support his argument. Which is that, in a nutshell, what our great-great-great-grandparents did matters.
Why, he asks the crowd assembled at Barnes Noble, do southern states in the US have a much higher murder rate but a lower property crime rate than states in the north? (Because their ancestors were herders.) Why do Asian kids consistently outperform everyone else in math competitions? (Because their ancestors worked in rice paddies.) If every academic conference were like this, the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association would be standing room only.
But one of the criticisms that is occasionally levelled at Gladwell's work is that it sews things up a little bit too neatly. The influential New York Timesliterary critic Michiko Kakutani, in a scathing review of Outliers, wrote that Gladwell was being "selective in the extreme" in the studies he uses to support his thesis. The Irish Timesinterview with Gladwell took place before the New York Timesreview of Outlierscame out, but I did ask him to respond to charges that his work is "unserious."
"I don't know what that means," he replies. "I am always puzzled by that phrase and I would take it more seriously if they gave an example of what that meant but they never do. I think what they are trying to get at is that they are suspicious of someone who sells a lot of books."
THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY - whom Gladwell happily acknowledges is a hugely important source of ideas - is, for the most part, grateful to him for translating what can be otherwise dull material into a thoroughly accessible read. Richard Lempert, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Michigan, whose work is cited in Outliers, says: "To be cited favorably by Malcolm Gladwell is doubly pleasing. Not only will your findings have a far wider audience than you ever hoped to reach, but he knows science. If your work was not sound science, he would not be mentioning it."
Finally, the obvious question that has to be asked of Malcolm Gladwell is this: in a book about success, and given his own remarkable success, does he fit into his own theory?
"I don't consider myself an Outlier," he says. "But the success I have achieved has been very much in the spirit of the book: I see the 10,000-hour rule, and the last chapter of the book is all about my mother. I talk about my mother's life - she was born in Jamaica, but is now a professional living in Canada. On the surface she seems like a self-made woman. But she's not. She's the product of very deep-rooted advantage that has to do with her race and class and all kinds of things."
• Malcolm Gladwell will give a lecture entitled Outliers: The Story of Successon Nov 27 in UCD. This event is free but will be ticketed. E-mail johnhumeinstitute@ucd.ie. Outliersis published by Allen Lane