|
 |
 |
Women & Leadership Australia eNewsletterAugust 2009 |
||
Book review: Outliers: The Story of Success
Publisher: Penguin Australia
Malcolm Gladwell has many talents. One of them is a razor-sharp ability to take previous research and synthesise it into something highly enjoyable, thoroughly accessible and equally intelligent. Riding a hefty wave of success as a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine, in his first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2002), he took the theory of memetics and expanded it into a serious best-seller that had office workers around the world discussing it at the water cooler. In that debut book, he argued that ideas, products, messages and behaviors can act as epidemics, spreading just like viruses do. He followed up The Tipping Point with Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2007), a wide-selling book that popularised research into perception and how we make snap judgments. The common theme through these two books, continued with passion here in Outliers: The Story of Success, is that the social milieu in which we reside is not only important to understanding our behaviour, but it’s terribly crucial. Gladwell cuts against the western dream – cherished most feverishly in the USA – that individual success is the domain of innate talent and individual effort. He doesn’t say that these things don’t count. Rather, they are less important than the social context of our life. Replete with examples, Outliers shows how disparate high achievers – from The Beatles to Bill Gates – shared a fundamental common circumstance: strong access to the conditions that let them practice their respective craft. With statistical rigour, Gladwell argues that genius is as much about where we're from and what we do, as who we are – and that no one, not even a genius, ever makes it alone. Gladwell will earn few admirers amongst those who like to believe in the ‘American Dream’: that anyone can make it. Gladwell’s point is that anyone can make it, provided that certain conditions are met along the way. Curiously, though, there is not a single mention of how gender impacts on one’s access to the resources that foster creativity and genius (almost every single case study is of a male). Even a cursory gender analysis of creativity and genius reveals the unequal lines of access amongst men and women. That criticism aside, Outliers presents a compelling case, one that could change how readers think about creativity and how they think societies ought to be organised.
Our rating: 9/10 By Ben Zipper, Co-editor, Women & Leadership Australia eNewsletter
|
||
|
||||||
Book author: 
