Tech types are giddy with anticipation (well not all of them). Outliers: The Story of Success is out next week; Why Malcolm Gladwell Thinks We Have Little Control Over Our Own Success by Jason Zengerle is in New York Magazine this week.
Andrew Sullivan quotes a Zengerlian observation about the Gladwellian image; David Pescovitz a synopsis of Gladwell’s explanation of the relative-age effect. Me, this:
What’s a put-upon guru to do? Gladwell isn’t about to give back his advances or stop speaking at business conferences, but he is trying to take his writing in a more meaningful direction. Where he once focused on cool-hunting and T-shirts in his New Yorker articles, now it’s IQ tests and pension systems. “There is a kind of underlying social vision in a lot of his pieces,” says Henry Finder, his editor at the magazine. “The basic vision says how we fare in life isn’t just determined by ourselves and our character, it’s determined by a lot of other things that are beyond our control.” Gladwell has expanded that social vision into a book that he describes as “more political” and “a little angrier” than his previous efforts. “The interesting part of this now is trying to figure out what you do with the idea,” he says, explaining the new approach he took with Outliers, “as opposed to before, where the interesting part was just explaining the idea.” Bruce Headlam, a childhood friend of Gladwell’s who’s now an editor at the New York Times, calls Outliers “the book that’s closest to Malcolm’s heart.”
“When I wrote Tipping Point, my expectation was it would be read by my mom and that was it,” Gladwell says. “I had no notion I was creating a kind of public document. Now I realize I have a bit of a podium, so it seems silly to put the podium to waste.” Which raises the question: With his new book that purports to tell “the story of success,” has Gladwell finally found an idea substantial enough to justify his own?
RELATED: Video of Gladwell at Pop!Tech 2008.