E-mail a friendMalcolm Gladwell
airdate December 4, 2008
Award-winning journalist and best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer with The New Yorker. Named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People, his books are provocative and thought-provoking. Gladwell originally planned on a career in advertising, but a job with the conservative monthly The American Spectator changed his course. He's reported on business and science and was The Washington Post's New York bureau chief. The British-born Canadian's new book, What the Dog Saw, is a collection of his famous New Yorker pieces.
Best-selling author describes the major cultural factors that lead to plane crashes. (1:34)
Full interview. (10:09)
Malcolm Gladwell
Tavis: Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for "The New Yorker" and the author of the international bestsellers "The Tipping Point" and "Blink." Following the success of those two books, "Time" magazine named him one of their 100 most influential people.
His latest text is called "Outliers: The Story of Success." He joins us tonight from New York City. Malcolm Gladwell, delighted to have you on the program, sir.
Malcolm Gladwell: I'm delighted to be here.
Tavis: Let me start our conversation where your book ends, and please allow me a personal privilege. I start there precisely because I happen to have had a grandmother who died a few years ago whose name was Daisy.
Gladwell: Oh, really?
Tavis: And so when I got to the end of the text and saw you start to talk about your grandmother, Daisy, and her connection to this thing you call outliers, it really got my attention. So let me ask you to tell me and those watching about your grandmother Daisy and the connection to this notion of outliers.
Gladwell: Yeah, my mother's Jamaican, and she grew up in a little, tiny cottage in the middle of the hills of Jamaica, and she now is a professional -- upper middle class professional in Canada. And I'd always assumed that my mother's story was about her own ambition and intelligence and hard work, and that was it.
And when I started to write this book, which is about success, and discovered that success is far more -- the route to success is far more complex than that and so many other things are involved, I thought well, let's go back and look at my mother's history again.
And so I went back and I interviewed all kinds of members of my family and discovered I had the story all wrong -- that my mother was an important player but by no means the only player in her success. That she had, for example, this extraordinary mother who really did pave the way for my mother getting an education and getting out of the hills of Jamaica.
Then I went back even further and I talk about my mother is a member of a privileged group in Jamaica -- brown skin -- mixed race Jamaicans -- and I traced the family back 300 years to a slave who got off the ship in the docks of Kingston and was spotted by a plantation owner, and he took her as his concubine. And that's the kind of -- and I talk about what it meant to be in Jamaica, to be of mixed-race heritage.
And the whole point of telling that story is to remind us that successful people are the product of a long line of circumstances of remarkable individuals, of opportunities, of chances, of lucky breaks, and we kind of somehow leave that broader history out. We like to pretend sometimes that success begins and ends with the individual, and that's just false. It's not true in the case of my mother, and it's not true in the case of anyone.
Tavis: How do you respond, with all due respect to your international bestselling status, Malcolm, how do you respond to folk who listen to that story or who've read a couple of the reviews I've seen here and there who say to you, but that's common sense?
Gladwell: Well, yes. This book starts from a common sense premise, but along the way I think it reaches all kinds of unconventional conclusions. Yes, I think that many of us believe that, but I don't know if we follow through on that idea. I think we're very much in love with the idea in America that each person finds their own way in the world and is responsible for their own success, and we're hostile to the notion, for example, that the government should play an active role in providing opportunities to the less fortunate, right?
We have a hard time with that notion in our politics. So if the notion that success is something that comes from many different opportunities provided by community, by culture, by society, why are we so hostile to those kinds of interventions in our own society?
So it may be common sense, but it's certainly not something that we follow through on.
Tavis: You talk about a formulation that you admit is not your own, but you build upon it, I think, in a somewhat beautiful way -- this notion of the 10,000 hour rule. Explain that.
Gladwell: Yeah, this is this idea -- psychologists began to look at this question of what does it take to be good at something? And what they found is that in almost any field that you look at, it is impossible to be good unless you put in 10,000 hours of practice first. And this is true for chess grandmasters, for classical composers, for medical specialists, for talk show hosts, (laughter) for journalists, for anyone.
That there is no such thing as someone who is brilliant out of the gate. You've got to put in -- 10,000 hours is roughly 10 years of practice. It takes 10 years to be good. I'm sure that if you looked at your own history, Tavis, you would come to the same conclusion. I look at my history and I see that. It took me 10 years before I was even remotely competent at writing and reporting, and that is a very critical idea, because it says that we need to be patient with people.
That sometimes I think we try to judge people very quickly in their careers, and that's a mistake. We shouldn't be judging students very early on in their academic career and we shouldn't be judging adults very early on in their professional careers. It takes time to develop true expertise, and effort.
And I think one of the big conclusions I come to in this book is that when you look at the lives of really successful people, those people are remarkable for their level of effort, not for their level of talent. It's a critical distinction, I think.
Tavis: It is a critical distinction, and so is the one you made a moment ago, Malcolm, which is that it takes time to become good, and maybe we do ourselves a disservice by judging people too quickly. And yet, with all due respect to that formulation, it runs, it seems to me, counter to the American way, which is that if you can't deliver now, you got to hit the road now.
Gladwell: Yeah. I was talking to a sports -- I'm a big sports fan, I was talking to a friend of mine about this. In the NFL, Andy Reid, the coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, was talking about it takes -- offenses are so complicated it takes three years to grasp the position of wide receiver now in West Coast offense -- three years. Do we ever wait three years to judge these draft picks?
Tavis: (Laughs.) That's my point.
Gladwell: It's crazy. Why would we throw out someone with the potential to do something great so prematurely? Why do we make a decision, why are we so quick to make a decision?
Tavis: But let me just take that concept and apply it to business and enterprise, since so many people in the business world read and recommend your texts to their staffs and personnel, et cetera -- indeed, I do in my own company. But in business, it's about making money. And you want to make money now, and if you're going to endure losses for three to five years while this person gets up to speed rather than downsizing and trying it another way or getting rid of this person and hiring somebody else who can deliver on day one -- you see my point?
Gladwell: Yeah, but that's ultimately a self-defeating strategy. The best companies are those that are built with the long term in mind. The richest man in America, Warren Buffett, is someone who does not think two or three years ahead but thinks five and 10 and 15 and 20 years ahead, and we need -- if we learn anything from this particular nightmare that we're living through at the moment, it should be that the assumptions that have driven our economy, our business world, over the last five or 10 years aren't working.
We need to rethink a lot of things, and this should be one of them. It should be that this notion that patience and investment in people is where success comes from. I tell the story in the book of Bill Gates and what made him who he is, and I stop the story at the age of 17, because between the ages of 13 and 17 he has this remarkable childhood where not only does he get access to computers at a time when no one had access to computers, but he doggedly and persistently sits down and teaches himself how to program over thousands and thousands of hours, and that is the real story of his success.
Tavis: Let me run right quickly to one example beyond Bill Gates that really got my attention, and for that matter all those who have read the book, and that is this issue of plane crashes. Can you explain it right quick?
Gladwell: Yeah. Well, I got really interested in the role that culture plays in how we do our jobs, and I looked very closely at plane crashes. And what you discover is the airlines that have the biggest problem with -- or the biggest factor in how often an airline crashes is not the technology or the planes or the mechanics or the airport, it is the culture that the pilots come from.
Flying a plane safely requires open communication between the copilot and the captain, and in cultures where it is hard for a subordinate to speak up to a superior, there are lots of plane crashes. And looking at it that way makes us understand that here is this incredibly complex field, and it hinges on matters of culture and human communication.
And I tell the story of how Korean Air turned itself around from one of the worst airlines in the world to one of the best by confronting the cultural aspect of Korean culture that was getting in the way of that free and open communication. And it's part of this whole thing that I'm trying to stress in this book, which is that we need to be honest and open about our cultural legacies, about what works and what doesn't, if we are going to be better at what we do.
I don't think we have an honest conversation in this country about culture at the moment. I think we try to pretend it doesn't exist.
Tavis: I would say amen to that, and I would also agree that I hope that, with you, that that changes in the coming months and years. Malcolm Gladwell always makes me think, as he will make you think when you read his new book, "Outliers: The Story of Success." Malcolm, you've done it again. I'm glad to have you on the program -- thank you, sir.
Gladwell: Thank you much. Thank you.
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