Book Review: Outliers by Malcolm

New York

: Little, Brown and Company. 2008

BF637.S8G533 2008

ISBN #978-0-316-01792- 3

 

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of Blink and Tipping Point. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. I have previously listened to Blink on audio and found it fascinating.

Introduction: The Roseto Mystery

Gladwell is a master at telling stories and taking seemingly disconnected stories and weaving them into a teachable moment. The story for the Italian-American community of Roseto is a typical example. In the late 1800, they were healthier than other communities. The only explanation was that they had a great community spirit. More importantly, they were different from others. They were an outlier, a data point that is on the edge of the chart. This book is about what people can learn from outliers.

Part One:

OPPORTUNITY

1.     The Matthew Effect

The stories in this chapter start with Canadian hockey. Players born right after the cutoff date can be almost one year older than other players. This gives them an advantage in size and maturity. These players are recognized for their abilities and are given better coaches, better opportunities, and more practice time. The chasm between the older players and the younger players grows. Eventually they are simply perceived as better players, not just older player. The same thing happens in American baseball. The cutoff date is July 31. People born in July have a disadvantage compared to those born in August.

Sociologist, Robert Merton, called this “the Matthew Effect” taken from Matthew 25:29.

2.     The 10,000 Hour Rule

The basic premise of this chapter is that one must put in about 10,000 of practice or experience in a field to become an expert or rise to the top. True to Gladwell’s style, he uses several examples, some well known and some more obscure.

Bill Joy is a relative unknown to most, though he wrote the UNIX operating system. Gladwell shows how several factors came together to give Joy about 10,000 hours in programming before the opportunity came to write UNIX. This happened in a time when few people had an opportunity to get computer time. Similar factors would come to play in the rise of Bill Gates. Gladwell lists nine different “lucky break” factors that helped Bill Gates reach the 10,000 hour rule.

The area of music has a similar rule. Gladwell shows how the Beatles were able to get a massive amount of performance time early in their careers and how it prepared them to break out later. An academic study of musicians showed that students who practiced 10,000 hours before age 20 rose to professional level and those who didn’t practiced less than 10,000 hours. They found no exceptions to this rule.

The thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. [39]

Gladwell introduces here the concept that just as with the athletes in chapter one have an optimal month to be born, outliers in certain field have an optimal year to be born. The leaders of industrial business were born mainly in the 1830s. Leader in the electronic revolution were born in the early to mid 1050s.

3.     The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1

This chapter serves mainly as an introductory chapter. It shows that being smart really isn’t sufficient to become an outlier. The example is Chris Langan, who has an IQ of about 195 and is possibly the smartest man in the world. Yet, Langan has not succeeded in his education or in publishing his many scholarly works. Gladwell also discusses a study by Lewis Terman at Stanford in the 1920s. Terman closely followed a set of young geniuses. He discovered that they did not fare much better than their non-genius counterparts.

The conclusion is that being smart is an asset only up to a point. All one has to be is “smart enough.” After that, any more intelligence doesn’t really matter. All one has to do is reach the lowest level to get be eligible for the advantages of education, occupation, or to produce intelligent enough work to be noticed. After that, other factors come into play, which is the discourse of the next chapter.

4.     The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2

In this chapter, Gladwell contrasts Langan with Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project. Langan appears to have gotten a series of very bad breaks which combined together to force him out of college. Oppenheimer got a series of “lucky” breaks. The most notable is that when he tried to kill one of his teachers in college, he was merely put on probation. The difference between the two men is that Oppenheimer has something Langan lacked, practical intelligence. Both men had analytical intelligence, but Oppenheimer was much more people smart.

Gladwell uses this observation to discuss the importance of family background in helping to create outliers. Middle and upper class families tend to cultivate practical intelligence in their kids whereas lower class parents don’t. He supports his conclusion by noting that in the Terman observations (from the previous chapter), students from middle class families made more As while equally smart students from lower class families made more Cs.

5.        The Three Lessons from Joe Flom

This chapter takes family background even further as Gladwell traces the rise of Jewish lawyer Joe Flom and others similar to him. Jewish immigrant families in the late 1800s were better adapted to urban life in American than their Irish and German counterparts. Their families had strong work ethics and were good at starting businesses. The next generation usually ran those businesses, and the third generation was able to go into a prestigious profession like medicine or law.

The third generation was born during an economic lull. They were able to get into better colleges because of less competition. Their teachers were more available to them and they graduated after the Great Depression was over. There is a real advantage to being born in a smaller generation.

In the law profession, the situation was even better for Jewish lawyers. They can into being at a time with the “old boy” law firms did not do litigation. The Jewish lawyers were resigned to form small companies that picked up the less attractive business of litigation. In the 1970s the legal situation in American changed and litigation was where the action and the money was. The Jewish firms had already logged in more than the 10,000 hours of litigation to be the experts, the outliers.

Part Two: LEGACY

6.    

Harlan

,

Kentucky

The second section of the book deals with how culture and history affect outliers. The example of

Harlan

,

KY

shows how culture can be isolated. In the

Appalachians

, there is a “culture of honor” that is endemic to marginally fertile areas like the Scottish highlands where many of the Appalachian residents’ families originally lived. The fact that people in these areas are more likely herdsmen rather than farmers assists this culture. The aggressive response to a personal insult or attack is so much stronger in these areas. For this reason, researchers have noticed that the American South has a much lower rate of crime against property or against strangers, but the murder rate among known associates is much higher. In summary, “traditions and attitudes we inherit from our forebears can” also affect success.

7.     The Ethnic Theory of Plan Crashes

This long chapter boils down to how a country’s culture can affect success. Gladwell uses airline crashes as the central example. He notes that most crashes are not due to catastrophic failures or bizarre accidents. It is usually a series of small errors that begin to add up. To analyze the human factors, Gladwell uses the “Hofstede Cultural Dimensions” that are frequently used in cross cultural training: Masculinity (MAS) versus, femininity, Long-Term Orientation (LTO) versus short-term orientation, Individualism (IDV) versus collectivism, and the two that Gladwell discusses.

Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) – Countries that have a higher tolerance for ambiguity can have a more difficult communicating it high stress, cross cultural situations and can communicate incorrectly is a way that could contribute to a crash.

Power Distance Index (PDI) – Countries that have a higher perceived distance between bosses, supervisors, and managers over employees and subordinates make is difficult for a person with a lower power level to correct a superior. Hence, a first officer will wait to the last minute to correct a captain who is piloting a plane.

8.     Rice Paddies and Math Tests

Are Asians better at math because they are smarter? Gladwell says “no.” First, their language makes them better at math. The numbers in Chinese are easier to say and therefore to memorize than western numbers. Second, eastern counting systems are more logical and consistent. The ten basic numbers are all the same in the language whether they are in the tens column, the hundreds column, or wherever – just like they are when they are written. There are no “teens” or “fifty” rather than “five.” This makes it easier for eastern people to calculate in their head and to conceptualize math in general.

Next, rice paddies can show how peasant people in many Asian areas have grown up with a culture that is more exacting, patient, and hard working. Western farming uses tools and machines to increase harvest. It is a matter of size and according to Gladwell, it doesn’t take as much work as a rice paddy. This created a culture where people worked hard to exacting measurements. This most clearly benefits people in understanding something like math. The longer someone is willing to work at a problem, the more likely they are to “get it.” Western students will ask for help or give up long before Asian students will  In fact, there is a correlation between the persistence and accuracy in which a student fills out a questionnaire and the scores on a test connected to the questionnaire.

9.     Marita’s Bargain

This chapter is about the KIPP program of middle schools. KIPP’s success has been documented in several current business books. The main point of the book is that KIPP simply gives kids a chance. Sure, KIPP is hard work and has a good strategy, but the real benefit is that students have the opportunity and encouragement to work hard.

Epilogue: A Jamaican Story

Gladwell closes with a personal story of how his ancestors from

Jamaica

come out of slavery through a series of opportunities that other people didn’t have.