Provocative ideas that
are taking the business world by storm.
Phenomenal best-selling author.

Highlights

Malcolm Gladwell has an incomparable gift for interpreting new ideas in the social sciences and making them understandable, practical and valuable to business and general audiences alike.

He’s become so successful at this that, in 2005, Time Magazine named Malcolm one of its 100 Most Influential People.

Malcolm's most recent book promises to have an even greater impact on both business and society than his first two books. In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm suggests an exciting new approach to helping people succeed by using the factors that really foster success.

He is the author of two New York Times #1 bestsellers—The Tipping Point and Blink.

With his first book Malcolm embedded the concept of The Tipping Point in our everyday vocabulary and gave organizations new tools for understanding how trends work.

In Blink he analyzed first impressions—the snap judgments that we all make unconsciously and instinctively—and he explores how we can master this important aspect of successful decision-making.

Malcolm is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. His editor describes his work as a new genre of story, an idea-driven narrative that’s focused on the everyday and combines research with material that’s more personal, social and historical.

He was previously a reporter for the Washington Post.

Malcolm is an extraordinary speaker: always on target, aware of the context and the concerns of the audience, informative and practical, poised, eloquent and delightfully warm and funny. Magically, he entertains and shakes up your perspective at the same time.

Outliers

The secrets of success can be decoded—and copied and reconstructed.

Why are people successful?

In his stunning new book, the bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Blink reveals the real—and mostly overlooked—secrets to extraordinary success. As in his earlier books, Gladwell builds his case with stories of real people, brilliantly told from an all-new perspective.

He reveals that we pay far too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where successful people are from: their culture, their family, and their generation. Gladwell explains what Bill Gates, the Beatles and other world-class successes have in common, how culture affects their careers and performance, why Asians are good at math and what drives the so-called “achievement gap” in American education.

Along the way, Gladwell overturns many of our conventional notions about what makes a person successful. He creates an entirely new model for nurturing success and suggests ways to give people the best opportunities to succeed.

Because we so profoundly personalize success, we squander human potential. We miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

In the Blink of an eye, the unconscious mind decides lots of (often very important) things for us without our even knowing what we know or how we know it. In his bestseller Blink, Malcolm describes how we make these decisions—both the good ones and the bad—why some people are so much better at it than others, and how we can improve our skill at interpreting these details correctly to become better decision makers—in our homes, in our offices, and in everyday life.

Blink examines the smallest components of our experience, the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that bubble up whenever we meet a new person, or confront a complex situation, or have to make a decision under conditions of stress. If we paid more attention to these fleeting moments, it would change how we do a lot of things. If you combined all these little changes together, you’d end up with a different and happier world.

Malcolm’s books are intellectual adventure stories.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference

The Tipping Point is a book about change, in particular, a book that presents a new way of understanding why change happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it so often does. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm describes how trends work and he helps companies apply this knowledge to their own business strategies. Using the principles of epidemiology—the study of epidemics—to understand the movement of ideas, he explains how trends start and spread and he offers tools for igniting, steering and/or sustaining the trends— “positive epidemics” —that matter to his audiences.

Credentials

• Staff writer for The New Yorker
• Author, The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers
• Former science and medicine writer for The Washington Post
• Winner, National Magazine Award

Picasso vs Cezanne

Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso revolutionized the world of art, but they represent two distinctly different ideas on how to innovate. Picasso was a conceptual innovator who revolutionized art with transformative ideas, whereas Cezanne used a trial-and-error approach and worked slowly. Malcolm applies this intriguing paradigm to business and business problems, with his usual insight and eloquence.

The grand idea often has more appeal and seems to promise quick results. But many problems are just too complex for a grand idea to work. Healthcare reform, for instance, is a Cezanne problem, not a Picasso problem. It cries out for experiments that will help us decide what works.

Puzzle or Mystery?

Puzzles can be solved if you have the right information. Mysteries, on the other hand, remain mysteries no matter how much information you have. They require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, not a simple, factual answer.

These differences matter. If you approach a problem as a puzzle, you are likely to seek more information, but if it’s a mystery, that will only make matters worse. You will want to make qualitative changes in your approach instead: improve your analysis, cross-fertilize, employ more thoughtful and skeptical people. Accountability works differently, too: puzzles come to satisfying conclusions and if it goes wrong, blame the one who withheld information. Mysteries sometimes don’t get answered at all and it can be hard to tell who’s responsible.

Some examples: The whereabouts of Osama bin Laden is a puzzle; so was Watergate. Enron, on the other hand, wasn’t a puzzle, as the prosecutors in the case against its principals claimed. It was a mystery—no Deep Throat, no cover-up, there was too much information available. Likewise, the motivations of the perpetrators of 9/11 are a mystery.

"Gladwell and his ideas have reached a tipping point of their own."
~ Fast Company