Malcolm Gladwell Fan Club (that's me)

The Gladwell Effect
By Rachel Donadio
Published Feb. 5, 2006 in the New York Times

"PEOPLE are experience rich and theory poor," the writer Malcolm Gladwell said recently. "People who are busy doing things — as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops — don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them." [MP3 audio clip.]

Slight, shoeless and sporting the large head of curly hair that's become his trademark, Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was sitting at the kitchen table of his apartment in a West Village town house. In tones at once laid-back and precise, he was discussing his best-selling books: "The Tipping Point" argues that small actions can spark "social epidemics" — a term he gives a positive connotation; and "Blink a paean to intuitive thinking, makes a case for "thin-slicing," paring down our information intake so we can tune out the static and make fast, sound decisions. Gladwell said his goal in those two books was simple: In a culture with too much information and not enough time, he offers "organizing structures" for people's lives.

Readers seem grateful. "Blink" has remained on the best-seller list since it first came out in January 2005, with 1.3 million copies in print in North America. It has also been translated into more than 25 languages. That compares with 1.7 million copies of "The Tipping Point," which was originally published in 2000 but returned to the paperback best-seller list when "Blink" first appeared.

Their success has given Gladwell an active, and extremely lucrative, second career as a public speaker. Much in demand, he is paid in the neighborhood of $40,000 per lecture. He's also on the recommended reading list at many companies and business schools, and has spoken at West Point and the National Institutes of Health, among many other institutions. Last year, Time magazine named him one of its "100 most influential people." Fast Company magazine called Gladwell "a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud." Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter of multiple-thread narrative movies like "Traffic" and "Syriana," is developing a movie based on "Blink." That book is also the subject of a clever sendup, "Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All," by the pseudonymous Noah Tall, which will be out this month.

Gladwell has become an all-out international phenomenon — and has helped create a highly contagious hybrid genre of nonfiction, one that takes a nonthreatening and counterintuitive look at pop culture and the mysteries of the everyday. In the past year, several other books in the Gladwell vein have appeared. They include the best-selling "Freakonomics," a breezy collection of case studies by Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, and the journalist Stephen Dubner (the pair write an occasional "Freakonomics" column for The Times Magazine); "The Wisdom of Crowds," a business book for thinking people in which the New Yorker writer James Surowiecki argues that groups are collectively smarter and more innovative than individuals; and "Everything Bad Is Good for You," Steven Johnson's case that pop culture is becoming increasingly sophisticated.

But Gladwell has a far wider audience than these other authors. With a writerly verve and strong narrative powers, he leavens serious social science research with zany characters and pithy, easily digestible anecdotes. Gladwell selects his anecdotes from a wide range of sources — the military, business, food, music, romance — and diverse locales, a tactic that broadens his books' appeal.

In "The Tipping Point," he discusses everything from the drop in crime in New York in the early 1990's to the retro return of Hush Puppies, the rise of the Aeron chair in the dot-com era, and how "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" became a best seller through its popularity in small reading groups. His point is that social epidemics can spread with the right context and the pull of certain influential people: "connectors," in touch with different groups of people; "mavens," experts in one area; and "salesmen," who can win customers over.

Similarly, in "Blink," he introduces a range of case studies and experts, including art historians who can tell within seconds that a statue is a fake and a psychologist who can predict whether a couple will get divorced after observing them for only a few minutes. His message is that we should trust first impressions — except when we shouldn't. Gladwell, who is multiracial, said he became interested in first impressions when he grew his hair into an Afro and then was repeatedly pulled over for speeding, and stopped once by the police looking for a rapist with similar hair. In an era of increased specialization and niche thinking, Gladwell himself is the ultimate "connector," bridging disparate universes: the New York literary world and corporate America; liberal and conservative; men and women; high and low.

Without slackening his reporting or losing his New Yorker-writer street cred, Gladwell has risen to the top of the A-list in the vast subculture of gurus brought in to penetrate the isolation chamber of the boardroom, to speak truth to power and tell executives what it's really like in the outside world. Or at least in the West Village.

He's long cultivated the persona of the outsider. Gladwell, 42 though he looks younger, was born in England and grew up in rural Canada. His English father taught mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and his Jamaican mother is a psychotherapist. Gladwell studied history at the University of Toronto and wanted to go into advertising, but said he couldn't find a job and became a journalist instead. After a stint at The American Spectator, a conservative political magazine, he joined The Washington Post in 1987. He covered business and science, and spent three years as New York bureau chief before Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker, hired him in 1996.

Gladwell, a self-described "right-winger" as a kid — he had a poster of Ronald Reagan on his wall during college — notes that his politics have changed over the years. When he was growing up, Canada was "essentially a socialist country" so "being a conservative was the kind of fun, radical thing to do," he said. "You couldn't outflank the orthodoxy on the left the way that people traditionally did when they wanted to be rebels. There was only room on the right." Now, he plays the flip side: "I hate to be this reductive, but an awful lot of my ideology, it's just Canadian. Canadians like small, modest things, right? We don't believe in boasting. We think the world is basically a good place. We're pretty optimistic. We think we ought to take care of each other," he said. "And it so happens that to be a Canadian in America is to seem quite radical." [MP3 audio clip.]

On his Web site, Gladwell offers an apologia pro vita sua: "If I could vote (and I can't because I'm Canadian) I would vote Democrat. I am pro-choice and in favor of gay marriage. I believe in God. I think the war in Iraq is a terrible mistake. I am a big believer in free trade. I think, on balance, taxes in America — particularly for rich people — ought to be higher, not lower. I think smoking is a terrible problem and that cigarette manufacturers ought to be subjected to every possible social and political sanction. But I think that filing product liability lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers is absurd. I am opposed to the death penalty. I hate S.U.V.'s. I think many C.E.O.'s are overpaid. I think there is too much sex and violence on television."

While his views may be conventionally liberal, Gladwell takes an unconventional tack in reporting. Omnivorous in his interests and brilliantly attuned to every level of today's conversation, Gladwell is one of the most inventive journalists now writing. In articles on everything from personality tests to ketchup, he doesn't offer a sweeping theory, but rather a counterintuitive way of looking at things.

When Time magazine and other media outlets declared an attention-deficit hyperactivity epidemic in America, Gladwell argued that people were no more distracted than they'd ever been, but that Ritalin had replaced nicotine as a socially acceptable focusing stimulant. While others were vilifying the pharmaceutical companies over the cost of prescription drugs, Gladwell's New Yorker article on the topic mapped out a broader codependency. "It is only by the most spectacular feat of cynicism that our political system's moral negligence has become the fault of the pharmaceutical industry," he wrote. And in an article on intelligence reform published when the country was in a furor over the failings leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, Gladwell proposed that free-market-style competition between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. might actually be good for intelligence gathering. Lately he's been investigating racial profiling. At first, "I had a reasonably benign attitude toward it. I felt that under certain circumstances it was justifiable — like looking for terrorists. But now I think that's wrong," he said. "I think it's never justifiable. And not on ethical grounds but on pragmatic grounds. I just don't think it works."

For all their resonance and success, Gladwell's books have also been criticized, most often for demonstrating, or encouraging, lazy thinking. In a scathing review in The New Republic, the judge and author Richard Posner found "Blink" full of banalities and contradictions, "written like a book intended for people who do not read books." Some social scientists have also been unimpressed. "I think what he leaves people with is not that scientists are doing some interesting work, but that Malcolm Gladwell has a couple of good ideas," said Thomas Schelling, who shared last year's Nobel in economic science and did pioneering research on the "tipping point," a formulation that originally referred to the point at which white families would leave a neighborhood after black families began moving in.

Translating academic work for a popular audience is "very explicitly" his mission, Gladwell said, though it might not be what readers take away from his books. He said he owed "enormous debts" to academia. [MP3 audio clip.] In an endnote in "The Tipping Point," Gladwell cited Schelling's "Micromotives and Macrobehavior" (1978). In "Blink," he cited "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious" (2002), a lucid, readable book by the noted psychologist Timothy Wilson, which he called "a real inspiration" and one of his favorite books.

Gladwell has had the most pronounced impact in corporate culture. His "mavens" and "connectors" have become a working vocabulary for marketers desperate to reach consumers though calculated word-of-mouth campaigns. In 2004, he helped Simmons Market Research create consumer surveys based on "The Tipping Point." (He resigned after questions were raised about a conflict of interest with his New Yorker journalism.)

Gladwell, who rose to prominence during the dot-com boom, when the economy became the big story, rhapsodizes about things that intellectuals often dismiss but most people living on earth have to contend with every day. Advertising, for instance. In many ways, his work is reminiscent of that of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and father of modern public relations, whose 1928 book, "Propaganda," made a positive case for manipulating public opinion through advertising as the operative arm of psychology. "I get genuine delight from ads, if they're clever," Gladwell said. "The idea that you can tell a story in 30 seconds is amazing." He finds the business world "rarefied and fascinating," and said running a company was "just about as interesting a challenge as there is out there."

Small wonder, then, that business executives invite him to speak: he's entranced by their world, and they by his attentiveness and aura. He has spoken at Google, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, among many other companies. He's one of nine people invited to address the World Business Forum, a conference for executives, next fall, where he's expected to share the stage at Radio City Music Hall with Rudolph Giuliani; Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric; and Colin Powell, who Gladwell believes may be a distant cousin on his mother's side.

"I'm simply there to explain my ideas," he said of his public speaking. But he also delivers what he calls "homilies," drawing on his books to urge companies to provide better training and create fertile environments for innovation. Gladwell's 2002 New Yorker takedown of McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm then much in the news for its involvement with Enron, ended with a zinger: "They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing."

Business audiences eat it up. "Thank you for a fantastic speech," someone identified only as the chief executive of a health insurance company wrote in a letter reprinted on the Web site of the Leigh Bureau, which organizes Gladwell's speaking engagements. Moreover, the executive wrote, one colleague, "not faint of heart — indicated that you brought her to tears with the message about how valuable each and every individual is. With a polarized political situation, that's a refreshing message!"

And that is because beneath the social science data, Gladwell is selling something for which there's always a market. "I'm by nature an optimist. I can't remember the last time I wrote a story which could be described as despairing," he said. "I don't believe in character. I believe in the effect of the immediate impact of environment and situation on people's behavior."

Thus, he concludes "The Tipping Point" with the hopeful assertion that "what must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus." In "Blink," Gladwell argues that we pay too much attention to "grand themes" and too little to "fleeting moments." "Making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis," he writes.

Although pitched as descriptive, Gladwell's books are essentially prescriptive. Trust your instincts! You too may be (or can become) a connector, maven or salesman! Gladwell's dazzling arguments ultimately offer reassurance. Indeed, he seems a contemporary incarnation of a recurring figure in the American experience, one who comes with encouraging news: You can make a difference, you have the capacity to change. Gladwell may be the Dale Carnegie, or perhaps the Norman Vincent Peale, of the iPod generation. But where Carnegie in his 1936 book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," instructed readers how to understand their customers and flatter people into liking them, and Peale in his 1952 "Power of Positive Thinking" offered watered-down Christian palliatives, Gladwell offers optimism through demystification: to understand how things work is to have control over them.

Or if you can't understand the complexities of today's world, you may still be able to make profitable use of them. Of all the people he's profiled for the New Yorker, Gladwell said he most identified with Nassim Taleb, who ran a hedge fund that traded on rare events, like disasters. Taleb was "doing something about the possibility of disaster as opposed to simply turning a blind eye to it," Gladwell said in our conversation. And that, too, is part of the secret of Gladwell's success: pragmatism over ideology, optimism over pessimism, colorful human-interest anecdotes over gray shades of data. "To be someone who does not believe in the power of the situation is to be a defeatist about the world," he said. "And that I can't abide."

Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.