Book Review - Outliers: The Story of Success

by Dr. Farid A. Muna

Outliers: The Story of Success

By Malcolm Gladwell Little, Brown and Company, November 2008.

Malcolm Gladwell is the detonation point and the flash of best-selling author. His latest book, solitude, has the New York Times best-selling books for 8 months, were included in the list, because it is published in November 2008. Gladwell's appeal and news writing style and simplify complex issues, his talent, I believe, he is the secret of success. And these are the reason his book is controversial and popular. His latest book is no exception.

Outlier trying to explain the secret of successful people, it recommended that intelligence (IQ) alone is not success in life assurance. However, this view is an already well-known fact has been established in the early 1990s a host of academic research found that success is indeed the need for additional capacity, emotional intelligence (EI) of the well-known. Unfortunately, Gladwell did not elaborate, or even refer to, in accordance with love growing body of literature.

Instead, Gladwell focuses on several other significant and equally important ingredients of success. In fact, his book naturally complements the EI studies and explains the “secrets” of success from a different perspective: by taking into account the personal, environmental, and cultural contexts of success.

In this book review, I will highlight the main secrets of success covered by Outliers starting with the advantage (or luck) of being born at the right time of the year. One example Gladwell highlights is that of Canadian hockey players and Czech soccer and hockey players who are born during the first six months of a year and have a distinct advantage of age and maturity over their teammates. This is due to the eligibility cutoff age of January 1 in those countries. As Gladwell explains, “A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of the year – and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity”.

What is the birth of the year? Also explains the impact of being there at the right time, at the right age. Gladwell cites the Silicon Valley tycoons, which were 1953 to 1956 and thus the ideal age born in 1975 to take the advantage of the personal computer revolution. Here are the names and year of birth of some of these successful men: Paul Allen (1953), Bill Joy (1954), Scott McNealy (1954), Steve Jobs (1955), Eric Schmidt (1955), Bill Gates (1955) and Steve Ballmer (1956). Gladwell introduces later that lawyers in New York, was born in the early 1930s, also had a huge advantage when the boom in the number and size of mergers, hostile takeovers and litigation took place in the 1970s, mainly due to the relaxation of state provisions.

Gladwell suggestion is that "10,000 hours of effort and practice rules which may explain why many people have achieved their success." He has provided Bill Joy's contribution to the UNIX, Java and the Internet example, the composition of Mozart's masterpiece, he was in 2001, although he began to write in the 6-year-old music, the Beatles and their Hamburg 8 hours of music to experience one day, 7 days a week from 1960 to 1962, and Bill Gates, who put a computer in the age of 13, thousands of hours of programming. Is not only smart, these people have achieved from 1.0 million hours of practice, first, become what they have done remarkable achievement.

Two other “secrets” are discussed at length in Outliers: culture and education. Gladwell compares the safety record of airliners in the 1990s, and notes that the Colombian captains (Avianca) and Korean captains (Korean Air) in certain cases could have averted plane crashes if their cultures permitted subordinates (copilots and flight engineers) to speak out and warn the captains of impending disasters. These two cultures place a high value on power distance, meaning that subordinates defer to their superiors even when these superiors may in fact be in the wrong. In brief, subordinates were reluctant to speak out because of fear and/or respect; a very dangerous cultural “dimension” when one is flying a passenger plane! In effect, Gladwell argues that it does matter where you were born and what culture you were raised in.

Citing culture again, Gladwell attributes the high scores on mathematics tests in countries such as China, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan to the strong work ethics and the demanding nature in those countries of the all important wet-rice agriculture. Here again, Gladwell fails to mention that rice is also grown in other countries, such as Philippines and Indonesia, whose populations are not necessarily known for high scores on math tests. Gladwell also does not mention the Protestant ethics of hard work which may have contributed to the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution, or the fact that growing tobacco used to be as demanding as working in the rice paddies.

Finally, Gladwell links the quality of education to success. He cites the longer days and hours of high schools in Japan and South Korea, “the school year in the United States is, on average, 180 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long. The Japanese school year is 243 days long”. Finally, Gladwell mentions the vast advantages and opportunities provided by KIPP Academy middle schools which were started in the South Bronx, one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. Students at KIPP excel at mathematics and reading, and a large percentage of them go on to university and “in many cases being the first in their family to do so”. KIPP school days start at seven twenty-five and goes on until five p.m. All students take classes in thinking skills, English, science, mathematics, social science, music and orchestra. KIPP gives its students a chance to work very hard and to excel.

Although it is written with a journalistic, rather than academic approach, Outliers has undoubtedly contributed to the ongoing thinking about success in the corporate world. It highlights the importance of hard work, determination, opportunity and luck, family upbringing, personal circumstances, and culture.

Despite its shortcomings, mainly its lack of academic rigor, Outliers is a highly recommended book for those who want to explore the “secrets” of success, beyond IQ and EI.