Malcolm Gladwell’s guide to success is not so clever

The pop sociologist returns with an engaging read but fails to find the true key to fame and fortune, says Nicholas Coleridge

FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 28, 2008

Malcolm Gladwell's stock in trade is writing highbrow-but-breezy works of pop sociology which go straight to the top of the New York Times bestseller lists, and then squat there for a hundred weeks. Data-rich and discursive, his books are the intellectually respectable cousins of those business manuals you find in airports about elephants learning to dance and office workers stealing each others' cheese.

With his increasingly zany Afro hair, his impeccable New Yorker provenance and his reader-friendly technique of slicing his chapters into soundbite-sized chunks, he is an ideal guru for the Attention Deficit Disorder generation. It's clever stuff, deftly packaged. Open Outliers (Allen Lane, £16.99) randomly at any page, and you'll find something smart and engaging. But...

Gladwell's new book investigates the origin of success. Why are some people exceptionally successful and others not? Is success a random phenomenon, pre-programmed in the genes, or the product of culture, background and opportunity? Culling evidence from the college hockey fields of Vancouver, from the paddy fields of South Korea, from the nascent rock culture of 1960s Liverpool to the Jewish legal community of 1950s Manhattan, Gladwell dances around on the head of a pin, defining the genesis of success.

Sometimes he seems to conclude that success is little more than the old adage that genius is 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration. He attributes hard work – 10,000 hours of graft – as a common factor.

At other times he seems to attribute it more to luck and timing – 14 of the richest 75 people ever to inhabit the world were born within nine years of each other in America in the mid-nineteenth century, at the moment the economy exploded. Had they been born 20 years earlier, it wouldn't have happened; 20 years later and they'd have missed the boat.

Similarly, Gladwell argues, Bill Gates was born at the perfect, auspicious moment – October 28, 1955 – for the computer revolution. There could have been dozens of other Bill Gates, but a confluence of talent and timing handed him his $58bn.

Success is almost always a long-haul, not one lucky breakHow new is any of this? Not massively. Reading Outliers is like sitting through a Chinese banquet of small, perfectly prepared courses, each rather tasty in itself, but scarcely changing the future

Gladwell's zany hair, New Yorker provenance and his reader-friendly soundbite-sized chapters make him an ideal guru for the ADD generation

of gastronomy. Success strikes me as a more imprecise commodity than Gladwell allows.

Looking at those of my own contemporaries who've been successful in their careers, most have made one or two pivotal decisions along the way – should they join Christie's or Sotheby's? Should they quit a secure job in a big-but-dull investment bank to set up a hedge fund? Should they switch channels in a television career? But success is almost always a long-haul, not one lucky break. Obviously, luck is crucial (in my own case, jobs opened up unexpectedly at perfect moments, giving me opportunities I might otherwise have had to wait years for) but in general it is the daily grind - turning up day after day at the office, actually doing the job - which eventually brings success. I put stamina, health and common sense ahead of most of Gladwell's criteria. And staying power. And being able to get on with colleagues over a long period.

Nor does Gladwell explore the obvious fact that successful people generally only find success in their own fields. It is rare to find a successful all-rounder who can switch from discipline to discipline. A successful book publisher is unlikely to make a successful hedge funder, for example, or a successful insurance broker make it in movies. Probably, in another life, I could have been quite a good PR or advertising executive or copy writer, but I would have failed utterly as an investment banker or actuary.

Some people are sprinters - for them, securing a high-profile and well-paid job is an end in itself, but there are so many bear traps along the way – boredom, hubris, crazed vendettas and infighting, disillusionment, drink, drugs... Those are seven. "It is not the brightest who succeed," Gladwell says at one point. In this, he is totally right.

Gladwell himself, of course, is the exception to his rule, being exceptionally bright and conspicuously successful at peddling old wine in new bottles.