A tipping point for Gladwell?

By Alex Beam, Globe Staff  |  December 19, 2008

I've just had a flash of intuition, a moment of "rapid cognition . . . the kind of thinking that happens in the blink of an eye," as Malcolm Gladwell explains in his book "Blink." My thought: Has Malcolm Gladwell reached his tipping point?

His latest book, "Outliers: The Story of Success" is of course a monster hit, flying off of bookshelves everywhere. But do I detect a certain impatience with Gladwell's glib repackagings of social scientists' ideas this time around? Earlier this week, New York Times columnist David Brooks opined that Gladwell's "social determinism . . . slights the centrality of individual character and individual creativity. And it doesn't fully explain the genuine greatness of humanity's outliers."

Brooks may represent the fulcrum in what looks like an epidemic of anti-Gladwell screeds, the epidemic metaphor being the lynchpin of Gladwell's earlier, gajillion-selling work, "The Tipping Point." The germ started festering two years ago, when Brooks's Times colleague Joe Nocera suggested that a Gladwell article about Enron was full of bushwa. Gladwell had wandered into a field that a strong-minded writer with a big megaphone knew something about - Nocera edited the book "The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron" - and the results weren't pretty.

Nocera made short shrift of Gladwell's contention that Enron's deviousness lay in the complexity of its Star-Trekkie financial tools dreamed up by B-school geniuses. Enron's deviousness, Nocera wrote, actually lay in its propensity for fraud. Gladwell calls Nocera's column "just grumpiness," to which I add: Yes, but grumpy in a good way.

Over in Great Britain, they don't seem to hold Gladwell in very high esteem. Appearing on a BBC show while promoting "Blink," Gladwell recalled, the interviewer turned to him halfway through and said, "You know, I just don't buy it." London's Sunday Times said of his latest book, "the problem with 'Outliers' is not that it is contentious but that it is largely platitudinous." The Guardian headlined its review of "Outliers": "Stating the obvious, but oh, so cleverly."

Writing for The Register, Andrew Orlowski served up a diverting, scorched-earth tour of Gladwell's books headlined, "The Dumb, Dumb World of Malcolm Gladwell." "As we can see, each time Gladwell has the opportunity to engage with challenging ideas he cops out," Orlowski wrote. "Addressing rationality, social trends or genius properly - and failing - would still leave us richer than Gladwell's approach, which is empty, cynical and trite. But Gladwell can't do science. He can't do people . . . [and] he can't really do journalism, either."

Ouch!

I want to make clear that none of this is personal. Apart from a healthy envy of Gladwell's supercalifragilistic book sales, I am unencumbered by prejudice toward, or any special knowledge of, his work. I've read most of his New Yorker articles, and the ideas undergirding the books seem to leach out effortlessly into book reviews, public radio jawfests, and airline flight magazines.

I have noticed a certain tendency to repeat himself. Gladwell has merchandised a hilarious, somewhat off-color anecdote about a woman friend baring her breasts more than once. And if you know anything about a subject he alights upon, you might be disappointed. One of the key moments in "Outliers" - his explanation of the famous 1997 Korean Air 801 air crash on Guam - is super-antiquated news to anyone who follows airline disaster literature. And Korean Air is now one of the world's safest airlines.

Patrick Smith, a professional pilot who writes the "Ask the Pilot" column for Salon.com, teed off on Gladwell's contention that "the single most important variable in determining whether a plane crashes is not the plane, it's not the maintenance, it's not the weather, it's the culture the pilot comes from." "That is a reckless and untrue statement," Smith wrote. "That is totally absurd, and I am extremely disappointed that somebody as influential as Malcolm Gladwell said it."

Is it time to short Gladwell stock? "Interesting question," Gladwell wrote in an e-mail. "I actually think there was more negativity around 'Blink' than 'Outliers' . . . I've always thought that a writer's job is very different from a politician's job. Politicians succeed when they convince people to agree with them. Writers succeed when they spark discussion, and I couldn't be more delighted with the discussion 'Outliers' has sparked."

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.