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Outliers: The Story of Success
Penguin Search Penguin by Malcolm Gladwell Search Malcolm Gladwell
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Rating:  More Details: Outliers: The Story of Success Outliers: The Story of Success @Amazon Outliers: The Story of Success @aStore |
Customer Reviews:
Not inspiring.
Apart from a few entertaining anecdotes this book has absolutely no value. Gladwell follows his now well established formula of telling you something you already know and dressing it up with some nice stories. In summary, Gladwell tells us that success has far less to do with talent and hard work than it has with seizing the opportunity. Those opportunities are the result of where and when you were born, the family environment in which you were raised or the cultural impact of the society in which you grew up. Now tell us something we didn't know already. Whilst he supports all of this with some nice anecdotes, the book has no scientific value and offers no clues as to how to make use of all of this. In short, if you are born in the wrong year or the wrong month of the year, grew up in the wrong family or the wrong country: Bad luck. Not very inspiring! Quite frankly, I cannot understand how he keeps getting these raving reviews and even less how he manages to sell so many books. Maybe the marketing team behind his book launches need to write a book on how they manage to get away with it. That would be interesting.
Change the way you think 
This book is, quite simply, life changing. Malcolm Gladwell does not so much originate research but rather assembles many colligate sources and then facilitates understanding. Truly enlightening
Outliers
A truly life changing book, on a level with the 'God Delusion' - sorry Dorque. Gladwell collects information and statistics from widely unusual places and sources - from the birthdays of the Canadian hockey team to Korean aircrew to rice growing in asia, jewish immigrants in New York - and uses them to present a wholly different view of how and why people achieve success in whatever field they are in. Written in the form of a series of stories that suddenly expand laterally in unexpected directions it is completely readable, fascinating and world changing.
Not bad, but not as good as its' predecessors. 
As usual, Malcolm Gladwell has come up with a different spin on topics most of us take for granted, if we think about them at all. This time around he looks at the nature of success, who achieves it and why. Gladwell has a nice easy accessible style of writing and certainly he makes you look at things through different eyes. I felt he was on slightly thinner ground some of his theses here, and some of his arguments provoked a 'so what' shrug rather than any sense of enlightenment. He's always worth reading, but if you're new to Gladwell start with The Tipping Point to get the synapses firing.
Engaging, but....
An engaging enough read, but as several other reviewers have indicated, this is primarily a set of anecdotes that lend support to what must be a fairly non-controversial primary theory (i.e. the more hours you commit to something the better you are at it, and you don't get really, really good at anything unless you do put in the hours). The theory is stretched at times; yes the Beatles played live for many, many hours in Hamburg, but their phenomenal success surely has something to do with the quality of their song writing (not mentioned) as well as their hard work playing live?
The more interesting theory for me was that cultural inheritance should have such a large impact on behaviours. This is illustrated in the stories about Korean Air, and the experiment on university students from the South of the US versus the North. Whilst it should not be surprising that cultural norms are deep rooted and long lasting, I think there are lessons to be learned in allowing more for such differences in cross cultural communications and for understanding how such norms appear to be so persistent.
Likewise the social implications of the fascinating tests into how much of the improvement in school kid's test results is due to what they learn at school versus what they learn in the holiday period could be further explored. It reminded me of my Grandfather who was a teacher and when challenged as to the length of school holidays used to argue that it was the teachers who needed such long holidays. When asked why this was the case he would point out, with a perfectly straight face, that teachers were exhausted because there was so much to fit in during such short terms.
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