Is that the lesson from Malcolm Gladwell’s new book David and Goliath?
Many of you may be fans of the Mr. Gladwell’s books and theories and how they have been popularized as business advice. But you can count me as a skeptic.
My discomfort started back when the lead example for the thesis of Blink -that experts intuitively sensed a lack of authenticity of the Kouros statue at the Getty Museum- turned out to be more fanciful than fact. This was compounded when he claimed his hairstyle marked him for police profiling.
The horse-hockey meter then went full-tilt when my boss tried to line up Gladwell as a speaker for annual Procter & Gamble management meetings. To say Mr. Gladwell had an inflated idea of his value on the stump is understating the case!
Wherever you come out on Mr. Gladwell, you owe it to yourself to read this critique that appeared last week in Slate: The Trouble With Malcolm Gladwell