Outliers- some general perspective

I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell and whether it is “Tipping Point”, “Blink” or his latest book “Outliers” I just devour them with fascination. His books are a breath of fresh air for me. From his thoughts of “viral life of ideas” to the “power of gut reactions”, he now stepped into the territory of “ The story of success”. Now when I saw the book for the first time with its “ story of success” title written on the front cover, I thought that this may be another of those on the self improvement CTRL+ C, CTRL+ V one’s (which basically means copy and paste), but I was totally taken by surprise with the content of the book. He actually approached a very brave topic, which many would not like to touch upon because of various sensitive reasons.

Now for people who have not read the book the key theme of this book is that geniuses are neither born nor do they arise out of nowhere. He feels that "they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot." Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky."

Well this actually reminds me of a the research done by Jim Collins on “ level 5 leadership”. Here they talk about leaders who attribute their success to their people, external factors and sheer luck. I have not read Galdwell talking about that in his book , but I can surely see a huge level of coincidence between the people Malcolm has quoted and the people researched by Jim Collins.
A classic example is Darwin Smith who was the CEO of Kimberly-Clark. He was highlighted by Jim Collins as a level five leader and if you look at what made him successful , from being a poor Indiana Town Farmer boy, to loosing a part if his finger when in college to finally being diagnosed terminally ill with cancer within 2 months of him becoming the CEO of Kimberly-Clark, you will see the striking similarity of “ The Story of Success”. He continued to be the CEO of Kimberly-Clark for 20 years and generated stock returns upto 4.1 times the general market rate.
Now the big difference between the level 5 leaders and those highlighted by Gladwell is that level 5 leaders always end up giving the credit to others , but it may not be the same case with the geniuses that has been highlighted by gladwell. Well for sure I may not be able to tell if all the people highlighted by Gladwell would qualify for a level 5 leader, but for sure most of the people highlighted as level 5 leaders by Jim would fall into the category of guys highlighted by Gladwell.

One of the names which both Jim and Gladwell missed out was Gandhi. I can understand why Jim missed him out because Gandhi was not a corporate leader, but I was surprised how Gladwell missed this out. Gandhi is a classic example of a level 5 leader who attributed all his success to the people around him and his faith in god. If you read the autobiography of Gandhi and the environment at that time you will clearly see why he will fall under that category of people Gladwell could have well included in his study. Gandhi was an English speaking, western educated, western culture following Indian who by chance and by sheer luck(?) ended up in south Africa where he was thrown out of the train for being black skinned. If that did not happen, or at the same time if his home country was not under the same colonisers, or if Gandhi did not speak English , then there is very less chance that Gandhi would have become the leader which he later became.

Also one another point which Malcolm missed out in his “ Asian” research was to include the striking contrast between the north and south cultures of India. India like china has its North based population which heavily relies on wheat and the south which heavily relies on rice. Though I don’t have enough research to corroborate my thoughts I see a distinctive difference between the professional areas chosen by north and south Indians. While north Indians primarily end up into management related fields, south Indians are more into financial, accounting and software. This would be in some way supportive of Gladwell’s research on rice growing cultures which he says is more “number” oriented.