June 11, 2009
Malcolm Gladwell appeared at the National Arts Centre yesterday in an interview format with Ottawa-personality Mark Sutcliffe.
Malcolm is a Canadian living in NYC and is a leading thinker about the key ingredients leading to success, as well as a perceptive observer about unconventional solutions to daunting social problems. He is a best selling author of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers.
Here are a few notes that I took during his lecture yesterday:
On Homelessness:
• It is more expensive to ignore the problem than to solve it.
• The hard core homeless can cost society more than $1 million per year each for police and health and social services.
• The problem can not be solved until you give a person a permanent address. (Hernando de Soto also recognized this—without a permanent address, a person is a vulnerable human being with limited rights and prospects, Ed.)
• Singling out individuals for help may not be fair to many others in less dire need, but society has to solve problems, one at a time and this will not always be fair but so what? That’s just the way it is.
• Some people may take advantage of the opportunity to have a ‘free’ home and support services but nothing can be done about this. (Chapters made a decision in its early days to allow people to sample its wares even if it meant tolerating a minority who would read an entire text and put it back on the shelf without purchasing it. But so what? The cost of policing this small group and ejecting them from stores would be more costly than permitting it and more alienating of the general customer. NHL star players are certainly treated differently than journeymen players; it’s just the way it is, Ed.)
On Entrepreneurship, Success and Life:
• “We make it up as we go along.” (That is so typical of Entrepreneurs. Plans don’t tend to last very long in a world that changes all the time, Ed.)
• John Rockefeller was the world’s richest person—worth over $400 billion in inflation adjusted dollars.
• Malcolm met John’s great, great, great grandson and he said: “I read that you said that my great, great, great grandfather was the richest person who ever lived. I don’t know where all the money went!” (Watch your costs and each generation has to apply itself and work hard or the money, no matter how much you start with, will be gone, Ed.)
• To make money, you need to match ability to opportunity. Timing is important—you need to be born at the right time to become a Silicon billionaire like Bill Gates. (You want to position yourself in an industry where all boats are rising, Ed.)
• Success is a function of: talent, desire, luck, work, love of what you do, intensity of effort, timing, exposure, parental influence.
• Love of what you do tends to come from: meaningful work, autonomous work and sustainability.
• Mozart was successful not only because he was talented but also because he was the hardest worker.
• Most times, we overstate the importance of talent and understate the importance of effort.
• Success is not a zero sum game.
• It takes 10,000 hours to get good at anything. (One has to wonder if the recent appointment of the new Head of GM who has NO experience in the car biz can have any success. People who say a business is a business and that running AT&T is the same as running GM have not studied the unfortunate career of Mike Zafirovski at Nortel. Every business has ‘secrets’ to success that are not easily verbalized or known. They are things that come from experience and are discovered in the process of building a successful enterprise. There are buttons that you push to make a business (or Non Profit or Charity or NGO or, for that matter, a Governmental Department) successful. A great player like Wayne Gretzky may not make the best coach or CEO—admonitions to “Just do what I did for goodness sake!” doesn’t work when you can see the play in slow motion and know where everyone will be on the ice 30 to 45 seconds ahead of time, which almost no one else on the Planet can actually do, Ed.)
• Excellence is open to someone who is willing to put in the effort and love. KIP (Knowledge is Power) Schools prove this. They can turn a poor Hispanic child in the South Bronx into a math prodigy by having the kids work Monday to Saturday, 6 am to 11 pm and all of July.
• There is a seemingly inexhaustible need/demand for education.
• Society needs to provide places where kids and people CAN work hard. (We should have a High School for the Technological Arts in Ottawa in addition to a High School for the Arts (Canterbury), Ed.)
• Medieval society in northern England worked from Dawn until noon then began drinking. They had lots of holidays and not a lot of hard work. Rice planting nations, on the other hand, worked incredibly hard at their agriculture.
• Underdogs can win if: they are highly motivated, thick skinned and willing to embrace the unconventional as well as defy the conventional and, of course, work harder than their opponents/competition. (The harder you work, the luckier you get. When any of my students ask me for an extension on their assignments, I say: “When I was 22 I was living in Australia (in Sydney). I was recently married, our first child was on the way, we bought our first home, I was building an addition on it for the baby, I was working for the New South Wales Government solving a critical waste disposal problem and working long hours with ten other people in our research division, I was taking my M. Eng.-Sci. degree, part time, at the University of New South Wales where I was not only taking courses but also writing my Masters thesis, I bought a motorcycle that I maintained myself because it was the only way to get across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and make class on time, I wove between lines of static cars, trucks and buses, it was incredibly dangerous. I still had time to see my friends. What I didn’t have time for was drinking and smoking dope and such. So why can’t you get your essay in on time?” One thing the iron ring of an engineer connotes is that they know how to work hard, Ed.)
On Societies:
• Canada is a low hierarchy/high collectivist society.
• It allows us to experiment with things such as Medicare.
• Solutions to social problems may be obvious but still hard to do.
• How you frame a questions or an idea can significantly affect its acceptance.
• Seat belt laws were a huge failure as long as it was the Government bossing people. But when it was rephrased as a ‘child protection’ measure, parents buckled up their kids and then kids forced their parents to do the same. Acceptance went from the teens to more than 70%.
• CEOs tend to be tall people. CEOs should be selected behind a screen—we want the best CEOs not the tallest. (Walt Disney knew this. He auditioned the singing voice of Snow White behind a screen, Ed.)
• “We should all band together.”
Prof Bruce