Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell's two humongous best sellers, "The Tipping Point" and "Blink," share a shake-and-bake recipe that helps explain their popularity.

Both popularize scientific, sociological and psychological theories in a fashion that makes for lively chatter about Big Intriguing Concepts: "The Tipping Point" promotes the notion that ideas and fads spread in much the same way as infectious diseases do, while "Blink" theorizes that gut instincts and snap judgments can be every bit as good as decisions made more methodically. Both books are filled with colorful anecdotes and case studies that read like entertaining little stories. Both use PowerPoint-type catchphrases to plant concepts in the reader's mind. And both project a sort of self-help chirpiness, which implies that they are giving the reader useful new insights into the workings of everyday life.

"Outliers," Gladwell's latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology. The book, which purports to explain the real reason some people -- like Bill Gates and the Beatles -- are successful, is peppy, brightly written and provocative in a buzzy sort of way. It is also glib, poorly reasoned and thoroughly unconvincing.

Much of what Gladwell has to say about superstars is little more than common sense: that talent alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, timing and luck play important roles as well. The problem is that he then tries to extrapolate these observations into broader hypotheses about success. These hypotheses not only rely heavily on suggestion and innuendo, but they also pivot deceptively around various anecdotes and studies that are selective in the extreme: the reader has no idea how representative such examples are, or how reliable -- or dated -- any particular study might be.

Citing what Robert Merton called the "Matthew Effect" (after the New Testament verse that goes, "For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath"), Gladwell suggests that children from wealthy or middle-class backgrounds are much more likely to succeed than those from impoverished ones. He describes a study, begun in the 1920s by a professor of psychology named Lewis Terman, that tracked a group of gifted children and found, in Gladwell's words, that "almost none of the genius children from the lowest social and economic class ended up making a name for themselves."

To Gladwell the stories of the Beatles and Bill Gates are also distinguished not by "their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities." The Beatles became the Beatles, he suggests, because they happened to be invited, repeatedly, to Hamburg, where they had to perform many hours an evening for many nights -- practice time that enabled them to hone their craft. Gladwell does not explain why other groups, who practiced as much as the Beatles, never became one of the seminal rock groups of all time.

In much the same fashion, Gladwell suggests that Bill Gates became Bill Gates because he was lucky enough to attend a high school that "had access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968" and because he had another series of opportunities to spend hours working on computer programming before dropping out of Harvard to start his own software company. Both the Beatles and Gates, Gladwell argues, exceeded or came close to what he calls "the 10,000-Hour Rule" -- the number of hours of practice that a neurologist named Daniel Levitin says are likely required "to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert -- in anything."

Gladwell raises the notion that cultural traditions may play a role in plane crashes, that the 1990 crash of Avianca Flight 52 over Long Island, New York, might have had something to do with the pilots' being Colombian. He quotes Suren Ratwatte, a veteran pilot involved in "human factors" research, saying that "no American pilot would put up with" being held up by air traffic control several times on its way to New York for more than an hour if he or she were running short of fuel.

Such assessments turn individuals into pawns of their cultural heritage, just as Gladwell's emphasis on class and accidents of historical timing plays down the role of individual grit and talent to the point where he seems to be sketching a kind of theory of social predestination, determining who gets ahead and who does not -- and all based on a flimsy selection of colorful anecdotes and stories.