Malcolm Gladwell
I went to the Malcolm Gladwell at the Lyceum event this Monday evening and it was a strange affair.
Firstly - I was taken aback by the scale of the buzz around just ‘being there’ – his celebrity status among the great and the good of the ad/media world had created a queue that resembled a 'scrum' (thanks @doug_graeme) that literally went round the block. There was definitely a frisson of excitement around the whole thing which I was quite surprised by.
Secondly, even though I had absolutely no preconceptions about this talk – given it is the difficult ‘3rd album’ as @herdmeister calls it - Outliers tour could either be a man selling a book without any real idea at its heart or another thought provoking journey highlighting a series of unconnected facts beautifully pulled together that might tell us something about ourselves. As it turned out it was the latter. More 'Glad-it went-well' than merely Gladwell.
Nervous. For him and for us.
As I sat down to strains of the Beatles (seemed wrong somehow) I felt strangely nervous that it might be awful. No idea why, except I felt there is an inherent danger that we were there to scrutinize everything he uttered in the hope it might be wrong – totally irrationally but like academic criticism – it is just easier to throw stones than to create a glasshouse in the first place.
And then – after being kept waiting – typical rock band trick - as if by magic (nod to @marcus) he appeared - and so it began.
What’s it all about then?
Well I can’t provide a detailed analysis of Outliers – I haven’t read it yet and I shall leave that to others, but he gave us a huge clue perhaps about why he wrote it. He spent a long time talking about the Avianca Flight 52 airplane crash – which was strange. And among the other references including nuclear plant meltdowns – he came back to 2 key themes:
1) cataclysmic events are the result of a series of seemingly unconnected events
2) cultural differences in the light of interpersonal relationships can lead to acts of mitigation, misdirection and misunderstanding.
‘Malcolm – your so…British/Canadian/Jamaican…’
So the clue is that he seems to be trying to understand the ‘why’ behind his own cultural behavioral differences and in the process this has led him to some interesting and seemingly unrelated facts that can be reverse engineered to shine a light on organizational dysfunction. Now, whether mis-communication due to cultural nuance can explain why things go wrong is debatable and indeed whether Geert Hofstede is correct with his 5 dimensions of culture, but it hardly mattered as it was a superb lesson in how to convey complex material through the art of storytelling.
But the one glaring thing that struck me afterwards – the style, the look, the search for identity through words and performance was however pure, well... Dylan!
Bob Gladwell
Now I am not going to do the whole Dylan thing here – if you know anything about him you will get this immediately - but suffice to say that he is a consummate performer who knows how to entertain an audience while performing material that helps to explain his own world rather than our own. Nuff said.
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