Business Book Review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Posted by Marie on August 26, 2011

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
309 pages, © 2008

Use to Small Businesses: informative, enriching

Malcolm Gladwell says in Outliers—
Hard-work, passion, and innate ability are just not enough to guarantee success.

One also needs certain opportunities to hit at just the right times. Unfortunately, some of these opportunities, like your ethnicity’s cultural traits and your own birth date, are beyond your control. But… to operate without this knowledge is to deny information that can help you succeed.

Outliers is a short and fast read. It is also interesting enough that it will keep your attention with things you already knew (within a group, older kids succeed more often than the younger kids do) and with ideas that may be new (airplane crashes are related to the crews’ cultural attitudes about power).

Instead of being overwhelmed with all the beyond-your-control influences though, I think the beneficial take-away of the book is the knowledge that hard work and passion are base necessities among people who succeed. Once these are present in a small business owner, well it only makes sense to be on the lookout for all these other windows of opportunity.

But as Outliers will point out, these turns of fate are not always easy to spot.