Malcolm Gladwell, _Outliers: The Story of Success_

IT DELIGHTS ME to imagine a travelling business executive in an airport bookstore quickly grabbing and purchasing the new Malcolm Gladwell book because of its title, which seems to promise foolproof advice on how to slash and burn your way to the top of the corporate foodchain, and then discovering while in flight that he has in fact committed himself to a roof-to-foundations dismantling of that Great American Business Myth, the self-made man.

Taking up a variety of examples of individuals who have achieved phenomenal, way-off-the-end-of-the-bell-curve success, Gladwell demonstrates that yes, they had talent, and yes, they worked hard, but they also had good fortune on their side, unusual opportunities, lucky coincidences -- that even being born in one decade rather than another (even one month rather than an another) made an incalculable difference.

Even one's cultural inheritance -- a good example of something over which one has no direct control -- can unpredictably redound overwhelmingly in one's favor (as it did for some of the sons of the New York City Jews working in the garment trade in the 1930s) or fatally against it (as it did for some Korean airliner pilots).

Gladwell's invocation of cultural differences as a key factor in one's success is likely to raise hackles -- but he is not ranking ethnicities in order of likelihood of success, so he is not simply resuming where the late-19th, early-20th century racial theorists left off, and he makes clear that what matters most is the unpredictable ways a culture's tendencies play out in quite specific contexts.

How does he do it? -- that is, digest the voluminous psychological research upon which his books are based and then make it all graceful, lucid, and vivid, even unto the experimental approaches used by the researchers, so the reader experiences something like the dawn of discovery? Talent, certainly, hard work, doubtless, and very probably something else, to judge from the thesis of this very book, but lucky us to be born at the right time to have the pleasure of reading him.