Reading Gladwell’s Outliers and Cushman’s Networks

I’ve been working my way through a backlog of books, and finally moved onto Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, which is a look at those people who stand out for their achievements, whether online or in the sporting world, for example.

He explores the possible reasons that contribute to such success – for example, the age cut-off for selection into sporting programmes – and shows that being born in a certain month gives you an advantage which is then amplified by being selected into more intensive training. Or the fact that in addition to the talents of Bill Gates, the fact that he was probably the only 13-year-old with access to an advanced computer (at the time), meant that his success was one of timing and opportunity in addition to his own skill.

I can understand why Gladwell comes in for criticism – his anecdotal style can hide the fact that Outliers certainly uses a reasonable amount of data to back up his observations. And as a parent, the insight into what can contribute to scholarly success certainly caught my attention.

Funnily enough, I actually observed something similar (I suspect it’s still languishing on my Blogger account amongst some posts which didn’t automatically transfer here) about the sudden appearance of Web 2.0 business successes under 30.

The reason they were all around a similar age (aside from possible fraudulence), was the situation they were in – old enough to be ambitious and educated at a time when Web 2.0 technology came available, in places where they were able to find equally interested developers, not tied down to mortgages and commitments etc, and generally in a University setting where they either had the free time to experiment, or could find it by missing classes!

The one thing that’s possibly missing is a message to absorb and use what you can learn from Outliers whilst still remembering that exceptions occur and not using it as an excuse.

The other book I’ve finally found time to sit down and digest is David Cushman’s The Power of the Network.

I’m probably not in a position to critically review his work (Dave is a former boss, colleague and friend of mine), but I can certainly see why Chris Thorpe wrote about the power of print after reading it.

It’s a collection of material and white papers Dave has already published on his blog, FasterFuture, and as such it’s material I’m fairly familiar with – but the fact that he frames it with discussion of Moore, Metcalfe and Reed’s Laws means that it benefits from a little bit of time and attention – which is too easy to avoid doing when skimming through RSS feeds during a busy day. Plus, as Chris points out, having the extracts collected means that certain themes become more apparent through the material Dave has picked out.

Plus at 98 pages it’s the right length to communicate the ideas without dragging on, and being self-published via Lulu, it’s also ‘cost-effective’ at £4.98 for print and £0.49 for a digital download.

Just to finish off, one of the books I’m currently keen to get hold of is What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis – which is available in print, but also as a video book if you’re in the U.S. You can watch a non-region specific excerpt below: