"Outliers" part 2

As promised, let me finish up my thoughts on Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers." Last time I told you about how the book was divided into two broad sections. The first was about opportunity.

The second section was about culture. Culture is a high value to me. I should say, being cross-cultural and experiencing a variety of cultures is a high value to me. Coming into contact with folks from other cultures are some of the most vivid memories I have throughout my life--the first Hispanic family to move into my little small town in the Panhandle (the Gallegos--I invited Jimmy to Vacation Bible School and he rode next to me on the firetruck during the VBS parade in first grade); the first time I remember being in the same place as an African-American (8th grade basketball game against Shamrock; one of my friends and teammates used a perjorative term throughout the game), moving to Hobbs, NM, which in that time was about 1/3 white, 1/3 Hispanic and 1/3 African-American.

Yes, I grew up in small-town West Texas (even Hobbs is really West Texas--only 2 miles from the Texas/NM border). One of my friends and mentors who is Latino talks about taking his boys to Hispanic Baptist churches so that they get a feel for their roots. Should I take my kids to small-town redneck churches???

But the real cultural immersion happened when I went to college in El Paso. I fell in love with the border, the blending of cultures and Mexican food. And eventually an Argentine. Now I've been around the world in various cultures, and I love it every time.

But I digress. Gladwell's point is that cultural values strongly shape success. I would say that they do even more than opportunity does.

For example, cultures that are high power-distance cultures (meaning that they maintain a high respect for power and rarely if ever contradict it) have a whole slew of natural barriers to success in our modern world. His example is Korean Airlines from the 70s and 80s. The modern air-traffic system is meant to operate as a 2 or 3 man team in the cockpit. There are overlapping and shared responsibilities, redundant work processes, etc. because you have the lives of hundreds of people in your head and hands. However, Koreans have a natural high power-distance cultural value. So when a pilot starts making decisions that the co-pilot or flight engineer disagree with, they do not speak up. Nor do they communicate bluntly with air-traffic controllers when they are in trouble. To do so would be a disrespect to authority.

And it led directly to several crashes, and nearly put the airline under. Now, as Korean Air, they are a very safe and successful airline. What made the difference? They brought in a specialist from Boeing who basically said "Look, we love your cultural values. They are a big part of what defines you as a people. But when you step into that cockpit, you set aside that lack of challenging authority. You speak up. You say what you believe is wrong. The system depends on that.

Gladwell gives other examples. Probably my favorite is his discussion of the people who settled the Appalachian region of the US, and how their difficult shepherding-on-the-side-of-a-dangerous-mountain past brought certain values to the forefront, and how those values--even though they no longer live in such circumstances--still shape their worldview, their dealing with conflict, and how they are successful in our world.

All in all, I highly recommend this book. It should be must reading for anyone who wants to understand people and what makes them successes or failures in life.

Book Review - Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I probably enjoyed this book more than any other I've read recently. Gladwell has written a couple of other tomes I've read; The Tipping Point and Blink. But Outliers jumps to the top of my favorite list for him, and one of the best "aha" moment books for me.

The book's stated purpose is to identify what makes one person (or group) successful and one not. It examines two large ideas--opportunity and culture--and their impact on our success.

Now we USAmericans really like to believe that everyone has equal advantage. We believe in the concept that people (and their success) is by and large a factor of their work ethic and attitude. Sure, your natural ability may provide some limitation (if you're 5'4" playing in the NBA is probably unrealistic) but we can find ample anecdotal evidence of people who were told they were too short/stupid/poor/etc to succeed at a particular task but overcame all odds and succeeded anyway. And we like to think that is us.

Gladwell points out you might as well be planning to win the lottery, cuz the odds are against you.

In the first section, he deals with opportunity. Does everyone have the same opps for success? Again, we want to say yes, believe yes, but in our honest moments we have to answer no. Did you know that 14 of the 75 wealthiest people in the history of the world were Americans born between 1830 and 1835? Why would that be? Because they were just the right age to take advantage of the post-Civil War boom of economy in the US. How about that the 10 founders of the largest, most successful software firms in the US were born between 1950 and 1955? All of them. The world came together to give them opps that others simply did not have.

Maybe the most intriguing example is elite Canadian hockey. If you examine the birthdates of the best players in the late teen clubs, you will find that about half were born in January, February or March. Luck of the draw? Not a chance. January 1st is the cutoff date for age of being on one year's team vs the previous years. Kids born in the last quarter of the year are nearly a year younger than those born in the first quarter. Now at the age of 18, that's probably not a significant difference. But these kids started playing organized hockey when they were old enough to skate, and when you're 5 on Jan 2nd vs Dec 14th, it makes a HUGE difference. So in the younger years, those born in the first 3 months get identified as the best players. They get put on the best teams with the best coaches, and get more practice and game experience as they grow up. If you were born in the last quarter of the year, your odds of a successful hockey career are significantly reduced.

This has incredible implications for parenting, for education, for sports, for all kinds of leadership development issues. We are subconciously giving better opps to certain kids for no other reason than the month they were born in. Are there exceptions? Of course. But they are exceptions.

One implication I thought about a lot in reading this is how we at Buckner develop solutions for the 145 million orphans in the world. How do we really provide the right kinds of opportunities for these kids to succeed in the world?

In my next post, I'll deal with the second half of the book, the cultural factors of success.