Malcolm Gladwell – Outliers at LBF

I had the good fortune of attending the London Business Forum‘s event with Malcolm Gladwell this morning, where he discussed some of the themes in his latest book, Outliers, and what he’s been thinking about since. Having received a copy of the book only today as part of the event, I can only comment on his talk, some of the themes of which I’m assuming he develops further in the book. The premise however is I think really relevant to those thinking about innovation. The book’s dust jacket sums up the thrust of his enquiry:

Why do some people achieve so much more than others? Can they lie so far outside the ordinary? What is the secret of their success?

He found the answer in Fleetwood Mac and a Hamburg strip club.

The popular story, as Gladwell told it, of Fleetwood Mac says that serendipity led to the band’s great success through a series of random events that resulted in Stevie Nicks joining the band and their immense commercial success that shortly followed. Gladwell pointed out that the truth was that the band had years of experience under the belts with lots of experimentation of different musical styles and forms. It was that large body of experience and expertise that flowed from years of trying, failing, and trying again that allowed them to achieve success in the end.

Similarly, looking at the history of the Beatles, it was the intense amount of time playing together as a band (playing 8 hours a day at times) crammed into a short period playing the strip clubs and pubs of Hamburg that honed and refined their skills so that when Beatlemania hit, they were already seasoned musicians.

We may like to think that the successful originate from a random collection of events and some extraordinary traits that somehow all fall into place. But Gladwell surmises from the experience of Fleetwood Mac, the Beatles (and many other examples) that the secret of success is mostly hard work and little to do with chance.

No secret there that hard works play a role, but he does note a 10,000 hour rule: Spend about 10,000 hours doing something and you can become an expert in that thing. When you combine time spent plus the willingness to experiment and persistence even after failures and setbacks, that’s where he sees the most innovation, and as a result, the outliers – those that lie outside of the normal set (the Bill Gates’s or Richard Branson’s).

Around the 10,000 hour rule and examples ranging from American Football to Mozart, Gladwell made a few observations:

• Taking the financial markets as an example, he noted that in many cases people with too little experience and training get thrust into roles that need a higher level of expertise (part of the problems leading to the current financial crisis).
• As a related point, the increasingly complex and specialist nature of areas such as finance often means less meaningful oversight. We should think more about how we train, encourage, and compensate expertise — particularly when thinking about research organisations, either as part of universities or in think tanks and industry (and I’d add expertise by government regulators).
• Those that work harder as a result of compensating for a setback (anything from dyslexia, low IQ, socio-economic factors, perceived low ranking such as a degree from a low ranked university) often end up out-performing those that go down more established paths.
• Innovation through persistence happens more often than innovation through a flash of insight (with the solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem as an example).

I’m wondering about innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly in the UK and the last point about persistence and his wider point on expertise. I’ve heard that having tried and failed in past businesses can be a plus to investors in Silicon Valley when looking at an entrepreneurs background, and that the culture there of “try and try again” has contributed greatly to its success. VCs look at past ventures and unpack the reasons for failure and if the experience taught the entrepreneur anything.

In contrast, I understand that often in the UK, investors and business generally does not reward (and may even punish) those that try, fail, and get back up and try again, having (hopefully) along the way learned some valuable lessons and gained quite a bit of experience. I’m not talking about those that fail because of malfeasance — rather those that experimented unsuccessfully but that experimented all the same.

The feeling I get from people here in the UK indicates that this may be changing. I’d submit that both encouraging experimentation and accepting that the risk of experimentation is setbacks and outright failure is crucial to developing further innovative businesses. Similarly with IP and IP strategy as in any field, trying new approaches to protection, enforcement, and building value with those innovations is crucial to developing the business.

Any thoughts?

Tagged as: IP strategy, london business forum, malcolm gladwell, outliers