Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell, CMis an English-born Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has written five books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Outliers: The Story of Success, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, a collection of his journalism, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. All five books were...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 September 1963
CountryCanada
Visionaries are limited by their visions.
A fan is always an outsider. Most sportswriters are not, by this definition, fans. They capitalize on access to athletes. They spoke to Kobe last night, and Kobe says his finger is going to be fine. They spent three days fly-fishing with Brett Favre in March, and Brett says he's definitely coming back for another season.
There is this tremendous body of knowledge in the world of academia where extraordinary numbers of incredibly thoughtful people have taken the time to examine on a really profound level the way we live our lives and who we are and where we've been. That brilliant learning sometimes gets trapped in academia and never sees the light of day.
If you're in business it's both a promise and a warning. It says that sometimes little things can cause some little guy to have an overnight success.
We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs. Putting sixty-four transistors on a chip allowed people to dream of the future. Putting four million transistors on a chip actually gave them the future.
We [people] can't do much about the fate part, but we can certainly do a lot about the man part.
Lands' End has undergone three major changes over the past couple of decades. The first was the introduction of an 800 number, in 1978; the second was express delivery, in 1994; and the third was the introduction of a Web site, in 1995. The first two innovations cut the average transaction time-the time between the moment of ordering and the moment the goods are received-from three weeks to four days. The third innovation has cut the transaction time from four days to, well, four days.
Incompetence is certainty in the absence of expertise. Overconfidence is certainty in the presence of expertise.
Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant.
Anyone who knows the marketing world knows that ideas come and go, and people latch onto things and think of them as a kind of solution....
I became convinced that knowing lots of people was kind of skill, something that the diligent can overcome.
Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard.
An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.
We are approaching levels - if we're not beyond levels - of threshold for the number of messages that consumers can take in in a given day. There is a kind of hunger for some kind of new approach to getting the word out about something.