Articles — Malcolm Gladwell
Dangerous minds
By Malcolm Gladwell
On November 16, 1940, workers at the Consolidated Edison electrical company building in Manhattan, New York, found a homemade bomb on a windowsill. Attached was a note: "Con Edison crooks, this is for you."In September 1941, a second bomb was found just a few blocks from Con Edison's headquarters. It had been left in the street, wrapped in a sock. A few months later, the New York Police received a letter promising to bring Con Edison to justice - "they will pay for their dastardly deeds".
Sixteen other letters followed between 1941 and 1946, all written in block letters, many repeating the phrase "dastardly deeds" and all signed with the initials F.P. In March 1950, a third bomb - larger and more powerful than the others - was found on the lower level of Grand Central Terminal. It exploded, as did one placed in a phone booth at the New York Public Library. In 1954, the Mad Bomber - as he became known - struck four times, once in Radio City Music Hall, sending shrapnel throughout the audience. In 1955 he struck six times. The city was in an uproar. The police were getting nowhere. Late in 1956, in desperation, Inspector Howard Finney, of the New York City Police Department's crime laboratory, and two plainclothes policemen paid a visit to psychiatrist James Brussel.
Early in his career, Brussel had done counter-espionage work for the FBI. Finney handed him photographs of unexploded bombs, pictures of devastation, photocopies of F.P's neatly lettered missives. "I didn't miss the look in the two policemen's eyes," Brussel writes in his memoir, Casebook of a Crime Psychiatrist. "I'd seen that look before, most often in the army, on the faces of hard, old-line, field-grade officers who were sure this newfangled psychiatry business was all nonsense."
In the words of a business guru
Smarten up. It's time to be more thoughtful about work, says writer Malcolm Gladwell. In an exclusive interview, he talks about math, retiring boomers and his BlackBerry.
By Rebecca Dube
If you feel like work is getting harder, it's not just your imagination, says Malcolm Gladwell.The bestselling author of Blink and The Tipping Point says the mental demands of the workplace are steadily growing - and we're all going to have to smarten up if we want to succeed.
"I'm quite prepared for the possibility that the next revolution is not going to come from a machine," says Mr. Gladwell, 44, a staff writer for New Yorker magazine, who has carved out his own niche as a business guru. "It's going to come from creating a more thoughtful work force and giving people the opportunity to be thoughtful."
Among his recommendations: Business leaders should get more involved in education policy debates, Canada should consider other countries' models for teaching advanced mathematics, and hiring managers should stop looking for a perfect fit when scouting for employees.
A native of Ontario, Mr. Gladwell is returning home this month (Oct. 14-16) for the University of Waterloo's "Workplace 2017" conference, where he will interview Research In Motion co-chief executive officer Jim Balsillie about the future of work. In a recent interview, Mr. Gladwell talked about the challenges ahead for businesses as the nature of work evolves and the baby boom generation retires.
Gladwell favors a 'Cezanne approach' for healthcare reform
By Patty Enrado
LAS VEGAS – The man who wrote about decision-making made in the blink of an eye is advocating a slow and steady approach to healthcare reform.Malcolm Gladwell spoke of healthcare reform and healthcare IT at America’s Health Insurance Plans’ Institute 2007 last month in Las Vegas.
Gladwell, who is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, noted that healthcare’s position at the top of the American agenda is a "positive thing." However, he suggested the country might benefit from more patience when it comes to transformation.
"I worry that the national conversation is taking the wrong way," he said.
Gladwell used examples from art to discuss approaches to change. "Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso revolutionized the world of art, but they represent two distinctly different ideas on how to innovate," he said.
The Risk Pool
What’s behind Ireland’s economic miracle—and G.M.’s financial crisis?
by Malcolm Gladwell
The years just after the Second World War were a time of great industrial upheaval in the United States. Strikes were commonplace. Workers moved from one company to another. Runaway inflation was eroding the value of wages. In the uncertain nineteen-forties, in the wake of the Depression and the war, workers wanted security, and in 1949 the head of the Toledo, Ohio, local of the United Auto Workers, Richard Gosser, came up with a proposal. The workers of Toledo needed pensions. But, he said, the pension plan should be regional, spread across the many small auto-parts makers, electrical-appliance manufacturers, and plastics shops in the Toledo area. That way, if workers switched jobs they could take their pension credits with them, and if a company went bankrupt its workers’ retirement would be safe. Every company in the area, Gosser proposed, should pay ten cents an hour, per worker, into a centralized fund.The business owners of Toledo reacted immediately. "They were terrified," says Jennifer Klein, a laborhistorian at Yale University, who has written about the Toledo case. "They organized a trade association to stop the plan. In the business press, they actually said, ‘This idea might be efficient and rational. But it’s too dangerous.’ Some of the larger employers stepped forward and said, ‘We’ll offer you a company pension. Forget about that whole other idea.’ They took on the costs of setting up an individual company pension, at great expense, in order to head off what they saw as too much organized power for workers in the region."
The Accidental Guru
The Fast Company cover story for January 2005
by Danielle Sacks
Business leaders are passing around his articles, snapping up his books, packing his speaking gigs, and begging him to consult.
Who is Malcolm Gladwell?
And what is it about his ideas that's making corporate America swoon?
"I really like that term 'momentary autism,'" a woman says softly into the mike. She is in the back of the Times Square Studios speaking to a room of some 200 people, and more important, Malcolm Gladwell, whos standing solo onstage. It's the second day of the fifth annual New Yorker Festival, and Gladwell has just finished a detailed reprise of the seven seconds that led to the infamous 1999 fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo. Minutes before, every eye in the room was locked on him as he unspooled the nanodecisions that misled four New York cops into thinking the innocent Guinean immigrant was an armed criminal, resulting in 41 shots, 19 to the chest.
Here’s the link to Fast Company
The Ketchup Conundrum
The New Yorker
by Malcolm Gladwell
Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same?
Many years ago, one mustard dominated the supermarket shelves: French's. It came in a plastic bottle. People used it on hot dogs and bologna. It was a yellow mustard, made from ground white mustard seed with turmeric and vinegar, which gave it a mild, slightly metallic taste. If you looked hard in the grocery store, you might find something in the specialty-foods section called Grey Poupon, which was Dijon mustard, made from the more pungent brown mustard seed. In the early seventies, Grey Poupon was no more than a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year business. Few people knew what it was or how it tasted, or had any particular desire for an alternative to French's or the runner-up, Gulden's. Then one day the Heublein Company, which owned Grey Poupon, discovered something remarkable: if you gave people a mustard taste test, a significant number had only to try Grey Poupon once to switch from yellow mustard. In the food world that almost never happens; even among the most successful food brands, only about one in a hundred have that kind of conversion rate. Grey Poupon was magic.
Personality Plus
Employers love personality tests. But what do they really reveal?
by Malcolm Gladwell
When Alexander (Sandy) Nininger was twenty-three, and newly commissioned as a lieutenant in the United States Army, he was sent to the South Pacific to serve with the 57th Infantry of the Philippine Scouts. It was January, 1942. The Japanese had just seized Philippine ports at Vigan, Legazpi, Lamon Bay, and Lingayen, and forced the American and Philippine forces to retreat into Bataan, a rugged peninsula on the South China Sea. There, beseiged and outnumbered, the Americans set to work building a defensive line, digging foxholes and constructing dikes and clearing underbrush to provide unobstructed sight lines for rigles and machine guns. Nininger's men were on the line's right flank. They labored day and night. The heat and the mosquitoes were nearly unbearable.