University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Outliers
A review of

Outliers

The Story of Success

Malcolm Gladwell • Little, Brown US • 2008

10,000 Hours?

by David Meyer

Bestseller Malcolm Gladwell explores what makes an outlier and the cultures that outliers outlie from.

Cultural icon Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Outliers is his third book, following The Tipping Point and Blink, which established his brand. Outliers concerns cultural patterns and norms, a reasonable subject for Gladwell, since his astonishing success marks him as an outlier himself.

Gladwell demonstrates the tenets of his style. He cites many examples from wide-ranging fields and asserts that the aggregation of those examples defines a principle. He describes behaviors and ideas in the abstract and makes them concrete with memorable illustrative stories.

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