René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

The simple recommendation would be: Everybody should read the book. But in terms of the topics Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” touches upon, I’d like to break it down into interest-groups (in order to avoid the over-used prefix “target”). First of all, the book is outstanding which I as a faithful reader of Gladwell didn’t expect it to be. I felt that the book is under-communicating its value with the title “The Story of Success” and over-relying on the fame of its best-selling author.

Yes, the headline throughout the book is that successful people are not just the result of their individual hard work and sheer determination, but equally a product of the social environment they grow up in. As I would not have disputed this, I didn’t expect the book to deliver a lot of novelty. I was wrong. So whom would this book concern most?

I found that it’s the “3 P”: Parents, Pilots and Politically IN-correct.

Parents

Most of us are obsessed with the importance of the intelligence quotient (IQ). I guess I was too when I applied 10 years back to join Mensa, that club of the 2% most intelligent people in the world, with an IQ of 130 and above – and missed out on 4 points. Gladwell makes a convincing case that for being very successful in life up to even earning a nobel prize, one just has to be “intelligent enough”, say with an IQ of 110 or 115. All the rest is something which will range in the dimensions of “emotional intelligence”, “practical intelligence” or “street smartness”. And here the social environment in which a child gets nurtured kicks in.

Parents and their way how to bring up their children will make an awful lot of difference. Scientists studied different social environments over time where there would exist an equal distribution of IQ among the children. Yet, among upper and middle class families, the model of “concerted cultivation” as opposed to “accomplishment of natural growth” in lower class families will put their children on distinct trajectory for the future. The former will grow up with a sense of “entitlement” versus the latter with “an emerging sense of distance, distrust and constraint”. This in turn, will in most cases determine if the grown-up will be able to get the rubber of her potentially superior IQ on the social ground or not.

Pilots

Professional pilots are for sure trained in this within “Crew Resource Management”, but for most private “hobby” pilots like me, Gladwell’s explanations were simply breathtaking. Examining at the miserable record of Korean Air’s fatal crashes in the 1990s, examinations of the voice recorders from the black box concluded that the nature of communication in the cockpit had played a crucial role. Korea being a particularly hierarchical society, possess in its language seven nuances to express basically the same factual idea – depending on the social relationship between “transmitter” and “receiver”. This had led in the communication between the captain and the first officer to something called “mitigated language”. Example: You will hardly tell your boss “I need this presentation by Monday”, you might rather apply “If you don’t mind taking the effort over the weekend to send me this thing over” or so …

Polite, well rehearsed in the social context, but in a cockpit potentially deadly. Imagine in a blind approach for landing through clouds where the first officer is convinced that the plane is heading against solid mountain rock. All that comes out is uttering something like “I am not sure if we have established our gliding path with necessary precision”. Bonk. This chapter is particularly illustrating as it quotes such low-impact statements before, err, heavy impact. The solution for Korean Air was to admit to the cultural reasons for the problem, bring in a foreign trainer and change the language among the crew compulsory into English. Changing the framework of the conversation proved to mitigate that bug of “mitigated language”.

Politically IN-correct

Admittedly, that’s my favourite. I always have had my strong reservations about the Thought-Talibans coming in disguise of the semi-divine cause of “political correctness”. The result of their persistent efforts has unfortunately been the suffocation of looking at things as they really are in exchange for pressing everything in an all-equalizing box. Thereby denying important cause-and-effect statements, overlaying problems with a cloth of silence (which would erupt later even worse), nailing every critic with the moral hammer for being a discriminating pig and, worst, prohibiting to work towards an effective solution.

It takes courage to speak out a number of truths where Gladwell doesn’t shy away from: First the one mentioned above with different results of education-styles based on social environments. Second, his analysis why children from Japan and China square so much better in maths than those from the West: Their ancestors always have had a much tougher attitude towards hard work, as cultivating a rice pad requires on average three times the effort of a wheat field. This trait of high working ethics, passed on from generation to generation, has proved instrumental when cracking a hard nut of a maths-problem.

In that context, my own conclusion one of Germany’s biggest post-war failures: The integration of Turks into society,  where many of them are living in a parallel universe which had occasionally mounted to anti-social excesses of violence like in Berlin’s Rüthli School. Conversely and most interestingly, issues with Asian immigrants are almost unheard of. Could it be that an attitude of hard work comes with a better aptitude for integration than a “culture of honour”? – by the way another fascinating topic in the book. In Outliers, it’s about the chapter “Harlan, Kentucky” with the subtitle “Die like a man, like your brother did” and set in 19th century, well, Kentucky. Phenomenal read which awakes a lot of contemporary insight.

Last but not least, the final chapter of the book “A Jamaican Story” where the author himself embarkes on a fascinating journey to his cultural self. Being half a half-English, half-Jamaican Canadian he looks into the story of his maternal line from the carribbean Island. What turns out is a candid and powerful description on racism. Merely on the sideline starting with what the “politically correct”-deformed mind would allow for as racism between the colonial masters and their imported African slaves. More importantly, moving on to describe ho the coloured people who emerged as offspring from those didn’t miss an opportunity to discriminate against each other based based on slightest nuances of their skin-pigmentation. This chapter is so darn convincing in resisting the broadly applied victimization of particular ethnic groups and in forcing everyone into much needed introspection.

I hold high hopes in people like the new US-president Barack Obama and Malcolm Gladwell whose intellect is undisputed, their record on integrity untarnished and both their racial and cultural background diverse. Especially the latter makes them immune against attacks from either side of the radical political spectrum: on the one the blunt racist bastards and on the other the more subtle PC-cruisaders. Obama and Gladwell are allowed to explain things as they really are, whilst standing above it all. That could finally provide progress in eradicating the social cancer of, in the broadest sense, separation, discrimination and racism.

Outliers is an important book on that mission. Although it calls itself “A Story of Success” on the cover, I found it equally illustrating on many instances as “a story of failure”. But coming from an honest account, drawing the right conslusions it can do a lot in overcoming failure and move towards success.