The Accidental Guru

A Genre of His Own

When you see Malcolm Gladwell for the first time, standing barefoot at the entrance of his breezy Tribeca apartment, you are struck by how young he looks. He's 41, but seems closer to 30. His slight build is that of a high-school runner, his halo of bushy brown hair evokes Lenny Kravitz. You notice his relaxed stance, his jeans and fitted white T-shirt. If you were going to rely on your own uncanny ability to nail first impressions, you would probably never guess that this is the guy so many people claim has changed the way they do business.

From an early age, Gladwell was drawn to the written word.

Raised in a home with no TV, the youngest son of two published authors was reading the Bible by age 6, and by 16 won a writing competition for a story in which he interviews God. A track star as well, "he was very, very competitive," says his father, Graham, a math professor. "In fact, he was obnoxiously competitive." While he was clearly precocious, Gladwell describes his Canadian upbringing as "very mellow," attributing it to Canadians' general nonchalance toward the American ideal of success. "There isn't this big fretting about getting into college," he reflects. "It seemed like a very easy and warm way to grow up, and by comparison, sometimes I feel like things seem to be a lot more at stake in America."

This combination of a laid-back demeanor with an inner ambition has turned out to be his competitive edge in journalism. He got his inauspicious start in high school publishing a 'zine: Ad Hominem: A Journal of Slander and Critical Opinion. "The rule was, in every article you had to attack somebody," says Gladwell, smirking while noting that only about four issues ever made it to press. While he dabbled in journalism, "it never occurred to me you could actually make a career out of [writing]." So the self-described "slightly lost" University of Toronto grad with a history degree tried breaking into advertising -- to no avail -- and on a lark landed an editorial gig at the conservative magazine The American Spectator. He was later fired, probably, he says, for his penchant for oversleeping. Gladwell eventually found a home at The Washington Post, where he worked for nine years, migrating from the business beat to science and medicine to New York bureau chief. He gravitated to business writing for the same reason he gravitated to science -- because they are about real things that have tangible consequences.

Since joining The New Yorker in 1996 ("It just kind of happened," he says), Gladwell has, as his editor Henry Finder puts it, "essentially invented a genre of story." A "Malcolm Gladwell story" is an idea-driven narrative, one focused on the mundane rather than the bizarre. It takes you on a journey in and out of research through personal, social, and historical moments, transports you to a place you didn't know you were going to end up, and changes the way you think about an idea. The result is articles such as "The Talent Myth: Are Smart People Overrated?" published in 2002 and still circulating today. In it, Gladwell uses psychology and case studies to demolish the "star" talent system that McKinsey & Co. lauded -- and its client (the then-bankrupt) Enron epitomized. "They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box," he writes. "It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing."

The business community's fervor for Gladwell and his work, particularly The Tipping Point, stems from this potent mix of the entertaining with the perspective-shaking. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell reveals a map for how ideas, products, and behavior become contagious within a culture. He traces the word-of-mouth life cycle through the people who start and then accelerate it, whom he dubs "connectors," "mavens," and "salesmen." "I bought books for my whole team, my whole family, and all my friends. I probably bought 30 copies," says Nikki Baker, a marketing analyst at Pepsi who tested the concept for the Aquafina Essentials product launch in 2002. A year after the beverage giant was busy pitching its bottled water to yoga instructors (deemed "key influencers"), its more irreverent competitor, Glaceau (maker of Vitaminwater and Smartwater), began seeding 500 influencers across the country. Matt Kahn, Glaceau's director of corporate marketing, now makes The Tipping Point required reading for his 35-person marketing team, starting from the point of hire.

Other companies have built entire practices around his ideas. After Simmons Market Research's team read the book, it created the Tipping Point Segmentation System -- syndicated research its clients can use in order to understand how to reach the 12.5% of the U.S. population that falls within Gladwell's classification of tipping-point segments. One of its clients? Gladwell's own employer, The New Yorker. Its sales team applies the data to its 950,000-plus subscriber list to help convince advertisers of the magazine's "influencer" following. Gary Warech, a vice president at Simmons, puts it plainly: "It was a great book. It became the bible, the must-read in business circles. Our guys read it and said, 'This is great. We can operationalize this and help our clients.' "