The Accidental Guru

While the notion is provocative, the road map Blink offers corporate America gets fuzzy from there. (For example, Gladwell never explains how Herman Miller's execs overcame their concerns about the Aeron's ugliness.) Gladwell offers much more insight into how those in rapid-decision-making professions (such as firefighters or ER doctors) can slow down a moment or create an environment where spontaneous decision making can take place. That's less applicable in the white-collar workplace. You can learn how to untrain yourself from making the Warren Harding error, but you're more or less on your own in rewiring your thinking.

This raises the primary criticism of Gladwell's work -- that he sometimes stretches his colorful stories to make them apply to business issues. And he admits it. "I'm just trying to get people to start a conversation, even if the conversation is, 'Well, that's interesting, and that's not, and that's sort of bulls -- t' . . . I'm much happier getting criticized for overreaching than I would for being too timid."

In effect, that's exactly the leap he wants companies like Hewlett-Packard to make. For a company of numbers-driven engineers, steering away from data is downright frightening. "We want to innovate and break out, but we don't have the instinct for it, really. It scares us a little," says Shirley Bunger, HP's director of brand innovation. So as part of her mandate to help HP's 145,000 employees think differently, she brought Gladwell in last June to share the Aeron story.

Bunger recalls watching reactions around the room as Gladwell's presentation erupted into a vibrant discussion. "There were some people who just had this sense of relief and connection and then other people with this sense of 'Oh my God, this man is completely challenging everything I believe in,' " she says. At one point, someone asked Gladwell if he believed in focus groups, and he replied, "I think we would all be better off if focus groups ceased to exist." While this idea and others in Blink aren't revolutionary, they're exactly the kind of thing that can spark change. And who better to hear them from, argues Bunger, than Gladwell?

Guru or Scribe?

Companies like HP are still vying to "bring in Gladwell in a way that he could really shape some of our work," says Bunger. Add it all up: a passionate following, companies eager to sign him on as a consultant, some accessibly packaged books, and a knack for addressing a room full of businesspeople with the intimacy of a dinner-party chat. It sounds like the beginning of Malcolm Inc.

"Oh God, no," Gladwell laughs, shielding his hazel eyes with his hands. "I can't imagine anything more horrible." While he is flattered by how many diverse groups have been drawn to his work and he enjoys speaking to companies, formal consulting would be a breach of his first commitment -- journalism -- and he claims he'll never do it. Yet when you ask Bunger, she says Gladwell was very receptive to the idea of a formalized working relationship. And he's already well entrenched in the pantheon of business prophets: Gladwell is number 27 in Accenture's ranking of "The Top 50 Business Gurus," above the likes of Jack Welch (34) and Richard Branson (45).

Gladwell's reluctance to accept the trappings of gurudom reflects his professional DNA: He's more Peter Drucker than Tom Peters. Like Drucker, he doesn't come from the usual feeder pools of consulting or academia, and his MO isn't prescribing the solution but sparking more questions. "I was definitely surprised that he didn't have all the answers and he didn't care about it," says Nikki Baker, the marketer at Pepsi who saw Gladwell speak at The New Yorker Festival last October. "He was just a thinker."

She doesn't mean that as faint praise, of course. But not everyone holds Gladwell's thinker credentials in such high regard. "When [Gladwell] talks about mavens or connectors, in my neighborhood we call them 'gossips,' " says Mario Almonte, who heads the PR practice for Herman Associates, a marketing communications agency. John McGrath, a psychiatrist who's also the vice chairman of a public-affairs firm, believes marketers became starry-eyed over Gladwell's first book because he props up the elusive with the quantifiable. "You tend to think, 'Oh wow, this is really science-based stuff.' Well, it's new language, but it's not science." In fact, the tipping-point concept has been around for decades. The idea was first deeply explored by the economist Thomas Schelling (as Gladwell acknowledges in his original tipping-point article), and marketers have been practicing these ideas without Gladwell's vocabulary for years. "It's one of these things that's kind of obvious but nobody said it," says Henry Mintzberg, the management guru and a Gladwell admirer. "You know, thousands of psychologists spend lifetimes studying these things, and here, one guy kind of waltzes along with a really interesting idea."

"When I was writing The Tipping Point, I realized that in order for people to talk about something . . . they need some way to describe and name things."