“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, who’s 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.
As the woman repeats the phrase to the crowd, you can hear her digesting it as if it has just become a part of her. It is a term Gladwell introduced to the group only moments earlier when describing what happens when our ability to read people’s intentions is paralyzed in high-stress situations. Cocking his hands back in a gunlike position, he had explained in a tone that was part sociologist, part Shakespearean actor, how the cops misread a “terrified” black man for a “terrifying” black man. “They didn’t correctly understand his intentions in that moment, and as a result they completely misinterpreted what that social situation was all about,” he said. “I call this kind of failure ‘momentary autism.’ ” It’s only one of many neatly packaged catchphrases Gladwell sprinkles throughout his new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown, January 2005). There’s “rapid cognition,” “thin-slicing,” and the “Warren Harding error,” but “momentary autism” is the one that you can quickly imagine this woman using, explaining to her boss why she froze during the new business pitch.
No one in recent memory has slipped into the role of business thought leader as gracefully or influentially as Gladwell. Soon after his first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little, Brown, 2000), fell into America’s palms, Gladwell made the leap from generalist staff writer at The New Yorker to marketing god. Since then, Gladwell has oscillated between pen and mike, balancing lengthy New Yorker articles with roughly 25 speaking gigs a year, his current going rate some $40,000 per appearance. Last year, he spoke at such highbrow conferences as TED and Pop!Tech and was invited to share his wisdom at companies including Genentech, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Hewlett-Packard. His New Yorker articles have become required reading for B-school students. The Tipping Point spent 28 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and more than two years on Business Week’s, and today there are almost 800,000 copies of Gladwell’s trend-mapping bible in print. Mention his impact, though, and he modestly tries to brush it off — leaning, like any good journalist, on data points to support his argument. “Remember,” he points out, “even a book that’s a best-seller still is only read by less than 1% of the American public.”
But as the expert in social epidemics knows better than anyone, it’s not how many people you reach, it’s whom you reach. Gladwell and his ideas have reached a tipping point of their own, and evidence of his impact can now be found in all corners of our culture, from politics (Donald Rumsfeld used “tipping point” to describe the war in Iraq) to entertainment (legendary hip-hop group The Roots used it as the title of their latest album).
