What the Dog Saw
The enormous success of Malcolm Gladwell’s books has a lot to do with his beautifully clear and engaging way of telling a story. It may also have a lot to do with the fact that the main ideas of those books are of particular interest to businesspeople and especially marketers.
The Tipping Point argues (as does Seth Godin) that success in marketing comes when you reach not only the groups and subcultures that will be most enthusiastic about your product, but those that are well connected enough to spread the word widely and rapidly.
Blink holds out the promise that the right decision may come to you in an instant (though only if you’ve devoted enough time to learning your subject). (Outliers, on the other hand, may have less appeal to the titans of industry—arguing as it does that success doesn’t always come from hard work or innate talent but usually requires timing, luck, and personal or cultural advantages.)
Anyone with three back-to-back number-one bestsellers is going to generate a certain amount of resentment. Participants in the Gladwell backlash accuse him of oversimplifying and cherry-picking his data and anecdotes. Life is not that simple, they argue.
As if in response, many of the essays in the new book What the Dog Saw make the point that in many situations the quantity of data, of noise, and of complicated interrelationships is such that you don’t know what’s going to happen.
Uncertainty is uncomfortable, whether you’re in business or not. Storytelling itself is a response to uncertainty, a way of finding (or creating) a narrative thread that makes sense, or seems to make sense, of our experience.
In What the Dog Saw, Gladwell explodes the very kind of appealing narrative explanations that he’s purveyed himself. Criminal profiling, he argues, is no more accurate than the predictions of sideshow psychics based on generalities and leading questions. The experience of being an NFL quarterback is so different from being a college quarterback that there is no way to predict which college stars will do well.
Enron, says Gladwell, didn’t really hide its financial risks—they were simply buried in the mountains of documents they disclosed. Similarly, the warnings about the safety of the Challenger space shuttle, and about the 9/11 terrorist attack, weren’t ignored—they were simply lost in the mass of similar warnings that seemed equally significant. And so on.
All this is interesting, but somewhat unsatisfying to those of us who are looking for guidance in how to make decisions.
One of the few people Gladwell finds who has actually found a way to profit from uncertainty is Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, whose investment strategy is based on buying insurance against large and unpredictable disasters. NInety-nine days out of a hundred, or more, this is a strategy that loses a little money. But every so often—for instance, during a global financial meltdown—it pays off big time.
