Malcolm Gladwell

The New Influencers that lever change

The best and most effective managers are often said to be intutitive, in the sense that they have the confidence to act on instinct. What is this instinct? And how can this “intutition” be developed? Gladwell draws lessons from the world of professional athletes and surgeons and musicians to understand the components of intutitive expertise, and help decision makers tap into that powerful resource.

Malcolm Gladwell has an incomparable gift for generating value by interpreting groundbreaking research in psychology, sociology and neurology and applying it to business.

In 2005, Time Magazine named Malcolm one of the 100 Most Influential People.
He is the author of two New York Times #1 bestsellers.

With his first book Malcolm embedded the concept of The Tipping Point  in our everyday vocabulary and gave organizations new tools for understanding how and why change happens, and how to create positive epidemics of ideas and behavior.

In Blink  he analyzes intuition — the judgments we make unconsciously and instinctively—and he explores how we can master this important aspect of successful decision making.

He is currently a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. His editor describes his work as a new genre of story, an idea-driven narrative that’s focused on the everyday and combines research with material that's more personal, social and historical.

He was previously a reporter for the Washington Post. Malcolm is an extraordinary speaker: always on target, aware of the context and the concerns of the audience, informative and practical, poised, eloquent and delightfully warm and funny. Magically, he entertains and shakes up your perspective at the same time.

Why do some ideas or behaviors or products take off and spread successfully - and others don’t? The best messages and ideas behave, Gladwell argues, like viruses, and understanding the laws of epidemics can shed new insight in how to rise above the clamor of voices trying to reach consumers.

The New Influencers

For too long marketers have clung to the notion that influence in the marketplace is a matter of status: that the wealthiest, best educated, consumers are the most important in setting marketplace trends and generating word of mouth. Gladwell turns conventional wisdom on its head, showing that consumer choices are instead increasingly driven by socially influential people, distinguished not by their status but by their personality.

The Levers of Change

Gladwell presents a roadmap for businesses trying to promote internal institutional change. Recent findings in the social sciences, he says, have shed new light on the kinds of contexts and steps that can speed the adoption of new ideas, and strengthen company cultures. Gladwell talks about the “power of context,” the “rule of 150” and other important levers of change.