Booktips: Outliers, The Story of Success

Culture impacts communications in the cockpit... And culture can change. Photo by "alaskan dude" via creative commons

The problem with writing about this book is that I have to remember how to spell success. OK. No little red dotted lines under the word. Two c’s, two s’s. Phew.

I really dug Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (thanks to my mother-in-law for giving it to me). I’d skimmed Gladwell’s Tipping Point and Blink but really got into this one. No skimming. Actual reading.

Outliers: The Story of Success

Gladwell’s premise is that success comes not just from within ourselves.. our grit, determination, hard work, talent, etc… but also from a gift, often hidden, unseen and unappreciated.

The gift of circumstance.

Gladwell gives loads of great examples. When we were born in history (some clearly statistically significant percentage of the wealthiest people EVER were born within a few years of each other); when we were born in a year (some equally significant percentage of Canadian pro hockey players are born within a few days of each other) … etc.

The culture we come from is one such circumstance. And as an example Gladwell tells of certain of plane crashes and how culture impacted communications in the cockpit and led to the crashes.

In one, a Columbian jetliner crashes in New York after running out of  fuel — seemingly (from cockpit transcripts) because the person radioing with the airport was too deferential and indirect in his language with air traffic controllers. He just kind of hinted that they basically had no fuel left.. while air traffic control put them in a long holding pattern.

Some of Gladwell’s circumstances are unchangeable… we’re born when we’re born. That’s the deal.

But others, like how crew communicate in a cockpit can be changed. He write a lot about Korean Airlines and its radical shift from having a high number of crashes to becoming an extremely safe airline  — after a new executive actively worked on changing the culture in the company and how people communicated in the cockpit.

The book is definately worth a read … it has a section at Gladwell’s website.