Pages tagged gladwell:

Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

It isn’t surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko’s strategies beyond the pale. It’s wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let’s remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let’s remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath’s terms, Goliath wins.
"Insurgents, though, operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance—and endurance battles favor the insurgent."
Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?printable=true
12 year old girls become basketball heroes by defying convention. SWEET!
"David" can beat "Goliath" by playing by his rules, not the established ones.
When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”
Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=all
Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? Gladwell owns Anderson by using an example from Anderson's own book.
Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell
Seth's Blog: Malcolm is wrong
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/malcolm-is-wrong.html
People will not pay for by-the-book rewrites of news that belongs to all of us. People will not pay for yesterday's news, driven to our house, delivered a day late, static, without connection or comments or relevance. Why should we? A good book review on Amazon is more reliable and easier to find than a paid-for professional review that used to run in your local newspaper, isn't it? Like all dying industries, the old perfect businesses will whine, criticize, demonize and most of all, lobby for relief. It won't work. The big reason is simple: In a world of free, everyone can play. This is huge.
I've never written those three words before, but he's never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go. Free is the name of Chris's new book, and it's going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about.
"By refusing to build new digital assets that matter, traditional publishers are forfeiting their future."
In a world of free, everyone can play. This is huge. When there are thousands of people writing about something, many will be willing to do it for free (like poets) and some of them might even be really good (like some poets). There is no poetry shortage. The reason that we needed paid contributors before was that there was only economic room for a few magazines, a few TV channels, a few pottery stores, a few of everything. In world where there is room for anyone to present their work, anyone will present their work. Editors become ever more powerful and valued, while the need for attention grows so acute that free may even be considered expensive. Of course, it's ironic that sometimes people pay money for my books (I view them as souvenirs of content you could get less conveniently and less organized for free online if you chose to). And it's ironic that I read Malcolm's review for free. And ironic that you can read Chris's arguments the most cogently by paying for them.
People will pay for content if it is so unique they can't get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people. We'll always be willing to pay for souvenirs of news, as well, things to go on a shelf or badges of honor to share.
"by refusing to build new digital assets that matter, traditional publishers are forfeiting their future. ... People will pay for content if it is so unique they can't get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people."
Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: Books: The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell?currentPage=1
Gladwell perspective on 'free'.
Here's an excerpt from Malcom's New Yorker piece pointing out the flaws in Chris's argument. Malcolm was paid to write the piece, of course. Handsomely. As was Chris for writing his bestseller: There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money).
New Gladwell book: What the Dog Saw
http://kottke.org/09/09/new-gladwell-book-what-the-dog-saw
Gladwell articles
Football, dog fighting, and brain damage : The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
Offensive Play How different are dogfighting and football? by Malcolm Gladwell
The effect of football on the human brain is stomach-turning.
“I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I’d hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn’t come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don’t remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off. You’re dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field—fifteen, eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions—boom, boom, boom—lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.
Annals of Education: Most Likely to Succeed: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell?printable=true
Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality.
Bill Simmons: A back-and-forth with best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell - ESPN
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/090513/part1
Great way to lose an hour - a must-read dialog between sports columnist Bill Simmons and author Malcolm Gladwell. http://bit.ly/3w857i [from http://twitter.com/JMaultasch/statuses/1796294654]
This will suck about 30 minutes from your life. As Truman Capote once said about Jack Kerouac, "That's not writing, it's typing."
Simmons Meets Gladwell Part II
Malcolm Gladwell talking about Nick Faldo. "Faldo in his prime was terrifying. He was surly and tough and charismatic and emotionally and psychologically bulletproof, and I feel like he'd do a better job of getting under Tiger's skin than anyone out there right now. What's the defining fact about Faldo? His ex-girlfriend once destroyed his Porsche with a 9-iron. The corresponding fact for Woods is that his favorite band is Hootie and the Blowfish. Hootie and the Blowfish? What's Faldo's favorite band? Joy Division? Or some kind of obscure Welsh thrash band too hard core for American radio?"