Invigorating talk by Malcolm Gladwell at the HCL Unstructure event this morning.
He talked about themes from his next book about “outsiders” and impact on innovation. They take big “social risks” (we ostracize them during their risky endeavors and when they succeed we try to make them insiders, lavish them big budgets and make them part of the status quo). He made a great point of how we encourage our kids to go to the same elite schools, strive to end up at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs – when we should be encouraging a lot more diversity. (He was too polite given his host to point out the career path in India – strive for their elite schools, the IITs and IIMs and end up at TCS or Infosys or HCL)
He anchored his talk around Emil Freireich, who grew up on the south side of Chicago, went to a relatively unknown medical school and was assigned the seemingly impossible task of finding a cure for leukemia at the National Institute of Cancer in the mid-50s. There was 100% mortality within a few weeks for any child who contracted the disease. The “why not” attitude that came out of that desperate situation led Dr. Freireich to try all kinds of crazy blood transfusion ideas and drug cocktail combinations.
In the Q&A, couple of folks in the audience asked about Steve Jobs. He called Jobs a “tweaker” – improved on stuff Xerox PARC, Sony and Microsoft had innovated. We need those tweakers, but we also need what he calls the outsiders.
Personally, even more gratifying was a few minutes I spent with him afterwards. Remarkably unassuming for such a bundle of intelligence and energy.
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