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Have you ever read a book that reaffirmed what you already believed about life, or perhaps, less importantly, what you believed about the practice of law? By simply reading the book you gained confidence that your own worldview was not only correct, but worth sharing with others? This is what happened to me when I read three books by Malcolm Gladwell-Outliers: The Story of Success; Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking; and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The following is a review of these books, which I fondly refer to as the "Gladwell Trilogy," from the perspective of a typical member of the Forum; in other words, from the perspective of an attorney who touches franchising in some way, shape, or form, along with a few personal observations made along the way.
I. Who in the World Is Malcolm Gladwell?
Gladwell is a unique author, having started his career covering business and science at the Washington Post before later becoming its New York City bureau chief. In 1996, he joined the staffat the New Yorker where he has become a prolific and accomplished essayist. Each of the books addressed by this review was, at one time, a number one New York Times bestseller. If all this success were not enough, Gladwell was named as one of Time's 100 Most Influential People and appears to be nearing social icon status. An English-Canadian, he notes that his unique upbringing-with his British father being a mathematician and his Jamaican-born mother a psychotherapist (and writer on the side)-allowed him to learn, as he would later recall, "that there is beauty in saying something clearly and simply."1 As attorneys, the ability to "say something clearly and simply" is a worthy goal, although one that often proves to be surprisingly hard to attain.
In my view, Gladwell can take relatively complex issues of social phenomenon and distill them down to pithy and entertaining prose-many times utilizing nothing more than multiple "stories" leading to a conclusion. One reviewer summarizes Gladwell's style by stating that he "excels at pinpointing a social phenomenon, be it cultural epidemics (The Tipping Point) or snap judgments (Blink); putting forth his thesis; and illustrating his proof through a series of...