Jeff Robinson
CIO & Founder
http://www.cookee.biz

ofcourse,,physically present is still different.

Greetings!

Just to drop by as an alumni of the same University we graduated.

I am a 1994’s graduates in Management

Keep in touch

Thanks

Eliezer

Jeff Robinson
http://www.cookee.biz

For one night only, New York savant Malcolm Gladwell has replaced The Lion King at the Lyceum in London. Curiously, the ticket receipt still has the Lion King symbol on it; even more curiously, the lion’s head is a perfect likeness of the striking, frizzy-haired Gladwell.

There are two performances - at 5.45pm and 8.30pm - and at 5.20pm the queue stretches around the block. The numbers are so overwhelming the first show has to be delayed half an hour. The tipping point has been reached. Gladwell-mania has hit the West End.

The bar is packed with fashionable thirtysomethings, probably all outliers. (If you don’t know what “outlier” means, you haven’t been paying attention this past week and are probably an inlier.) Everyone is furiously typing emails on chunky mobiles, the auditorium a sea of shimmering silver screens.

Eventually Gladwell appears, small, motile, hands making refined shapes in the air, part concert pianist, part marionette. The audience clearly loves him: he is clever, and more importantly, he makes them feel clever. They have come to touch the hem of their hero’s battered black jacket. He is the New Yorker magazine in human form. Malcolm Gladwell - Live in London reads the poster behind him, as if he was a pop star; Art Garfunkel, but writing books rather than assiduously reading them.

“Anyone who thinks they are about to see The Lion King should leave now,” he begins. One longs to see a group of angry children troop out, but no one budges. His introductory remarks are funny and true: on his multiple identities - English, Jamaican, Canadian, American - and on titles. How putting Freud or geology in any lecture title will draw an audience (”Freud and the transparency of real estate”, “the geology of footballers’ wives”). Combining three disparate characters and pretending you have found a link will pack ‘em in too, he says, positing Julius Caesar, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Helmut Lang.

All this is by way of explaining that tonight he has not advertised a theme. But he does have one - the ethnic theory of plane crashes, taken from his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. And therein lies the problem. Because, try as he might - with his seductive tenor voice and his skill with a story, his theatrical silences and the dangerous way he makes mass death amusing - his theory is just not very interesting.

Deferential societies produce bad pilots because they’re reluctant to challenge their captain. Fly with uppity Aussies and Americans rather than polite Colombians. That’s about the long and short of it. Long, in fact, because it takes him an hour and 10 minutes to try to make this fly. Sadly, it doesn’t.

His bigger thesis - that geniuses are made not born, created by cultures rather than genes - gets lost as he obsesses over one Colombian plane that crashed as it approached John F Kennedy airport in January 1990. He almost makes the runway, almost makes you believe he has recreated the lecture as a mix of theatre and stand-up - but not quite.

You end up wondering “why am I here with all these people in expensive spectacles sending text messages?”, and, more insidiously, “wouldn’t I prefer to be watching The Lion King?”