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“Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push – in just the right place – it can be tipped,” writes Malcolm Gladwell at the end of his breakthrough book, The Tipping Point . It is a great read for retailers who puzzle why their shoppers do one thing and politicians do another. Or why some marketing sticks and some sure fire products stall. Gladwell is a journalist who tells great stories. In this book he talks about the success of Airwalk when the west coast US footwear maker rose from sales of $16 m in 1993 to $175m in 1997. And then bombed… What went wrong? Gladwell interviewed former president Lee Smith. Airwalk made a critical mistake, he said. “We had a segmentation strategy where the small core skate shops – the 300 boutiques around the country who really created us – had a certain product line that was exclusive to them...” And then they stopped doing that… Smith was asked by his category manager what h...

Malcolm Gladwell says he was prompted to write Blink because he grew his hair long and found as a result that he was being stopped by the police more. “It used to be cut very short and conservatively. But I decided on a whim to let it grow wild as it had been when I was a teenager. Immediately in very small but significant ways my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines. And one day as I was walking in downtown Manhattan a police van pulled up on the sidewalk and three officers jumped out. They were looking for a rapist and the rapist, they said, looked a lot like me. “They pulled out the sketch and the description. I looked at it and pointed out to them that the rapist looked nothing at all like me. He was much taller and much heavier and about 15 years younger. All we had in common was a large head of curly hair. After 20 minutes or so the officers finally agreed with me and let me go.” A master story te...

Malcolm Gladwell is famous for his books explaining how the long tail works in e-retailing and that you need to spend 10,000 hours to become an expert in anything. His new book, David and Goliath, is about how we misunderstand the true meaning of advantage and disadvantage. His thesis goes to the heart of a major dilemma facing wholesalers, how to leverage their scale to help independent foodservice and retail businesses beat the multiples. My review: “David came running toward Goliath, powered by courage and faith. Goliath was blind to his approach – and then he was down, too big and slow and blurry-eyed to comprehend the way the tables had been turned. All these years, we’ve been telling these kinds of stories wrong. David and Goliath is about getting them right.” This is how Malcolm Gladwell ends his short, pacey and myth-busting introduction in his latest book. Gladwell is famous for his ability to capture ideas and tell compelling stories that illustrat...

“I have an idea for a new product but I don’t know how to build it,” Josh Kaufman writes on the first page of his book: TheFirst 20 Hours: How to learn anything fast . So do I and so probably do you. So why are we not doing it? “How much free time do you have each day after all your work and family obligations are complete?” asks Kaufman. “Do you feel like you’d need 36 or 48 hours in a day to finally sit down and learn something new?” In 2008 another US author Malcolm Gladwell wrote Outliers in which he argued that you needed 10,000 hours of skills training to become better than other people at something. You may notice that the England football team has just used the 10,000 hours idea as the basis of its skills work with young England footballers. So now you have a new barrier to not learning something new. “Not only do you have to make time for practice…but now you have to put in 10,000 hours.” Kaufman’s book, which will help any business owner looking to grow and develo...

My children hate Malcolm Gladwell and they don’t even know him. In his book Outliers, Gladwell proposed that you had to spend 10,000 hours practising something to become an expert. I won’t let them read The Click Moment , a book from Frans Johansson that proposes that luck has just as big a role to play in success – unless you want to be a chess grandmaster, a tennis star or a classical musician. But The Click Moment will make me more sympathetic when they complain about the long work. Maybe they will get lucky early, I think. But I doubt it. Take the story of Ray Preston who found the perfect spot for his independent bookstore in New York. A month after he opened, a major civic project started that diverted foot traffic away from his shop. Ray tried lots of different things to save his shop. He sold his apartment and moved into the stock room to invest in it. But he reached the point when he thought he would go bust in three weeks’ time. I might as well have some fun, h...