Review of Gladwell's "Outliers"

I always enjoy reading Gladwell, but I'm also always left with this nagging feeling that I've been flim-flammed somehow. The stories tie too neatly together. The world is confused, then someone has a bold insight, and suddenly everything makes sense, and if we just implemented this great insight, the world would be a much better place. In my world, transitions are much slower and messier than in Gladwell's world, but he's a lot more interesting to listen to.

From his latest work, I've picked up a few things.

1) I'm intrigued by his argument (again, lots of people have people have been saying similar things for a long time, so the story is messier than what Gladwell presents) that IQ accounts for only so much when it comes to worldly success. In fact, there's a threshhold of about 120, beyond which, there's a serious law of diminishing returns. Other types of intelligences (emotional, practical, creative) come to the fore at that point. It would be interesting to do a study of our Honors students, for example, 10 and 20 years out. How much did success in their fields correspond to ACT, for example? We all know the anecdotes of the "C" students who made it big and the "A" students who floundered in life. And if it turns out that "leaders" aren't made in the IQ lab, then are we really privileging the "right" type of student in recruiting? I know, this goes back to the 19th century method of looking first for "character," and that method was very heirarchical and discriminatory ("character" was found in people who looked alike and came from the same social circles), but maybe they had something right that we've lost in our emphasis on IQ and cognition?

2) This argument applies also to our process for hiring good teachers. Southwest's motto is "hire for attitude, train for skill." But we cull candidates based in large part on terminal degrees, experience, and professional accomplishments such as publications. If Gladwell's right about success being determined less by innate cognitive abilities (being born a "genius") and more by socialization, practice, multiple intelligences, etc., then perhaps we have this backwards? To take a JBU example, of our top 9 professors according to our student evaluations, 8 of them are women. Women make up about 25% of our faculty but 89% of our top teachers. Furthermore, 6 of those 8 do not have terminal degrees and none had their terminal degrees when we hired them. In other words, what we "think" we should be looking for when we hire people turns out in large part to be misguided when viewed from the perspective of the main job we ask our teachers to do, namely teach.

3) Being an outlier is both easier to become (it's less about genetics and more about effort and opportunity) than one might think, but it's also harder than one might think (it takes 10 years of real effort with lots of expert support and by someone who has a lot of talent to begin with, and even then you need to hit just the right window of opportunity).