What is an outlier? The word may not be a neologism but I have never heard anyone use it in conversation.
As it is, he's a kind of literary Bill Gates, a guy so far ahead of the rest of the pack that you never quite know what he will do next. If you didn't know he was a writer and journalist, you wouldn't be surprised to hear that he was a leading operator at Microsoft or Google. He seems to have absorbed one important lesson of the consumerist culture he deconstructs - that the image you project is paramount in effect, he has made himself, superficially at least, into a brand. It helps that with his wild, unruly curls and wide-eyed gaze, Gladwell has the look of an übergeek. He is the go-to man for a corporate business elite seeking to understand the way we live, think and consume today. He has since become a lauded pontificant and ideas progenitor on the international lecture circuit. The success of the book, which began as an article in the New Yorker, the magazine for which he works as a staff writer, propelled Gladwell into the realm of super-consultancy. The tipping point: who does not now use this phrase to describe a moment of definitive transition? ('Tipping point' seems to have become this generation's 'paradigm shift', a phrase popularised by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 'Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses,' he wrote, suggesting that we contaminate and infect one another with preferences and recommendations, until we reach a 'tipping point', after which a social epidemic becomes contagious and crosses a threshold to reach saturation point. In his first book, The Tipping Point, he studied events such as crime waves and fashion trends and settled on an arresting metaphor to explain why they happen.
He is also an intellectual opportunist, always on the look-out for a smart phrase or new fad with which to define and explain different social phenomena. M alcolm Gladwell is a cerebral and jaunty writer, with an unusual gift for making the complex seem simple and for seeking common-sense explanations for many of the apparent mysteries, coincidences and problems of the everyday.
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