Catalyst 09 :: Malcom Gladwell

Malcom Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award and in 2005 he was names of Time Magazine’s Most Influential People. He is the author of three books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, and Outliers: The Story of Success all of which were number one New York Times bestsellers.

From 1987 to 1996, he was a reported with the Washington Post, where he covered business, science, and then served as the newspaper’s New York City bureau chief. He graduated from University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.

• What happens when people who are good do things that are really bad?
• The Battle of Chancesville took place in the spring of 1863 in Viriginia.
• Lincoln brought in Fighting Joe Hooker.
• Hooker set up a group of smart analysts and set up a spy network to spy on Lee’s army in the South.
• Hooker knew more about Lee than Lee knew.
• He devised one of the most brilliant battle plans and said, “God Almighty could not prevent us from victory tomorrow.”
• What are the consequences of confidence?
• As you give people more information, do they get better at making a prediction or a decision?
• We think that when you give people more knowledge that they would make better decisions.
• More information leads to sense of overconfidence.
• We overestimate how much value there is in extra bits of information.
• If you give people more information about something they will become confident in their understanding of it.
• Additional information typically improves our confidence but not our accuracy.
• Miscalibration happens when experts have excess confidence in their decision.
• The curse of experts is overconfidence.
• They think they know more than they really do.
• Confidence goes against our intuitions.
• Miscalibration of experts is worse than incompetence of amateurs
• People  don’t just make mistakes because they are incompetent, people also make mistakes because they have knowledge.
• Incompetence irritates me; overconfidence scares me.
• We want to hear confidence from experts we listen to.
• We can be trapped by our confidence.
• The world around us can change and we can’t see it if we are blinded by our confidence.
• In times of crisis we think we need daring and bold decision making from our leaders.
• But what we need most from our leaders in a time of crisis is humility.

What are signs of an over-confident leader?

• Overconfidence is not arrogance.
• All of us can become overconfident.
• When we start to get good at something we start to belive we’re better than what we are.
• Look for signs of it in everybody.
• When people stop listening to those around them is when they start to become overconfident.
• Humility is the ability and willingness to listen to others.
• Leadership has to become collective after a certain point.
• Organizations need to change.
• A church of 120 people is not the same as a church of 180 people.

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