Why Malcolm Gladwell is Wrong

I might be a bit tired right now so I couldn't grasp what she meant. But was there ever a counter-argument in this post?

"I don’t know, because it’s a faulty premise. Just because an entrepreneur minimizes his or her downside, he doesn’t render his risk meaningless."

So she's saying that Gladwell should have said "minimized risk" instead of "[about taking risks] they do no such thing".

"What he never acknowledges is that most entrepreneurs fail, whether they are zany or calculating, and whether or not they are prepared for the challenges of creating a new business."

She doesn't acknowledge this because that wasn't the point of the article. Entrepreneurs who take less risk are generally more successful, of course many (maybe even most) fail anyway, that doesn't change the fact that you are more successful if you take less risk.

This article seems more like a summary and not an actual argument for why "Malcolm Gladwell Must Be Stopped" or why "He’s also a purveyor of garbage".

Edit: he = she

I didn't read the Gladwell article, but it sounds like he's a victim of hindsight bias [0]. It's easy to think that there was less risk involved when reflecting back on someone's decisions after they succeeded.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

True Gladwell writes garbage that sells itself, but isn't this article attempting to do the same thing?

There are different classes of entrepreneur that run the gambit of risk profile. An entrepreneur can be an investor who puts a deal together, a soccer mom who opens a flower shop, a software developer trying to change the world, etc, etc.

I can't read the full Gladwell article (only the abstract), but its not clear to me that Gladwell was trying to address all classes of entrepreneurs. However, if he is saying that predatory, risk-averse behavior is how one class of entrepreneurs (or some classes of entrepreneurs) have made most money / success on average - I think this is a reasonable thesis.

Anyhow, its a fuzzy rebuttal to an unclear thesis, but my takeaway is that there are plenty of people taking huge risks under the label of entrepreneur, succeeding, and setting good examples for the rest of us. Will 'predators' exist and continue to thrive? Sure. But that does not mean its the only way an entrepreneur can approach an opportunity.

While reading Gladwell's book Outliers I got the distinct impression that you could effectively argue against his thesis, that successful people are only successful because of their circumstance, without changing many words in his book. What Gladwell fails to understand is that what makes a person an outlier isn't that they happen to have expended energy getting good at something that people want, it's that they took the time and effort to get good at something to begin with. What makes a person an outlier is the dedication and motivation to truly become an expert at something.

For example, in his book Gladwell says that Bill Gates is a victim of circumstance, and gives examples of that circumstance. One example was that Gates frequently snuck out of his parent's house in the middle of the night to ride a public bus to a local college where he worked on an unused computer terminal. Similarly, Gladwell tells a similar story about Steve Jobs, in which he looks up Bill Hewlett's number in the telephone book, and calls him to ask if he can have some spare electronic components to construct something for a school science project. What makes those two outliers isn't that they had the opportunity to do those things, it's that they actually did them. In both cases, they created an opportunity for themselves, then seized the opportunity. They didn't just created one opportunity, however, they created and took advantage of hundreds of opportunities, each time further leveraging their cumulative advantage. If it was truly just circumstance, then everyone living within bus distance to a college with an unused computer, and everyone with a telephone and a phone book should have founded Microsofts and Apples.

David Cowan captures it better here http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2009/11/gladwells-igon...