On this episode of Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, host Diane Brady talks to author Malcolm Gladwell, who recently published Revenge of the Tipping Point, a follow-up to his bestselling book from 2000, The Tipping Point. Gladwell is also the co-founder of audio production company Pushkin Industries. Their conversation includes a discussion of the new book's themes, including Gladwell's belief that a community's "overstory" or "shared set of norms ... [is] unbelievably powerful in shaping the behavior of those within the community," and why the seed for Revenge started with the opioid crisis.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below.
Transcript
Diane Brady: Leadership Next is powered by the folks at Deloitte who, like me, are exploring the changing roles of business leadership and how CEOs are navigating this change.
Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I’m Diane Brady.
Malcolm Gladwell burst onto the international stage almost 25 years ago with the publication of The Tipping Point. The New Yorker writer went on to do six more books, and now he's back with his eighth, Revenge of the Tipping Point. It's not a reassessment of the factors that make a product or idea explode into a trend, but rather an assessment of how humans manipulate these factors to cause the fevers and contagions around us—for good and for ill. I spoke with Malcolm about what's changed in the environment and in himself since the two of us first met over that iconic book 25 years ago. Here's what he had to say.
[Interview begins.]
Malcolm, it's good to see you and speak with you. I believe we first met, actually, about almost 25 years ago, when The Tipping Point 1.0 came out. I don't know if you remember that.
Malcolm Gladwell: I do. I do remember that. I mean, not crystal clear, but yes, you were one of the very first.
Brady: What made you decide to write Revenge of the Tipping Point? Even the term revenge? I thought that was a fascinating choice of words.
Gladwell: I was going to just do a revised edition, like a kind of updated on its 25th birthday. And then I got into it and I was like, you know, I just have so many more thoughts about epidemics and how they work and so much has happened in the intervening 25 years. And I was particularly interested in how many of these kind of techniques of epidemic management have been used by less scrupulous parties. So I thought, Oh, this isn’t a revision. This is a whole new book. So that's when I switched gears.
Brady: Yeah, I think the whole element of human culpability is really interesting, the thread throughout this book. Let's remind people of the initial thesis of The Tipping Point, not just what it is, but how the idea came to you.
Gladwell: I ran across a paper from a sociologist in 1991 in the American Journal of Sociology. A guy named Jonathan Crane writes a paper called “The Epidemic Theory of Ghetto Life” or something like that and he was looking at teenage pregnancy and I think delinquency or something like that. And his point was, if you examine closely how social problems in a poor neighborhood work, it looks just like an epidemic. They're clearly contagious. The curve looks like an epidemic. And we shouldn't, we use that term epidemic all the time. But his point was it's not a metaphor. It's literal. And I remember reading that and thinking, Oh my God, this is exactly what happened in New York with crime. That was just at the moment when crime in New York had gone from being one of the worst in the country to one of the best, safest cities in the country.
Brady: The broken windows theory.
Gladwell: That and yeah, I was trying to I wa,s just as a New Yorker, trying to understand how did the city go from terrifying to incredibly safe overnight. And that theory made me think, Oh, this idea could be really useful in explaining that transition.
Brady: You know, one of the things that I remember after that book was it really was seized on by the business community. I remember there was a cover story on you being a marketing guru. You started going out on the speaking circuit and such, and it, for good reason, right? It really identified all, so how do you create trends? So give me a sense of when you look back on that period and the impact of this book, how do you reflect back on the way that especially business seized on this as really in some ways a manual on how to create trends?
Gladwell: At the time, I was really interested in marketing and had done a lot of articles for The New Yorker on marketing. And so it was a kind of natural way for me to think of these ideas in that context. And it's funny, you know, this is pre- the full flowering of the Internet, but I think it was already the case that people in the marketing world were understanding that the rules were changing and that traditional media or traditional approaches to marketing their products weren't going to work anymore in the same way. So I think I came along at a time when there was a great hunger in that community for new ways of making sense of their challenge, and that was just good fortune on my part.
Brady: Tell me a little bit about how your thinking has evolved in terms of this book. I know you mentioned it, you know, in the intro, the conclusion, sort of throughout, but what was the motivation to write this? Was it a sense that something was missing or also that the world has evolved in a way that really we need to take more responsibility for the epidemics we do see?
Gladwell: I think the latter. I think it was I mean, I begin and end the book with the opioid crisis, and I, a part of that was just, I had done an episode of my podcast on the opioid crisis, and I just was struck then by something that struck a lot of people, which is that it's amazing to me that a crisis of this magnitude attracts as little public attention as it does, and that the way we were understanding the crisis was, to my mind, very unsophisticated. That was one of the first stories I realized I wanted to tell in a new Tipping Point was to say, you know, this is an epidemic and it's strange in the way that epidemics, when you properly understand them, often are, and we need to understand all the ways in which it is idiosyncratic and inexplicable. And we also need to understand what Purdue did. You know, the company that made OxyContin simply saying that they heavily marketed the drug is utterly inadequate. Their innovation was not that they spent a lot of money on marketing. It's, first of all, is not factually correct and secondly, it's a ridiculous oversimplification. Their innovation was something far more specific, which was they understood they were the first drug company to, in a directed, strategic, aggressive way, put the rules of epidemics to work on behalf of a product.
Brady: Well, and there is a whole ecosystem around it, too, with McKinsey and such too, right? There's a reason why we're seeing multiple fines across the board.
Gladwell: Yeah, no, absolutely. It was a, a lot of telling that story properly, I felt like in order to understand it, you needed a lot of buildup. And so one way to think about the book is it's a very, very, very long introduction to the opioid crisis, to understand the opioid crisis. That's the last chapter for a reason, because I feel like I've got you finally to a place where you get what was happening there.
Brady: Let's go through the book a little bit, because you know, even this investigation of social epidemics, the concept of overstory to start with, I'm going to just go work my way through. The L.A. bank robbery crisis. You contrast really what happened in L.A. with what did not happen in New York. Explain what the difference was between those two cities in terms of one having so many bank robberies and the other really being concentrated largely on one individual?
Gladwell: Yeah. In the book, I'm very interested in the idea that social epidemics respect borders. They're not these wild out of control phenomenon. They appear to, in many cases they appear specific to local communities. And so the example that I start this investigation with is this weird fact that in the late eighties and early nineties, L.A. was overwhelmingly the bank robbery capital, not just of America, but of the world. No one else was even close. A city like New York City, by contrast, had a tiny fraction of the robberies that L.A. did. But the answer as to why that would be the case is not obvious. New York had an incredibly high-profile bank robber who was, you know, if you want to, if you're looking for a kind of contagious figure to lead the movement, New York had that. New York had tons of banks. New York…
Brady: Willie Sutton. Yes, He had two books, actually. Not just one, didn't he? He was quite…
Gladwell: Two books, a documentary. He was a huge celebrity in the sixties and seventies. And, you know, a city with a large criminal element, tons of bank branches. It's really easy to slip away unnoticed in New York City, right? You disappear into the subway. I mean, there's a million things that should have made New York at least the equal of L.A. in bank robberies does not happen. New York's fine. L.A. on the other hand just gets engulfed for a period of about to two years in the nineties, where there are thousands of bank robberies in L.A. Half the bank robberies in the country come from L.A. And that was just a kind of a question that fascinated me in sort of it begins is chapter one. It begins the narrative, is trying to figure out why would something like this strike one city and not strike another?
Brady: And what's the conclusion there? I mean, give us a sense. I know you talk about Miami and some other communities, too. What is the takeaway in terms of what distinguished those two cities if there's if there's some lessons to be gleaned from this?
Gladwell: The L.A. question leads me into this discussion of what I call the overstory, which is this idea that that communities have a kind of common shared set of norms that are maybe outside of awareness, but are unbelievably powerful in shaping the behavior of those within the community. These overstories are volatile. They change. They can change quite dramatically. Like I said, they were more powerful than we think. And they offer a kind of once you kind of appreciate what's happening with these shared norms, you can make sense of behavior that otherwise would be inexplicable. And I think what's going on is that L.A. and New York have very different over stories around, the criminal element has a very different set of narratives they’re telling each other about bank robberies.
Brady: When you go to the example of the Waldorf schools and the low vaccination rates, I started to think about companies and one of the, the term really, when you think about a company’s culture, you know, it feels like this amorphous thing, but yet it's very real. And Purdue, of course, had a culture, as do you know, many more benevolent companies. Is that similar in your mind that this is really a form of overstory where you get absorbed into employment and you start to accept different norms?
Gladwell: Yeah, I think it is a beautiful example of that. The best companies have distinctive stories. I'm not sure all do. I think that that what this is what distinguishes, well, the best and worst. So, I remember years ago going to give a talk at a company that was not doing well. I won't say the name. It's one everyone will know. And the minute you walked in the room, you could tell there was something wrong. You could just feel it. And at the same time, I've — all of us, of, you know, [who] report on business —have been to companies where you walk in the front door and can tell is just something. There's excitement here. People like each other. They're there's a sense there's a real sense of team. You know, there's optimism. There’s enthusiasm. So there is I think that absolutely applies. And one of the things that great leaders have always done instinctively is known how to create and feed the overstory to create some kind of common sense of community and shared values.
[Music starts.]
Brady: Generative AI has been a transformative force in the business landscape for the last 18 months, according to the latest Fortune Deloitte CEO survey. More than half of CEOs are experimenting with generative AI in their own daily activities and, of course, trying to spread it throughout their organizations. I'm joined by Jason Girzadas, the CEO of Deloitte US, which is the long-time sponsor of this podcast. Jason, good to see you.
Jason Girzadas: Hi, Diane. It's great to be with you.
Brady: How are businesses integrating AI into their organizations? Where do you see the most substantial benefits?
Girzadas: I think it's true, as you say, that every organization wants to capitalize on the benefits of AI, particularly generative AI. The benefits have been largely around efficiencies today and looking for ways to automate routine tasks. The promise is there for more insight driven use cases and innovation use cases. That's the next stage. We're seeing organizations looking to move from proofs of concept and pilots to see these technologies and models put in place in true operational uses at scale.
Brady: When you think about how much change there's been in the last 18 months, really curious how do you think it's going to evolve in the next 18 months, 36 months?
Girzadas: I think we're actually needing to change our timing horizon. By all indications, we're more in six month intervals, and I think that's exciting, but also a challenge. Enterprises aren't accustomed to working in that type of cadence and with that type of pace. And so the winners, if you will, will be those that can assimilate this technology that quickly, which I think is putting real strain on organizations’ ability to adapt that quickly. This is a perfect instance where leadership has to be in sync to assimilate technology that quickly. I think as a CEO, it's important that we lead by example. So I've been through all the training, I've been through all the productivity tools that we have available within our organization. But then more broadly, we've embarked upon a significant investment to deploy this across all we do.
Brady: I'm feeling the urgency, Jason. Thanks for joining us.
Girzadas: Well, thank you, Diane.
[Music ends.]
Brady: When you get to the part of the book, I think it's called “The Magic Third” and you quote one of my favorite thinkers, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, about this problem of kind of being the only. Two of the examples you cite are former CEO PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns. And really this idea that a lot of the qualities that we ascribe in this case to women, or to Black women with Ursula Burns, really is more of a factor of proportions and group proportions. Can you talk a little more about that?
Gladwell: I'm delighted that you share my reverence for Rosabeth Moss Kanter. She writes this article in the seventies, [Some Effects of Proportions on Group Life], I’ve forgotten the full title. Incredibly boring title for an article that is so brilliant. I've read that article many times now. There is, every single paragraph has some incredibly interesting insight. It's extraordinary, but she's the one who says very often when we judge the performance of people. So she was called in famously to do a study of a figure at a Fortune 500 company had just hired a bunch of women for the first time in their sales teams, and they weren't doing well. They didn't understand why. She comes in, does this big study, and she says it's not because the women are talented, they're super talented. It's not that there's something wrong with your company. You've got a great company. The problem, she realizes you didn't hire enough women. That you're hiring a bunch of women, you’re distributing them across your sales network. So the typical office is like nine men and one woman, she goes, is not enough. No woman can be herself when she's one out of 10. She's not going get treated like a real human being when she's one of the 10. She's not going to be comfortable when she’s one of the 10. There is, she believed strongly that, you know, when you are one out of 10, you are a token. And that was a debilitating state. And you need to go beyond token status to perform at the highest level. And she felt that was somewhere around a third of, she had three women out of 10, she would say, You have a good shot at being yourself. I use that as inspiration for a much broader investigation of this phenomenon, which is if this is the case, we should be looking at group proportions all the time and asking the question, not what are the individuals like, but what's the size of their group? How many of them are there?
Brady: Well, and one of the things that fascinates me is this upper limit idea. So you talk about the third. You also talk about whether it's white flight in Atlanta or the fear factor we've always seen with Harvard, which of course brought it to a lawsuit of trying to cap the number of certain types of students, which really is social engineering, right? Talk about that as a phenomena, because I think that on the one hand, you increase the numbers, but then there are many incidents that we can think of people increasing the numbers to a point, an understanding that past a certain point things may work in a way that they don't like.
Gladwell: Yeah, so I use this same principle to critique the way that Ivy League schools have managed their minority populations and simply pointing out the thing that triggered the big lawsuit against Harvard and that ended up ending affirmative action was just this observation that over time, the proportions of each ethnic group in the Harvard undergraduate body have remained the same. And the question is, why have they remained the same? Why does Harvard only let certain groups reach a certain level and not get any bigger? Black kids, Asians in particular? And my answer is that it’s social engineering. They understand Rosabeth Kanter's point that at a certain threshold you change from being a token to being yourself to having a real impact on the community you're part of, and they don't want their minority groups to reach that point. I mean, that seems like a highly prejudicial reading of their admissions policy. But in that chapter, I sort of try and make the case to support it.
Brady: Well, that's how you end up with a 33-member rugby team, right? Women's rugby, because by virtue of the type of people that have the money, the expense, and the time it takes to be a certain group. You know, I want to pause a second on Harvard, because you're Canadian, as am I. And much like you, I went to University of Toronto and I believe it was maybe six hours of quality time was spent on my college search. And I have a mental block about the whole idea of legacy admissions and this, I think, you call it ALDC in the book— athletes, legacies, the deans interest list, and of course children of faculty —but especially those legacies. How do you feel about it today? Now we've got court cases that have been decided. Maybe it's just I don't think it's my inferiority complex as a Canadian, it just seems such an anti-meritocratic, if that's the right word, way to approach education. Anti-American almost.
Gladwell: Yeah.The idea that you should get a preference a selective institution because your parents went there. I understand why they're doing it because they think they can raise more money from families that have a multi-generational presence at a school. But it violates everything that’s supposed to be pure and wonderful about a meritocracy, right? It's like ridiculous. If anything, there should be a reverse, Adam Grant has—I think it’s Adam Grant— says he thinks it should be a reverse policy that if your parents went to a selective institution, you should be penalized upon admission because your family has already received the benefits that that institution confers. I love that idea.
Brady: Well, it's such a, people cleave so closely when they're from those schools that that it does, I don't know, it just becomes so much a part of their identity in a way that my school did not for me. And it feeds into this myth of genius somewhat. People forget why they got into a particular institution and they assume it's because they're better than others. I don't know. I'm perhaps going down a rabbit hole here, but I do feel like it's an interesting part of the book of intention and mindset and how we essentially view America today. I mean, to some extent, you wrote The Tipping Point during a period of great optimism. You know, 2000, we'd gotten through Y2K, pre-9/11. Still, the technology bubble had not burst. Or if it was, it wasn't fully there yet. So now we're in this period where we're seeing such polarization and anger. What do you make of the environment today when you kind of intersect it with these issues you've been looking into?
Gladwell: Well, it is true that this book is a good deal more, it’s a little darker than the original book, which was full of youthful optimism. It's the book that you would write at 36. And, you know, the world doesn't look quite as promising and rosy at the present time. So that's a little bit of the book. I just think as well, you know, in reading, going back to my original book, it was my first book. And I think I'm if the, this one feels differently, it's because this one is a much more mature and sophisticated reading of this idea, which is inevitable, I mean, it's written in the prime of my career, not at the start of it. And I just feel like I'm more open to nuanced interpretations than I was back then.
Brady: Do you feel you're less optimistic yourself at this stage in your career?
Gladwell: Ask me on November 5th or whatever it is.
Brady: That’s true. It does feel very high stakes. I don't know if you see any sort of genesis of a shift in the overstory today. Yeah, the stories, how are we shifting the narrative right now or are we?
Gladwell: You know, I'm very always reluctant to talk too much about politics in my book, mostly because I don't really understand politics that well and others do such a good job. So I don't know. I’m baffled by it.
Brady: Yes, it's somewhat existential, I suppose. Well, let me ask you, you've written several books, obviously, and I know Outliers still get cited a lot in my house. In fact, I did a book with a CEO who was very emblematic to me of the herder culture, if that's the right way to [describe it], you know, very interesting. How has this research shaped your thinking in terms of even how you live your life, how you're raising your kids? I know they're very young, Malcolm. Has it shaped some of the decision making that you have yourself?
Gladwell: You know, I wish I could say that all the insights that I've uncovered in my writing have been seamlessly incorporated into my life. They probably haven't. I mean, I'm sure some things have seaped in. I mean, I am acutely aware of this, the idea that I explore in David and Goliath, that not all advantages are advantageous. And I am, you know, by raising my children in a family of relative affluence, I think I'm not entirely sure I'm doing them a service.
Brady: Yeah, it's true. And I know that when I speak to, you know, successful entrepreneurs, etc., it's something sometimes that tortures them, even especially those in family businesses. How do you instill in somebody a hunger, a work ethic, a desire to do something greater? It's very hard. What about journalism? Because when you and I first met, young journalists, we each had our motivations to get into the profession. Here we are now in an age where I probably hear fake news at least once a week and I'm a punching bag for either side depending on what I write and how it's interpreted. What do you think about the state of journalism?
Gladwell: Well, I think it's this is going to sound like a cop-out answer. I think we can't tell because I think we're in a period of transition and who knows where we'll end up. I suspect we'll end up in a pretty, in a better place than we are now. The biggest issue in journalism, to my mind, is not the anger at the mainstream media. It's the decline of local news. And if we could find a way to restore that, I think we'll be a lot healthier.
Brady: Because of the common village green it creates to spur conversation?
Gladwell: Just like democracy is healthier. When there's a case I mentioned in the book a case about a guy named Alman Curry mentioned in the Harvard chapter. And it was a big deal case, a federal case out of Boston. But one of the Varsity Blues cases, very high profile. And I was trying to find a local reporter who covered the case, who could talk to me about it, maybe have some tape on the case. No local reporter covered that case. AP covered it out of New York. And the idea in our generation, when we were starting out, the idea that there could be a high-profile federal case in our city, that our news organization, did not send someone to cover, it would be unthinkable. Unthinkable. And yet that happened in Boston in 2019. And that to me is like that's a recipe for disaster. But I do think that's a fixable problem.
Brady: Yeah, I think it is. I think it is, too. You know, since this podcast is about leadership and I know you've covered a lot of leaders yourself, you speak to a lot of leaders, What do you want them to take away from this? Do you see it as a business book in the same way that The Tipping Point was?
Gladwell: Yeah, in the sense that to be a business leader in 2024 requires that somebody have much more than an understanding of good business practices and strategy. You're leading diverse, complicated workforces. You are dealing with consumers who are way more complex and unpredictable than they ever were in the past. I mean the task is so much more involving and that you have to be someone who's curious about the whole world. You know, I don't think there's a neat division between things that are business-oriented and things that are not anymore. I think that it's one of the reasons that I really love talking to business audiences because I find that they are the most open and curious audiences. They're most willing to entertain new and different ideas to challenge them, because in their world you don't have an ideological attachment to a product, right? Someone comes along with a better idea. You just go with that idea like this.
Brady: Exactly.
Gladwell: So there is a kind of, that kind of thinker is someone who is enormously sort of attractive to me as a writer.
Brady: Well, let me end with something that I think about with regard to the zeitgeist. You know, for both of us, the U.S. is our chosen home. You know, I came here for a reason, including much as I liked the culture of Canada, you mentioned poppies in the book, tall poppy syndrome comes to mind, which was a phrase that Australians and Canadians knew that kind of little bit of a 'why?' culture versus a 'why not?' culture I found in the States. How do you find the zeitgeist right now of American culture, that you've been observing and analyzing and reporting on for so many years?
Gladwell: I mean, I guess one thing that's come out of this book is a much healthier regard for the diversity of American culture, by which I mean the idea that Miami can be a very different place than Jacksonville and that there can exist within what seems like a common cultural and political ecosystem, really profound differences in attitudes and in a wonderful way, that kind of regionality, which is you know from reading the book, a huge part of this book is devoted to this, to the puzzle of why are different communities so, so different? Right.
Brady: Like Palo Alto, and the fake poplar grove, which is reminiscent of several communities.
Gladwell: Yeah. And I suppose that's America does that very well. It's a rare thing. It's a real strength of this country that it's many, many, many different countries lumped together. And I wish that people here, instead of getting upset about those kinds of that kind of variation, would embrace it and just say, actually, that's what's great about this place.
Brady: Is there anything else on your radar right now, Malcolm, that you'd want to put on?
Gladwell: No. My, you know, this book has more than occupied my attention.
Brady: Well, congratulations.
Gladwell: Thank you, Diane.
Brady: Always good to talk to you. And it's food for thought as well. For those who go back and read The Tipping Point, gives a different perspective on that and a different perspective on where we are. Thanks for joining us.
Gladwell: Good. Cheers.
Brady: Cheers.
Leadership Next is edited by Nicole Vergalla. Our audio engineer is Natasha Ortiz. Our executive producer is Hallie Steiner. Our producer is Mason Cohn. Our theme is by Jason Snell. Leadership Next is a production of Fortune Media.
Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune‘s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.
