Gladwell Video

[michelej1]

[this is a fuller discussion of what Gladwell says about FM, cited by someone in the grocery business as advice for long range success]

By Michelle Moran, Progressive Grocer, May 13, 2009

http://www.progressivegrocer.com/pro...3bc2ac76d14a7e
Malcolm Gladwell stepped onto the stage and began talking about Fleetwood Mac.

Fleetwood Mac is often referred to as a band that became an overnight success. Instead theirs is a story of a band that went from failure to success. It’s their effort that brought them success, not mere chance. Rumors was their 15th album.

“I had assumed this was an overnight success. But it took 10 years for them to get to the top,” Gladwell said, adding that to achieve mastery, you have this long period of gestation -- the 10,000-hour rule.

“It is impossible to master any cognitively complex activity without spending 10,000 hours of practice on that activity,” he explained.

That’s 10 years of practice.

“I wonder, while we were in the last 10 years of this bubble where things seemed to be happening magically, whether we have fallen into the trap that effort isn’t in the center of mastery,” Gladwell questioned. “When you ask American kids what it takes to be good at math, they’ll tell you it is something you are born with, it’s innate, not learned….Is this a problem confined to mathematics? I don’t think so.”

Gladwell illustrated his point with American Idol, which fosters the idea of the overnight sensation, supposedly enabling contestants to become stars in the next 10 minutes.

“It is so profoundly false and so profoundly toxic. And I cannot help but thing that this is a behavior that is seeping into our business culture,” he exclaimed.

There are two very different learning strategies. The first is Capitalization, where you build on your strengths and grow toward success. The second is the Compensation strategy, where you compensate for your weaknesses.

“You are given a series of disadvantages and overcome them to build on your value,” Gladwell explained. “This is the more valuable strategy. You see a very different quality coming from people or businesses that follow the compensation strategy.”

People who are willing to work harder to overcome their limitations succeed. In illustrating his point, Gladwell noted that one-third of the most successful entrepreneurs have been diagnosed with a learning disability. They have acquired, while overcoming their disability, a set of skills critical to the business world -- leadership, problem solving, oral communication and delegation.

“The Compensation strategy is a better route to greatness than the Capitalization strategy….We are at a moment when compensatory strategies are all we are left with. They are not obstacles to creativity, they are highways to creativity,” Gladwell concluded. “I worry we have lost sight of the notion that the root to achieving something of value requires failure along the way. There is no way that Fleetwood Mac could have made it today. We would never wait 15 albums for success. We would not even wait one album to see promise. And I cannot help but wonder….Is that kind of attitude costing us all sorts of genius and innovation?”

As this industry faces a new set of challenges -- of disadvantages -- those ready to harness their energy and their teams, and work harder to meet the demands of consumers and the new social structure of the shopping environment are on track for success.