While reading Outliers, I reminisced about the time when I was in Business School, and was struggling with the art of cracking cases for management consulting interviews. Some interviews went disastrously, but I finally got the hang of deconstructing cases by the end of the 2nd-year interview cycle. But the fact is that I'm not in consulting, and my thought processes are far less structured now.
The book underlies how a systematic approach to problems can yield some eye-opening results. I admire the examples Gladwell presents, and depth to which he has researched each one. However his basic argument is very simple: that success is dependent on hidden advantages, extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies.
There's one point I don't agree with. In order to explain why Americans of Asian descent do better in college than the majority of Americans, Gladwell makes the generalization that all Asians come from rice growing cultures. I'd momentarily accept the argument that farmers who worked on rice fields learned to work harder than other farmers in other regions of the world, whose crops were more seasonal. However, assuming that all hard-working Asians can be traced to paddy fields, sounds a tad bit simplistic to me. When I was in the US earlier this year, I watched a high-school spelling competition on TV. About 70%+ of the finalists were of Indian descent. I can wager that their families in India had dramatically different backgrounds, and many of the competitors' parents may have immigrated from cities. The impact of an agrarian lifestyle on family culture could have been erased for at least three to four generations.
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