As the paperback of Outliers has been on the bestseller list for ever, I'm probably the last person to read it. It's an enjoyable read and for a book that's about research results in social science, that must be high praise. 'Outliers' are the people who are extraordinary successes in their field. Here's how Gladwell describes his ambition in writing the book:

My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a
group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just
because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots
of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means
that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how
many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and
uplifting idea.

It's a less unified book than you might think from this description, however. Some of the parts I found most interesting were about how people communicate and make decisions. It's a slight stretch to link that to the notion of extreme success – the link is that people who succeed in difficult circumstances (such as the near-crash of an aeroplane) do so as part of a team of people.

Having said that, I applaud his aim of making readers appreciate that success stems not just from talent, but also from hard work, culture, and the luck of timing and happenstance. The sooner we move away from the idea of the lonely genius (or the heroic leader) the better of we'll all be. This is partly understood, I think. People do appreciate that a star athlete has put in hours of training to burnish a natural talent – but they probably do not know about the impact of arbitrary selection dates in turning athletes born in certain months into successes. We just don't pay enough attention to the role of luck – a theme of Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. But to be a big success, an outlier, you need all of the above, the genes and talent, the effort, the teammates and the luck.

The readability of Outliers lies in Gladwell's gift for storytelling – a good lesson for others who want to popularise serious research. It did sometimes make me uneasy, however. Perhaps such a strong storyline reflects the suppression of the messiness and confusion which usually surrounds empirical work in social science?

As I'm so late to the book there are plenty of other reviews around. Here are the ones from The Independent, Business Week, Time and an astute Huff Post review which points out the glaring absence of any mention of gender in Gladwell's analysis. In a way, the fact that he doesn't discuss why all the 'outliers' are male makes his point over again – success isn't a question of individual genius but rather a social construct.