Malcolm Gladwell
Author of Seven New York Times Bestsellers Including "The Tipping Point," "Outliers," and "Blink"
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers — The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, David and Goliath, Talking to Strangers, and The Bomber Mafia. He has been named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People and one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers. An extraordinary speaker, Malcolm has an unparalleled ability to be both entertaining and challenging, meeting the needs and exceeding the expectations of each unique audience with his signature eloquent, warm, and humorous delivery.
Renowned for his unique perspective on the forces driving human behavior, Gladwell employs masterful storytelling to break down the complex and often misunderstood concepts shaping society. He explored decision making in Blink, the roots of success in Outliers, our underestimation of adversity and overestimation of privilege in David and Goliath, and why interactions with people we don’t know often go terribly wrong in Talking to Strangers.
In his #1 debut The Tipping Point that remained on the bestseller list for more than 400 weeks, Gladwell changed the way we looked at the world through his examination of how ideas spread. In October 2024, he revisits the phenomenon of social epidemics with Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering. The highly anticipated sequel explores how the viral spread of influences has been turbocharged in an age of political upheaval and disruptive technologies. Gladwell offers insight into the potential of tipping points to drive positive change as well as the costs of social engineering gone awry.
His book, The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, was inspired by the four-part series about General Curtis LeMay on Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast. He weaves together stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. He also authored the audio biography Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, an intimate window into Simon’s legendary career, what it means to be alive as an artist, and how to create work that endures, told over 30 hours of conversation with one of America’s most popular songwriters.
Malcolm is the host of Revisionist History, an award-winning podcast that takes a second glance at overlooked or misunderstood events, people, and ideas and asks whether we got it right the first time. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996 and previously served as a science and medicine writer for The Washington Post. He has won a National Magazine Award and been honored by the American Psychological Society and the American Sociological Society. He is a member of the Order of Canada and holds an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Toronto.
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Overstories: Rewriting the narrative on social epidemics
Malcolm Gladwell's research and insights come to life in this inspiring talk based on his highly anticipated new book.
In Revenge of the Tipping Point, his sweeping study of social epidemics, Gladwell shows that we have more control than we think over the worst scourges of our time. From the rash of bank robberies that plagued 1990's Los Angeles, to rampant Medicare fraud in Miami, to the still-raging opioid crisis rooted in spotty prescription regulation in the 1940's, he illustrates how such crises attach themselves to specific places for specific, but often non-obvious, reasons.
If social epidemics embed in places, and the power of places comes from the stories communities tell themselves, Gladwell argues, then communities must change the narrative to find a cure. This is the power of the 'overstory':
'The overstory is made up of things way up in the air, in many cases outside our awareness. We tend to forget about the overstory because we're so focused on the life going on in front of and around us. But overstories turn out to be really, really powerful.'
Like a forest canopy, overstories are complex, and seem all-encompassing. But, as Gladwell reveals, individuals still have an important part to play in shaping our overstories—for better or worse. If we wish to affect positive change, then the more we can understand about the systems around us, the better—because the faster we identify the 'superspreaders' sharing our canopy, the more we can hope to stem a problem before it reaches its tipping point.
In this story of stories from the master storyteller himself, Gladwell offers the ultimate lesson in how not to miss the forest for the trees. Attendees will walk away seeing the world just a little bit differently, with a clearer view of the tools around them to build a better place.
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Next Generation Leadership
The COVID pandemic has given businesses a chance to rethink the way they collaborate and work. Gladwell talks about what he thinks of as the two most important elements of this golden opportunity. First, that teamwork can be realigned according to the very different expectations of the youngest members of the workforce — the digital generation. And second, that teams can be reimagined as "weak link" systems, as opposed to the traditional model of teams as dependent on their strongest link.
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