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Description: The best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink promotes his latest book, Outlier: The Story Of Success.
Trains: Tube/BR: Charing Cross/Embankment 
Phone: 0870 243 9000
Hot ticket: fans were begging for tickets to Malcolm Gladwell’s sell-out show
For one night only, London’s hot ticket was a lecture on safety in the aviation industry given by a geeky Canadian journalist.
And make no mistake — this was a hot ticket. Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker staff writer whose lucid, sparky non-fiction books have become a minor publishing phenomenon, commands a reported $40,000 for conference appearances.
Last night, he sold out the Lyceum, one of the West End’s largest theatres, twice over.
Morose web designers and business students were seen patrolling queues, begging for spare tickets. No one was selling.
It’s not bad business for a man who looks like the gaunt lovechild of Edward Scissorhands and Leo Sayer and whose specialist subject is, as Basil Fawlty might have it, the bleeding obvious. Gladwell’s first bestseller, Tipping Point, explained how when a lot of people like something, it becomes popular.
His latest, Outliers — which, we were not allowed to forget, these two lectures were an exercise in selling —describes how people’s success depends on the culture they were brought up in. However, what Gladwell does, quite astoundingly in print, is reformulate these simple truths, research some esoteric field, switch the emphasis and make the world seem fresh and exciting again. He’s interested, so we are. So it proved in person. He speaks high, no hesitation, has a kind of serenity to his movements I’ve observed in chess grandmasters. Though the subjects that most fascinate him are on the frontiers of technology, the format for this evening was quaintly old-fashioned — just him and a lectern, like some Victorian scientist. (“Power corrupts, Powerpoint corrupts absolutely”, he has explained.) The focus — expanded from a chapter of Outliers — was the sad tale of Avianca Flight 52 from Bogotá to New York, which crashed as the Colombian co-pilot never communicated to the ground staff at JFK that they were running out of fuel. Colombians are generally deferential; the co-pilot was intimidated by the Americans, so mitigated the truth to the extent that they didn’t even realise the plane was in trouble. More than the bad weather, or the old technology, it was a cultural, human reason that led the plane to crash — just as, though we don’t like to admit it, cultural factors really determine most phenomena.
There was lots more to chew on besides. Most cherishable was Gladwell’s opening gag. Pondering what to call his lecture, he suggested that if you put “Freud and …” or “A geology of …” in front of any subject, it instantly makes it sound appealing. “Who wouldn’t want to go and see a lecture called The Geology Of Footballers’ Wives? ”
Many. But Gladwell’s faith in our curiosity is inspiring — and it’s kind of reassuring that an auditorium’s worth of people found that funny.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
