麻豆传媒

WHEN you are on board an aircraft, 鈥淭his is the captain speaking鈥� may well sound more reassuring than a message from the first officer. Yet crashes happen far more often when the captain, rather than the co-pilot, is flying the aircraft. This is counter-intuitive, since captains almost always have more flying experience than co-pilots.

The reason, says New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell in an alarming chapter of , is cultural. When the captain is flying, the first officer tends to defer, even when he or she suspects danger, while the captain does not hesitate in seizing the controls from the co-pilot.

So what is going on? A chapter called 鈥淭he ethnic theory of plane crashes鈥� looks at the widely varying safety records of national carriers. Borrowing from a 1994 Boeing report, Gladwell invokes psychologist Geert Hofstede鈥檚 鈥減ower distance index鈥�, a concept designed to express the strength of hierarchies in workplaces. The five countries with the strongest hierarchies are Brazil, South Korea, Morocco, Mexico and the Philippines; the least hierarchical are the US, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. This index, says Gladwell, very closely matches the ranking of plane crash frequency by country.

He illustrates this with a riveting 鈥渂lack box鈥� recording of a notorious Korean Air crash in 1997, where the anxious first officer could not bring himself to do more than hint: 鈥淐aptain, the weather radar has helped us a lot.鈥� He could have seized the controls, said crash investigators, but deference inhibited him. No wonder the South Korean president switched airlines.

As you would expect from his hugely successful The Tipping Point, Gladwell roves widely, anecdotally and always readably. He considers success among, for example, Canadian hockey players, New York Jewish lawyers, Asian maths students and the early careers of Bill Gates and The Beatles. Much of his material is drawn from within the US, although, cannily, he says little about Wall Street 鈥渟uccess鈥�.

His basic theme is that success depends on relentless application and a supportive environment, not merely rare 鈥渘atural鈥� talent or intelligence: 鈥淭he outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all,鈥� though most of us 鈥渃ling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit鈥�.

鈥淢ost of us cling to the idea that success is a function of merit鈥�

This is not original, though it may surprise true believers in the American dream more than Brits long immersed in debates about the advantages of family connections and inherited wealth. The fact that high IQ is not a reliable predictor of high office or creative genius is hardly news, either. As Gladwell describes, none of the high-IQ children in a 1920s study by psychologist Lewis Terman went on to found a leading business or win a Nobel prize. Terman even managed to exclude two future Nobelists from his study for having too low an IQ.

One downright suspect aspect of Gladwell鈥檚 thesis concerns Asian skill in mathematics. 鈥淭he Asian world view was shaped by the rice paddy,鈥� he argues. Cultivating rice required hard labour year round and promoted autonomy, compared with the idle winters and feudal structure of European agriculture, and so inculcated an ethic of hard work. This, he says, combined with the more logical, easily memorised names of numbers in east Asian languages compared with Europe鈥檚 gave Asians an edge.

But why then did China and Japan not develop science before the west? Such thinking is on a par with a converse fantasy, revived periodically, that the 鈥渁nalytical鈥� western alphabet promoted reductionism (hence science), while 鈥渉olistic鈥� Chinese characters stifled it.

Although Outliers does not hang together overall, it is thought-provoking in parts, and its miscellany of information and individuals entertains. Now I can answer at least one question asked of Microsoft job applicants: why are manhole covers round? I also know how many thousands of hours the teenaged Gates spent programming before he dropped out of Harvard 鈥� undoubtedly a crucial factor in his success.