I’m putting off reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers. Not because I think it’ll be a difficult read – his work is never less than entertaining – but because its premise goes against everything I like to think about how you achieve success, including as an IT professional.
As with his previous titles, The Tipping Point and Blink, you can spend more time reading about Outliers than you will actually read in the actual book. The word outlier, in this case, are the over-achievers like Bill Gates or Wayne Gretzy whose accomplishments are almost impossible to explain except by attributing it to innate genius. Perhaps Gladwell offers the best synopsis on his Web site:
“We’ve been far too focused on the individual—on describing the characteristics and habits and personality traits of those who get furthest ahead in the world,” he writes. “And that's the problem, because in order to understand the outlier I think you have to look around them—at their culture and community and family and generation. We've been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looked at the forest.”
The patterns Gladwell pulls together include common birthdays of successful software entrepreneurs, rich people and soccer players. He points out the disproportionate number of high-profile New York lawyers who happen to come from Jewish backgrounds. He looks at the family life and cultural backgrounds of those pilots who manage to avoid plane crashes and compares them to the ones who crash and burn. Turns out it not only takes a village to raise a child. Behind every great man or woman is a great collection of stats.
I doubt Outliers devotes a chapter to highly successful IT managers, because it’s not a profession that’s typically broken out and analyzed the way doctors and lawyers are. If we took Gladwell’s approach, however, we might see a lot of the clichés about young men mesmerized by technology through video games and Web surfing that go into technology support roles turn out to be true.
We might also discover, however, that the best and brightest IT managers – the ones who wind up being CIO, or who take on a more business-oriented function in the enterprise – are also the ones whose families encouraged them to play sports as well, or whose high-school drama teachers put them on stage. Maybe they were the college kids who started off majoring in history or politics who switched gears before they graduated. Such well-rounded individuals typically have great communication and interpersonal skills, along with business savvy and a holistic approach to solving problems. In other words, they make stellar IT managers.
I don’t think this means IT managers’ destiny is completely based on their backgrounds or surroundings. Similar to the nature vs. nurture debate, there are always examples of those who succeed despite their circumstances. Perhaps the lesson is for IT managers to better understand how their background contributes to their success, and to what extent they need to capitalize on it or transcend it.
Of course, what the best IT managers do might not qualify under Gladwell’s definition of an outlier. He’s charting some of the really big fish, and perhaps helping automate business processes, increase productivity or improve collaboration isn’t really in the same league as what Bill Gates and his peers have done. But the sub-title of Outliers is “The Story of Success.” There may be more stories out there that are still untold.