8,000,000.
That's the estimated number of books sold by perennially bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell — and that figure doesn't include his latest offering, David and Goliath, published on Oct. 1. The undisputed king of "big ideas" has become an economy unto himself: Gladwell commands enormous book advances and has delivered his insights (for big fees) to companies like Google, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.
The Tipping Point
WHAT WE LEARNED: “If you want to bring a fundamental change
in people’s belief and behaviour...you need to create a community around them,
where those new beliefs can be practised and expressed and nurtured.”
Gladwell
reportedly received a $1.5-million advance in 2000; after 428 weeks, it’s still
on The New York Times bestseller list.
Blink
WHAT WE LEARNED: “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”
After Blink was published in 2005, Gladwell’s star was in the ascendancy. According to Geoff Shandler, Little, Brown’s editor-in-chief, “the hardcover of Blink sold three times what the hardcover of Tipping Point did, so his audience has grown and grown.”
Outliers: The Story of Success
WHAT WE LEARNED: “Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for 22 minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after 30 seconds.”
Gladwell’s third book was published for a rumoured $4-million fee and has been on The New York Times bestseller list for over 125 weeks. His speaking fee is now an estimated $80,000 a lecture.
David and Goliath
WHAT WE LEARNED: “We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is — and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants.”
Like every other Gladwell book, it was a bestseller out of the gate, helped in no small part by his publisher Little, Brown: They arranged with Hudson Group, the largest U.S. chain of airport bookstores, to have the title featured at the front of every possible store.