ISSN: 1992-271X
Vol. 4, Issue-2, Julv-Deceniber, 2009 Journal of Business and Technology (Dhaka)
Outliers: Story of Successes: by Malcohu Glad Well, Little Brown, NY, and 2008 pp (309). A review
By Dr. M. Shamsul Haque
The dictionary (Oxford) meaning of the term “Outlier” is 1. ‘Some thing that is situated away from or classed differently from the main or related body’ 2. ‘A statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others in the sample’. The author MGW has started the book by giving above definitions. He then has gone on to explain some of the Outliers in terms of society, culture, professionals and excellences in the broader historical contexts. In doing so he brought certain combination of factors rather than one or two such as high IQs and education as determining some of the widely known Outliers such as the people in the small city of Roseto in Pennsylvania, lived by migrants from Italy and Bill Gates of the Microsoft The book is a fascinating study and those who are involved in social engineering and development especially in the poor countries all over the world can benefit from the insights provided in this book. This review is intended to highlight some of the findings from this study that appeared to be most interesting to this writer.
The book has nine chapters after an introductory chapter and an epilogue at the end, besides notes for each chapter listing sources and explaining tables and concepts after his epilogue and before index. It is a well-researched publication and there is a thesis that he has tried to establish. That is, given opportunities and chances there could be many more Outliers in the world and the world would have been benefitted more from them and be a better place to live.
The introductory Cli has traced the reason for the healthy condition of the people of Roseto to the way they live in the community following their ancestral home in Italy where from their fore fathers migrated in the end of 19th century. Researchers found out that living in a community of known people for generations in the small community with so many civic organizations they created a social structure that insulated them from the pressure of the modern world and helped avoid fatal diseases like heart attacks that became almost epidemic in the USA in the 1950s. That is why Roseto was a city outside everyday experience where normal rules did not apply. hence it was an outlier.
Ch one describes how the birth dates of Canadian and Czech hockey team players during the first three months (Jan-March) allowed them to get an early start in training among other things. Success in hockey is based on individual merit, on their own performances and that was found to be associated strongly with their dates of birth in the early years of a year for their selection in a team amongst thousands in Canada and Czech Republic. Born in later months of the year they start with smalldisadvantage relative to those starting training earlier by a few months. He has also
described the work of two economist-Bedard and Dhuey, on what is called of the Trends in International Math and Science Study given every four years around the
world and month of birth. “They found that among the fourth graders, the oldest children scored better than the youngest children and that as a ‘huge effect’. They also repeated the study at colleges in the USA and noted that “the relatively youngest
group in their class is under represented by about 11.6 percent. The initial difference in maturity does not go away with time.” The author has concluded that “success is the result of accumulated advantage” that accrues to the relatively older players and students persist in a way that becomes magnified and tends to be shown as outliers, He has suggested grouping players and students with closer birth dates, every three
months, to allow fair competition that would increase the supply of talented players and students besides the ingredient of success at the highest level: passion, talent, and hard work. Reflecting on the Bangladesh situation in the disadvantage of students from rural areas one cannot avoid thinking how many such talents are wasted for not getting opportunities for admission in good colleges in urban areas. This year the MOE fixed a 12% quota for rural students in colleges located in district towns. It would be interesting to monitor if this quota is actually filled with rural students with comparable GPAs. Ch two has the title “the 10,000-hour rule” and it covers successful entrepreneurs in the IT field such as Bill Joy (Sun micro system) and Bill Gates (Microsoft), Beatles
and others. All of them were talented but that would not have been sufficient if opportunities were not opening for them to practice their trades for long hours with computers and music in Hamburg. The author has estimated roughly ten thousand
hours of hard and persistent practices that resulted in their successes as world-class
entrepreneurs and musicians. “ What truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talents but their extraordinary opportunities.” The author noted. These
computer nerds and entrepreneurs were born between 1953 and 1955.( including
Steve Jobs of Apple computer and Eric Schmidt of Google). We can also relate at
least two persons who attained eminence in Bangladesh by their hard work in the
areas of microcredit, Prof. Yunus and Abed of Brac. They worked for at least 25
years before they got recognized as social entrepreneurs( micro-credit plus non-
formal education and health services). In 2007 Yunus and his Grameen Bank got the
Nobel Prize for Peace and F Abed was awarded many national and international
awards for changing the lives of so many poor people , women in particular, in Bangladesh and other countries of the world.
Ch three titled “the trouble with geniuses part-i. It has started with the TV show“who wants to be millionaire” and has cited the performance of Chris Langan whohad IQ of 195, Einstein had 150. In that TV show Langan did very well and remainedcalm till his winning reached $250,000, he made some mental calculation and foundthe risk of losing higher and decided to quit the game with the money. He proved hisgenius without fail the author has noted. But then he has described the result of astudy on geniuses by a psychologist named Lewis Terman, of Stanford University. In l92l Terman took up a study on 1470 children who’s IQs averaged above 140 and
ranged as high as 200. He has traced their lives and published volumes entitled
“Genetic Studies of Genius”. Terman concluded that his Termites would be leaders in
the fields of science, art, government, education and social welfare. Are geniuses the
ultimate outliers? The author then goes on to questions that and found answers in the
works of many others. The relationship between success and IQ works up to a point,
and beyond IQ of 120 points additional IQ points did not translate into measureable
real-world advantage. To prove further he has given two lists of Nobel Prize winners
in medicine(25 colleges and univs) and chemistry(25 American). It showed that more
than half of the prizes were obtained from colleges and universities not in the top
ranking ones. Yale and Columbia and MIT and Harvard are on the list, but so are
DePauw, Holy Cross and Gettysburg. For this reason the author argued against “the
idea that schools can be ranked, like runners in a race”. The issue minority students
(black) also came up and the author quoted from one of the authors of the Michigan
study and quoted as: “But we were completely surprised. We found they were doing
every bit as well. There was no place we saw any serious discrepancy.” The issue of
testing students for admission was also raised and the author found the convergence
test (soiling through a list of possibilities and select right answer) so called MCQ as
not satisfactory to judge intelligence. He has suggested “divergence test” like the Raven’s as more useful for testing quality of candidates. Example of such a test was
also given with possible answers from students for evaluation. For example, write
down as many different uses that you can think of for the two objects: a) a brick, b) a blanket. A student prodigy with much higher IQ gave very brief uses of the two items
comparative two another brilliant students who gave elaborate uses, showing a more
fertile mind than the prodigy. The author argues that after a threshold level, say 130 higher IQs may not discriminatory in terms of achievements. This he terms as the
error in Terman’s studies. Some of his Termites succeeded in many fields. But “the
majority had careers that could only be considered as ordinary, and a surprising
number ended up careers that even Terman considered failures. Nor were there any
Nobel Prize winners in the exhaustively selected group of geniuses.” His field worker actually rejected two elementary students with high IQs who went on to be
Nobel Laureates. By the time Terman published his fourth volume of Genetic studies of Genius he himself expressed his frustration with saying “intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.” In order to be a true outlier you have to know a lot more besides high IQs the author has concluded.
In Ch four, titled The Trouble with Genius-Part2, MG has traced the diverging birthand upbringing of two geniuses: Chris Langan and Robert Oppenheimer. Robert wasborn in a wealthy family and went to Harvard and Cambridge in England to get adoctorate in theoretical physics under a tutor named Blackett. Blackett was more interested in experimental physics and he was forcing Robert in that line of works. Robert became emotionally unstable and at one point tried to poison Blackeu usingchemicals from the laboratory. Blackett suspected that some thing was wrong and reported the case to the university. After negotiation Robert was put on probation only. Ne later on was selected to be the director of the famous Manhattan Project that produced the nuclear bombs dropped on Japanese cities and ended the Second World War. On the other hand Langan got a place in the University of Chicago but joined an unknown Reed College. His poor mother lost three husbands and the fourth one became drug addict and one day simply went off. She missed to send back his financial aid application forms to the college for which he had to drop from college and got a job outside the town. His request to the college to attend in after noon slots was rejected. He could not finish his studies although he maintained his deep interest in philosophy, Math and physics. He could never publish anything. MG has narrated this heart-breaking story of Langan and contrasted with Roberts to show the importance of family and community besides high IQ in attaining success. Further the author has reported from the subsequent analysis by Terman on 730 of the earlier group of Genius in their adult life. According to Terman the top 20% of the group as true success stories in turning out bright lawyers and physicians, engineers and academics. The middle 60% in B group and termed as doing satisfactorily and the bottom 20% were laggards and only eight obtained graduate degrees. After making all sorts of comparison on many traits between the As and Cs Terman concluded that “in the end, only one thing mattered: family background. Knowing that the Cs were also were of high IQs what was lacking was “ a community around them that prepared them properly for the world. The Cs was squandered talents. “This is some thing of universal and enduring factor that Hillary Clinton wrote in her book after visiting many places in the third world countries that you needed a village to raise a child. Looking back in the context of Bangladesh this writer can relate how his life, education and career were shaped by a group of people in his family besides his mother and grandmother to some school (Arabic teacher) and college teachers who provided extraordinary support and encouragement to go ahead from one step to the next up to his M.Com degree from Rajshahi University and finally getting the Ford Foundation Fellowship to study for MBA in the USA and join IBA DU as a teacher. He remembers how at least two of his bright predecessors from the same school simply fell into the C category of Terman. That was the time of 1950 and 1960s. Now as it is widely known rural students in Bangladesh can hardly overcome their accumulated disadvantages over the years and simply fail to make even in good colleges. As mentioned earlier this year the MOE reserved a 12% quota for rural students to attend colleges in district towns. I wonder how many would be able to get into the net and move on in view of the poor educational and social background. When talents are considered as essential to play the roles of prime movers in a society one is left to wonder how much of it is wasted needlessly in the developing countries such as Bangladesh. Frankly speaking there were not enough places to enroll college grads to universities. Some relief has been provided by the establishment of private universities in Bangladesh but they are also not supported by the state and donors to improve the quality in education in these universities. Needless to mention that quality in education has been deteriorating for long in the educational institutions in Bangladesh starting from universities down to primary levels.
In Ch five MG again has traced rise of many professional, specially among the Jewish community who migrated to USA in the early years of the 20th century. Most of immigrants came with some petty professional backgrounds from Europe and they started in the same profession and slowly accumulated capital to expand. However the author has noted how those came before the economic depression in the 1930 could not perform well and those that came after the second world war got tremendous opportunities to prosper in the USA. The second and third generations of the immigrants became professionals in law and medicine. As opposed to the Jewish immigrants Italian and Irish immigrants who came in the later part of the 1 9th century were small peasants in their home places and they concentrated in-their old farming lines. Since the Jews were forbidden to own lands they acquired some skills in trading, and jewelry and garment making. They naturally excelled in those lines in the USA. Here MG has tried to differentiate such works by Jewish community as “meaningful” as there was complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work and that’s worth more to most of us than money. Hence the author again found the culture and generation and family history gave the Jewish immigrants greatest opportunities in the new world and they attained the heights in the professional world. We can see some reflection of the pattern in occupational growth in Bangladesh as determined availability and fertility of cultivable land. People in the Northwestern areas have been engaged in cultivation for centuries as the lands in these areas are fertile due to silts from river flooding every year and were available more on per family basis. Where as the scarcity of land, water logging and salinity from sea water in the south and eastern areas in Bangladesh forced the people get to off to other forms of living within the country and outside. Large number of families from Noakhali, Comilla and Syihet districts migrated out of their home districts and got employed in paid jobs in hotels and restaurants and in civil services and established small shops in other parts of the country and in Britain and NY. Most of the so-called Indian restaurants in England and NY city are owned and operated by migrants from Syihet and Noakhali districts. There are reports that children from these families are going to attend colleges and universities and taken up professional careers in teaching, law and engineering. This is similar to the curse on land holdings by Jews in Europe and their subsequent success in business and other profession as mentioned above. In Bangladesh per capita income of the people in the South —Eastern districts is much higher and those in the Northwestern much lower due to different culture, tradition and opportunities. In Part two of the book there are four more chapters and an epilogue at the end. (Chs 6-9). This part of the book is devoted to tracing what legacies persist generations after generation and if these traits in the people can be changed to bring higher levels of performances. Part 1 of the book has tried to trace how success was due “to steady accumulation of advantages: when and where you were born, what your parents did for a living, and the circumstances of your upbringing were all made difference in how well you did in the real world.
Ch six is small and it introduces the concept of cultural legacies by describing the violent behavior depicted in a small town in Harlan, Kentucky. People in these mountainous county migrated from the boarder lands of Britain-”Scotch-frish” where culture of honor of families was considered so important that killing for honor was not considered murders. These boarder lands were remote and lawless territories and that they had been fighting over hundreds of years to elk out a living rocky and infertile land. So they settled here in the interior and rocky mountain lands in Kentucky and continued tradition of honor killing over petty disputes. Psychologist from the University of Michigan studied these cultural traits among students from such remote violence prone counties and confirmed that they maintained the cultural legacy even after one hundred years and living in a university environment of a cosmopolitan city in the northernmost states in America. “Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives And they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we can not make sense of our world without them”, MG has concluded. Reading this chapter one is quickly motivated to think why the various religious groups in Iraq- the Shiites, the Sunnis and Kurds kept on killing the opponents even after Saddam was removed by the American forces in 2003 and was tried and hanged for murders he did while ruling over the feuding sects for thirty years. Strong religious cultural legacies also held by the Muslims and the Hindus in the area called Kashmir Valley in the mountainous borders between India and Pakistan and the sectarian violence that erupts in India among Muslims and Hindus, and among the many upper and lower castes within Hinduism in India. BD is fortunate in this respect, although cultural legacies of killing over new lands rising out of the estuaries of rivers flowing into the Bay of Bengal is quite common every year. Ch seven covers a more interesting social phenomenon under the title “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes”. The chapter started with the seventeen times higher plane crash record of the Korean Air as compared with United Air of USA during 1988 to 1998, by that time the President of South Korea had to speak up on the matter as it affecting the image of the nation not to speak of the quality of its service. The President actually switched the presidential plane from Korean Air to its newer rival, Asiana. In the midst of the controversy of what was going on an outside audit of Korean Air was leaked to the public. The audit found flight crew smoking on the cigarettes on the tarmac during refueling, in the freight area and when the plane was in the air. The crew read newspaper even blocking signals from the cockpit and that training standard of 747 “classic” was poor and that there was doubt if the First officers could land the plane if the Captain became totally incapacitated. MG described some other plane crash reports and specially the one on the Columbian (Aviana) plane crash in JFK airport in NY in Jan of 1992. It seems there failure in communication between the people who were in the cockpit and the ATCs that might have caused those plane crashes than any technical or weather related troubles and the failure could be rooted in the cultural legacies in the society from which the crew originated. In 2000, Korean Air employed David Greenberg from Delta Airline to run their flight operations. First Greenberg found the English language skill deficiency among some of the airlines flight crews and he set up a program to assist and improve the proficiency of aviation English. Secondly he engaged a Western firm, Alteon to take
over the company’s training and instruction programs. Since there is no non verbal
communication when you are trying to land your plane in an airport, English being the language of aviation it was essential that the cock crew knew English as it is spoken and understood in the English speaking countries. He gave the pilots an opportunity to change on the way to success; an opportunity to transform their relationship to work. That changed the operating conditions in Korean Airlines and it got awards subsequently for sound flight operations after the transformation. An idea of mitigated speech was used to indicate ambiguity in communication from the original objective.
This chapter contains seminal works of Dutch psychologist Geert Hopstede who was
working for the human resource dept of IBM’ s European head quarters. He traveled the globe and interviewed employees on problem solving, working together, and their attitudes
to authority. The result of his study came to be known as “Hofstede’s Dimensions”
in the field of cross-cultural psychology. He categorized people on the
individualism- collectivism scale” in different countries and put USA in the top of
individualism end and Guatemala in the opposite. On “uncertainty avoidance” dimension and tolerance of ambiguity. Among other things Hofstede developed a” Power Distance Index” measuring attitudes towards hierarchy, respect for older people and if power holders were entitled to special privileges etc. In low PDI
countries such as USA as opposed to high PDI countries such as Colombia, pilots treat ATC in JFK differently when approaching to land- on equal vs. subordinate
relations. It may be mentioned that such cross-cultural research in the operations of
MNCs in the sixties and seventies improved managerial performances of businesses globally. It is however surprising to know that Hofstede’s “cultural consequences” could so high impact phenomenon as to cause airplane crashes was quite revealing of the fact that how you were doing was related to where you came from”.
Ch eight of the book dealt with some more interesting aspects of human lives, especially in the poor Asian countries growing paddy(rice). Titled as Rice Paddies and Math Tests. Based on studies on the intricate nature of paddy farming with manyprecise techniques and timing of tilling, irrigation, using fertilizer, weeding out, quickharvesting etc MG tried to relate the practice of cultivation in China and other Asian countries with superior math skills of the people in the so called eastern countries. He also identified some transparency in Asian number system that makes it easier to remember. Like adding 37 to 22, a child has to convert whole words to numbers, 2+7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Asian child does it by three-tens-seven and two -tens two and the necessary equation is embedded in the sentence: its five —tensnine. This another case of cultural legacy, that for the Koreans is advantageous for the 21th century whereas power distance and was unsuitable for the modem task flying airplanes. He then went on to trace the very hard work and intricate small holding rice cultivation around the year to get three crops was behind their in industry and modern sciences. He compared the back bending work in the hot sun as some thing akin to the garment workers of Jewish immigrants to NY and called both them as meaningful works, indicating a relationship between efforts and rewards in an autonomous way. Quoting from many others MG established that agriculture in the western countries even before mechanization was not closer to the as hard, calculative and meaningful works as in Chinese and Asian paddy farming. Paddy being the only crop they used as food three times a day, unlike cultivation of wheat, corn and potato. He mentioned the works of a math professor at Berkeley, Schoenfeld saying learning math is not so much of ability as attitude. Success is function of persistence and doggedness and willingness to work hard, he said. And that is rooted in the Asian culture partly due to the paddy growing practice- from seedbeds preparation to planting, taking out weeds, watering, harvesting quickly, winnowing, drying and storing etc. This being the common practice in all the paddy growing countries in Asia, it is not surprising that the superior math skills of Indian and other countries got recognized in the western world, especially in the IT sector in the silicon valley in California. This line of arguments and evidence provide some hope for the poor countries such as BD where Chinese type of paddy growing has been in practice at least for the last 50 years. Unfortunately BD education system has been failing the nation in developing the inherent math skills of the students in schools due to policy setback. Math and English have been relegated to the back burner in the whole education system. Teachers have been converted into civil servants and given third class category of salaries. As a result no talented graduates take up teaching as a career in primary and secondary levels. Recently some educationists took up the challenge of organizing math Olympics in BD and they are joining international Olympic with good results. In internal Olympics in Math top of the lists are occupied by Singapore, South Korea, China(Taiwan), Hong Kong and Japan. The culture of all those countries is shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work, MG notes. It seems the revival of the Asian nations in the 21st century is to be expected and not only for some of the other values, such as thriftiness and hard work the culture of paddy growing might also be a dominant factor. Chapter nine of the book extends the concept of hard and meaningful work under the title “Marita’s Bargain”. It has traced how a special public school was opened in NY City called as KIPP Academy in mid-1990s. (KIPP stands for Knowledge Is Power Program). KIPP a middle school is famous for mathematics and longer hours of student’s involvement in home works and it afready established its mark in the poor South Bronx area in NYC. There are now more than fifty KIPP schools in the USA and more were opening MG noted. KIPP program is considered as one of the most promising educational philosophies in the USA, not for its curriculum or resources but for taking the cultural legacy of hard work seriously which has been the sources of success for the outliers traced by MG in the previous chapters of the book. Marita was a 12 year old poor girl in one of the NYC schools under KIPP. An interesting statistic was given in this chapter that shows how the knowledge gap in California Achievement Test between students in the first grade from poor and wealthy families doubled by the end of fifth grade in Baltimore. The researcher analysed another set of data that however showed that lower achievement of the poor students was mainly caused by poor scores in reading skills. The tests are taken after the summer vacation and it was found that during the summer time poor students did not work at home whereas the students from wealthy families used their summer effectively to increase reading skills. The poor students did better when they were in schools. This speaks of the home environment in poor families. In the KIPP schools students spend more hours in school and also they spend more hours on study at home. That is the bargain between students in KIPP schools and their students. That in exchange of the extra effort they will get scholarships and obtain places in private or parochial schools and then on to colleges. MG writes” we are so caught in the myth of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth.” That is not really the case as he tried to demonstrate in this book. Students such as Marita actually needed a chance and the chance was given to her to work hard and change her lot through the miracle of meaningful works just like the back breaking works in the intricate wet-rice farming culture in the Asian nations. That China has been attaining 10-12% rate of economic growth is due to combination of the culture of paddy farming that is transferred to industrial jobs whatever be the level of new technologies. In the Epilogue of the book MG has traced his own ancestry in “A Jamaican Story”. He has explained how changes were brought in the British colony in Caribbean by the critical publication of W M Macmillan, a historian from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa in 1935. He has exposed the weaknesses in the education system that led to violent protests in Jamaica and the British introduced reforms and offered scholarships for the children of black slaves. His grand mother and his mother got opportunities to study in London and through generations of marriage with whites they lightened the color of their skin. Gen Collin Powell the former US secretary of States was from one such families. In the end MG seems to have disclosed that his rise to be a prize winning successful author of three books from his former job of business and science reporter in the Washington Post was due to a series of chances that was given to his great-great-great grand mother and the educational reforms brought to Jamaica following the publication of the book by Macmillan created conditions for many including MG to excel and get famous. “The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all”, he has concluded at the end of the book. According to him, the world would be a much better pkce if many such chances were available to all the people all over the world. The whole idea behind sustainable economic development is just that. To create equal opportunities for all people in all places-rural and urban. It is a matter of great regret that how little do we think and try to do that although we talk a lot about changing times in Bangladesh.
