Issue No. 426 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features the latest Wall Street Journal bestseller by Malcolm Gladwell—but be warned. It’s depressing! And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my Top-10 books of 2019 and my Book-of-the-Year pick.
Don’t Read This Depressing Review!
If you’re looking for an upbeat you-can-be-anything-you-wanna-be positive-thinking, inspirational page-turner for Year 2020—THEN QUICK!—delete this eNews. This book is depressing.
Malcolm Gladwell’s new bestseller, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know, is mistitled. Had the publisher asked me, I would have suggested these titles:
• We Are Rotten at Spotting Liars and Deceivers!
• The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things and Desperately Wicked!
• Why Neville Chamberlain Should Have Skipped the Meeting With Hitler!
• The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth: LOL!
• Dishonesty and Stupidity Are Everywhere: Don’t Trust Large Organizations or Bernie Madoff!
I could go on. But if you insist on reading my review of Talking to Strangers (and even worse—reading the book), please remember that I warned you.
This will be short—because it’s too depressing to write a long review.
THE BIG IDEA: Really smart people (the CIA, military intelligence, regulators, university officials with Ph.D.’s, the list goes on…) are not that smart when discerning if people we don’t know well are hoodwinking us (think spies, double agents, Ponzi schemers, football coaches, job applicants, the list goes on…). So…what chance is there for the rest of us with average intelligence? Gladwell: not much! The author elaborates on two puzzlers:
PUZZLE #1: “Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?”
PUZZLE #2: “How is it that meeting a stranger can sometimes make us worse at making sense of that person than not meeting them?”
EXAMPLE: The brazenness of a female employee of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (a Cuban spy), who won honors from the CIA and then was chosen for a stint in Cuba as a CIA distinguished intelligence analyst. Shocking! (Did I mention “shocking”?)
BEST QUOTE: “The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.”
What’s wrong? We’re rotten at spotting liars. Citing numerous studies, Gladwell notes: “What [the researcher] discovered is what psychologists always find in these cases, which is that most of us aren’t good at lie detection. On average, judges correctly identify liars 54 percent of the time—just slightly better than chance.”
He adds, “This is true no matter who does the judging. Students are terrible. FBI agents are terrible. CIA officers are terrible. Lawyers are terrible.”
In typical Gladwellian fashion (to be clear—I love his books), the author paints page-turning narratives with both familiar and unfamiliar accounts: Chamberlain and Hitler, Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Cox (fascinating), the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State University, and the never-should-have-happened death of Sandra Bland (the result of a routine traffic stop). There’s more (and caution—some of the verbatim courtroom accounts are raw and R-rated).
AHA! MOMENT: There are many, but I was particularly intrigued with Gladwell’s focus on “location” and why local police tend to misunderstand criminal data about location—or just ignore it. I found just a modicum of hope to mitigate the depression:
Discussing the “Law of Crime Concentration,” the author writes, “Like suicide, crime is tied to very specific places and contexts. Weisburd’s experiences in the 72nd Precinct and in Minneapolis are not idiosyncratic. They capture something close to a fundamental truth about human behavior. And that means that when you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.”
FINAL THOUGHT: The book is depressing, but you should read it—or delegate your reading to someone on your team.
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know, by Malcolm Gladwell. And special thanks to Dave Barton for recommending this depressing book! To listen to the audio version (8 hours, 42 minutes), visit Libro.fm
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) Malcolm Gladwell said the reason we’re so bad at spotting liars is because “we’re truth-biased” and “…we nearly always miss the crucial clues in the moment…” Yikes! So…who would like to read and report on this book BEFORE we interview our next job applicant?
2) In a footnote about training U.S. military personnel who might some day be water boarded and/or tortured (page 244), Gladwell contrasted two schools of thought. "The Navy wanted to show their trainees how bad things could get. The Air Force felt their trainees were better off not knowing that.” How would you approach this subject—wanting the best for the people you’re training?
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Outliers: 1 of My Top-100 Books
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook
One of the big ideas in the Book Bucket, Chapter 5, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to create your Top-100 book list. This week, I posted three updated lists on my Book Bucket webpage:
BOOKS REVIEWED BY JOHN PEARSON:
• List #1: Books by Management Buckets Categories
• List #2: Chronological List of 425 Issues of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (400+ books)
• List #3: John Pearson's Top-100 Book List (updated every 2 years)
One of my Top-100 book picks is by Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success. (Click here to read my 2008 review.) Here’s a snippet:
You will insist that Gladwell’s conclusions cannot possibly be true. Are they? You’ll sense sadness at how we fail to understand culture—and the incredible harm of wasted years and lives—all preventable, claims the author. He makes a compelling case about luck, timing—and the extraordinary power of the 10,000-hour rule and how it contributed to the success of Bill Gates and the Beatles.
Read Outliers and then host a team discussion on the vast implications for your organization, such as what to consider when recruiting new team members and how professional development programs might need to change based on a person’s ethnicity. For example, Greeks and Guatemalans are in the top five of the “uncertainty avoidance” countries (high reliance on rules), while Swedes and Jamaicans represent the top-five cultures best able to tolerate ambiguity. (Did I mention I’m Swedish?)
P.S. To read my 2013 review of Gladwell’s excellent book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, click here.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Are you leveraging the extraordinary power of visual media to inspire your members, clients, or customers? Check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video), including the new book by Jason Pearson and Doug Fields, This. Customizable Journal: 52 Ways to Share Your World With Those You Love. (Read John’s review here.)
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