Perhaps Malcolm Gladwell is right. Perhaps success isn't something we achieve through exclusively through hard work, leadership training, innate skills, traits and abilities. Perhaps success is a simple combination of all the right factors coming together at all the right times.What does this imply for leadership and followership conversations?
Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. For hockey and soccer players born in January, it’s a better shot at making the all-star team. For the Beatles, it was Hamburg. For Bill Gates, the lucky break was being born at the right time and getting the gift of a computer terminal in junior high. Joe Flom and the founders of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz got multiple breaks. They were born at the right time with the right parents and the right ethnicity, which allowed them to practice takeover law for twenty years before the rest of the legal world caught on.
Hm...do we find ourselves in successful, powerful leadership roles because of hard work, dedication, skill sets and qualifications or is it perhaps due to more primal, circumstantial details? And do many of us "end up" as followers not because of any lack of skill or qualification, but simply because all the circumstantial "stars" just didn't line up? How should Gladwell's conversation affect follower thinking?
This should be a thought-provoking read, as are all Gladwell's thoughts.
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