• Newsweek , Tuesday, November 18, 2008 11:45 AM

Jerry Adler sat down with author Malcolm Gladwell and turned out an entertaining article that is more than just another review of Outliers: The Story of Success. You'll get the sound bites in the resulting article -- how the Beatles' grueling work routine had more to do with their success than their acknowledged genius; why so many professional hockey players are born early in the year -- but also insight into Gladwell himself, whose past books have been big hits in marketing circles ("The Tipping Point" and "Blink.")

"Outliers is, among other things, an attempt to deflate the bull market in executive ego," Adler writes. Gladwell is the son of a Jamaican woman who won a scholarship to study at the University of London and an Englishman of greater means.

"I realized I had misunderstood my own family history," he tells Adler. "I was making the same mistake people make about Rockefeller and Carnegie -- assuming they had these unique gifts that let them rise above their origins." Instead, he says, his mother was the beneficiary of her own mother's initiative, of the culture of mixed-race Jamaicans in the last century, of the generosity of neighbors and of impersonal social forces stretching back into history.

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