C2 Online in a Nutshell

C2 Online – Montréal 2020, October 19-30, is a new way to convene and connect. It’s a completely digital event separate from the annual C2 Montréal conference each spring, albeit with all the signature, creative C2 content you’ve come to expect. Participants will be able to experience all 10 days of the event via an innovative platform, benefitting from enhanced digital content, deeper learning, heightened networking and greater community engagement.

Now, without further ado…

He’s been called the occupying force of big ideas, a chronicler of jobs-you-never-knew-existed, the Guru of the Underdogs, the king of nonfiction, an eclectic essayist, a “phenomenon… somewhere between social scientist, motivational speaker and preacher-like source of consolation…” But best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t seem to care what critics say, as long as you’re listening.

On the heels of the release of Talking With Strangers, his first book in six years (a case study in how badly humans judge and interpret one another), Malcolm will present a masterclass entitled “A crash course in curiosity” at The Ketchup Conundrum” to “The Talent Myth” to the psychology of overconfidence.

His particular style of intellectual nonfiction, which he himself described as “gateway drugs” to harder readings in academia, has even earned him a term in the cultural lexicon: Gladwellian. And he’s responsible for thrusting concepts like the “10,000-Hour Rule,” “stickiness” and “mavens” into common parlance.

His breakthrough pieces of smarty-pants pop-neurology have turned the writer into a bona fide brand.

Gladwell at a glance

Columns for The New Yorker → Where he’s been a staff writer since 1996
The Tipping Point → How ideas spread
Outliers → The story of success
Blink → Decision-making
David & Goliath → Underdogs

The power of asking

Reviewers have suggested that Malcolm “has mastered the art of telling eye-opening stories about the slightly dumb, obvious questions in life” or that he “raises questions that are reassuringly clear even before they are answered.”

But one could still argue that — especially in business — asking the right questions is key!

Gaining insight into how one of the world’s “Top Global Thinkers” goes about their process should prove invaluable to creative leaders, considering Malcolm believes good business “really comes down to understanding the people that you are working with, both clients and colleagues.”

The mistake many leaders make is that they “are assuming that people have the same identity map as [they] do, that they care about the same things,” he told C2.

“If you don’t know how to ask the right questions, you’ll never understand people. This is a key part of empathetic leadership.”

Indeed, C2 Online participants will have the pleasure of catching Malcolm during his transition from publishing and promoting bestselling books to releasing podcasts while running an audio shop, “suddenly wearing the hat of a manager.”

Famously, since his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Gladwell-the-Manager has stopped doing face-to-face job interviews during the hiring process, pointing to the fact that orchestras were all-male until the introduction of blind auditions.

“We need to completely restructure the way we make hiring decisions,” he argued recently in Montreal, noting the U.K. monarchy is a lottery system that’s produced two highly successful female heads of state.

With a truly Gladwellian finish, he asked: Are random choices better than considered ones?

“Why do we continue to believe how great the system of election is when we keep voting in the same middle-aged white guy?”

The pivot to podcast

Co-founding Pushkin Industries in 2018, Malcolm now leads 21 employees, sitting at the helm of the audio content company that’s responsible for his hit podcasts Revisionist History (which “reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood”) and Broken Record (where he and his team interview musicians across genres).

LISTEN to Solvable, a weekly Pushkin podcast that Malcolm co-hosts featuring the world’s biggest thinkers trying to solve the world’s biggest problems.

Malcolm seems to enjoy his latest gig a lot, emotionally diving deep into the audio game. Revisionist History “unleashes my id,” he told Business Insider. “The immediacy of a podcast is different from a book… with more freedom in the medium to use emotion, to be outraged.”

“You feel with your ears and think with your eyes,” he added on the VOX podcast Recode.

And people are listening: a reported three million listeners tune in at the drop of each episode. “It would be a crime not to use [my] platform,” Malcolm says. “My job, the way I see it, is to start the conversation.”

WATCH Malcolm Gladwell’s Top 10 Rules for Success

Original Source: C2 Online Events, https://www.c2montreal.com/post/c2-online-storyteller-malcolm-gladwell/