I have to give Mr. Gladwell this, he is a damn fine writer. Everything he touch becomes interesting and obsessively readable. You come away feeling smarter, let in on a bit of secret knowledge. That said, I'm not so sure Malcolm Gladwell is actually a good thinker. His style is a collage of anecdotes and surprise to conceal the obvious. In this case, those obvious stories are that large and ponderous entities can be beaten by nimble and aggressive ones who break implicit rules, at some point more of the same produces negative results (inverted U-shaped curves), and that childhood adversity produces 'great' people.

I admire Gladwell's obvious skill as a writer, and his jackdaw collections of facts and stories, but I worry that his psuedo-profundity is replacing actual insight.