LAS VEGAS - When Canadian pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell took to the stage at a recent SAS Institute Inc. business leadership series here in Las Vegas, he had simple advice for the more than 700 executives in the room on how to become better decision makers: never underestimate the importance of practice; become aware of innate biases that exist in everyone’s decision making processes; and whittle down the amount of information you work with when making those decisions, to only the most crucial elements.
After poking fun at SAS’s, decision to hold a business-analytics software event in a city full of casinos, Gladwell made his point in a keynote by challenging Mozart’s greatness, describing a Greek sculpture acquired by the Getty museum many believe to be a work of forgery, and exploring the bizarre height restrictions that corporate America puts on its CEOs.
Gladwell’s first lesson centred upon the so-called 10,000-hour rule that suggests people need that amount of time in order to engage in a kind of highly complex pattern recognition that makes them masters in their areas of expertise. “It’s incredibly difficult to find exception to this rule,” Gladwell said, adding that if you were to examine a list of the 50 greatest classical compositions of all time, you’d find that their composers had been composing for at least 10 years.
“Mozart is a late bloomer,” Gladwell said, eliciting laughs from the audience. “Have you ever listened to the things Mozart composed when he was nine? They were terrible.… His first truly great (composition) was Concerto 9, K271 … at which point he had been composing for 13 years.”
So what’s going on over those 10,000 hours? According to Gladwell, the key is feedback. Over those hours, a person gets feedback on what they need to do in order to do it better next time, what went wrong and how to correct their mistakes. “That’s my first lesson… the extent that we can create tools that enhance the quality and the speed and the accuracy of feedback,” he said.
