Malcolm Gladwell

On a cool clear night in early march, in front of a nearly packed house at Arlington Theatre (courtesy UCSB Arts & Lectures), the famous New York Times bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell delivered a riveting speech on the epic failure of “experts” in our society, and how certain failures within the banking sector let to the most recent melt-down on Wall Street.  The expert failures were due to overconfidence, according to Glawell, and have occurred many times throughout history including during the Civil War.  Refreshingly, the speech was anything but a snooze-fest, which is often times difficult to accomplish when giving a speech on topics of equivalent importance and scope.  Gladwell, however, captivated the audience for the better portion of about 90 minutes with his story telling prowess, infusing the message with appropriately timed comedic one-liners and an optimal margin of delusional competence, a concept that Gladwell elaborated on quite thoroughly throughout the night. 

At one point in the night, Gladwell summarized his message by saying, “Incompetence annoys me, overconfidence terrifies me. “  He went on to say that “Incompetence is the disease of the Idiot, whereas Overconfidence is the disease of the Expert.”  What he meant by these two lines is that as a society, we place a significant amount of trust in people that are deemed “experts” by their peers.  And because we “trust” these experts, we give them a significant amount of power and responsibility.  Furthermore, when one or more of these experts make a mistake, like in the recent financial crisis when investment banking experts over-invested in sub-prime real estate loans, the outcome is much more devastating than if an incompetent idiot were to make that same mistake, because the idiot has much less power and influence.   In other words, when an idiot fails, it’s no big deal, but when an expert fails it is VERY BAD.  And according to Gladwell, a major reason for the failure of experts is overconfidence.   Overconfidence leads to the inability to see changes in the world around us, blinding us to new information that could help us avoid disastrous failures.

In my personal opinion, the great thing about the message delivered by Gladwell is that it can be applied to a broad spectrum of experts, including but not limited to business leaders, educators, politicians, health care professionals, and military personnel.  In addition, it can be used in our personal lives on a day to day basis because, let’s face it… we all think we’re experts in one thing or another.  For example, if you’re a parent, you are an expert compared with your child.  As experts, we should all remember that overconfidence can ultimately lead to failure.