MBiz

C a p i ta l Every Underdog Has Its Day Malcolm Gladwell tells Winnipeg being first is overrated by Pat St. Germain Winnipeg isn't the most glamourous city in the world. We're not the biggest or the richest, either.  And that's OK. Centrallia 2012 keynote speaker Malcolm Gladwell says being an underdog city has its advantages. "Underdogs tend to triumph more often than you'd think," Gladwell told a full house of international delegates to the global business-to-business forum at the Winnipeg Convention Centre in October. The bestselling author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell says his next book will explore how underdogs win and attempt to figure out why. Part of the focus will be on Manitoba and the Mennonite culture of forgiveness, personified by Winnipeg's Wilma and Cliff Derksen, who forgave their daughter Candace's killer after the 13-year-old was abducted in 1984. Photo courtesy of ANIM Centrallia co-hosts Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce CEO Dave Angus and World Trade Centre Winnipeg CEO Mariette Mulaire with keynote speaker, author Malcolm Gladwell. Macintosh personal computer. He wasn't the first to create a smart phone, laptop or tablet computer, either. But he was able to take other people's ideas and turn them into affordable, user-friendly tools that appeal to a mass market. Gladwell says a key element to Jobs' success may have been his underdog status. When Jobs visited Xerox PARC in Silicon Valley in 1979, he was instantly able to see how the mouse and icon technology under development at the think tank could be marketed. He didn't have a Xerox budget for research or production, but he was able to improve upon their ideas, and it probably helped that he was desperate to succeed. Xerox had money and talent, but lacked his vision. Eventually the company marketed a personal computer, but it had a $16,000 price tag and failed to launch. "We're obsessed with being first in our society and being first is overrated," Gladwell says. Gladwell suggests a history of persecution gave Mennonites the strength to forgive, and he says overcoming obstacles makes us all stronger. Citing Biblical wisdom, he says the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. "We're obsessed with being first in our society and being first is overrated," he says. Gladwell says he's interviewed billionaires whose hardscrabble youths drove them to succeed. And he points to a high rate of dyslexia among successful entrepreneurs, saying they've learned something from their ability to engineer their way around it that puts them ahead of the curve on other fronts. Born in England and raised in Ontario, Gladwell was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2005, but he says he wasn't the first to come up with all the ideas he explores in his books. "I talk to smart people and write down what they say," he told the Centrallia audience. It's not that simple, of course. Like Jobs, Gladwell has a knack for distilling ideas and delivering them to the masses in an appealing format. Centrallia itself is a new take on an existing idea, patterned on the French Futurallia.  A prominent example is Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs. But Gladwell says its face-to-face business matchmaking structure beats high-tech alternatives, in the same way face-to-face dating is essential in personal relationships. Gladwell says Jobs wasn't the first to come up with the idea of using a mouse and screen icons to navigate the "This is the best way to find each other. Everything else is an approximation of this." 22 MBiz November 2012

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