Malcolm Gladwell’s Impending Tipping Point

Nearly 20 years and millions of sales after his nonfiction debut, Mr. Gladwell is at something of a professional tipping point.He elicits from readers the kind of polarized reactions usuallyreserved for talk-radio hosts. To one camp, he is a master storyteller,pithily translating business concepts and behavioral science to a layaudience. To others, he is a faux intellectual, dressing up ordinarytruths (such as an “Outliers” argument that success results from acombination of hard wor