Earlier today, I had the pleasure to briefly meet Malcolm Gladwell and then listen to his keynote.  He told a number of great stories that illustrated things that we should all keep in mind, particularly in the increasingly cost-cutting crazed world that we live in .

The first story he told was about the first boxing match broadcast over radio.  Malcolm also highlighted the dramatic drop in crime in New York City in the 1990s as well as the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The point in all three cases was that dramatic change occurred in a very short period of time and with very little cost.  In other words, even in times when budgets are very tight and business leaders only want to hear about business cases that return value in a matter of months, there is the potential to help drive dramatic change.  In fact, this is likely the time when dramatic change will occur in various industries.

Next Malcolm highlighted the importance of re-framing context when striving to drive change.  He mentioned that safety laws did not drive many people to wear seatbelts.  However, when children who grew up in car seats asked why their parents were not wearing seatbelts, many parents started wearing seatbelts.  The same dynamic applies to how Apple changed the context of mp3 players from techy devices that required a decent amount of geeky knowledge to fashion statements that anyone could figure out.  All of us hoping to help our organizations by leveraging IT, should stop and think about how we can change the context away fixating on devices, software, and things like viruses.  Rather, we need get people focused on how technology can help business and government change in meaningful ways.

The third point that Malcolm made was around the importance of social power that comes from people in a position to rally people to a cause.  Interestingly, the individuals who can rally critical masses of people are often not executives or other obvious leaders.  Referring back to The Tipping Point, Malcolm pointed out that people that can drive mass behaviors are often either:

• “Mavens” – experts that we all turn to
• “Connectors” – people that no many other people across social circles

Finally, Malcolm told a story around the U.S. Navy’s struggles circa the beginning of World War II.  The path to solving the challenges turned out not to be the normal options: changing leadership, throwing money/resources at the problem, finding a better expert.  Rather, it was about aggregating a wide variety of information as well as a wide variety of ‘mavens’.  This led to the identification of key pieces of information that were rapidly disseminated through ‘connectors’ to ship captains.  I’m sure there is much more to the story and that I didn’t get it all right, but the main point leads to the power of combining many different information types with a wide variety of experts and the ability to quickly disseminate actionable advice.

This makes me think about the ‘information’ part of ‘information techology’.  We shoud all spend a bit of time thinking about what information within and outside of organizations would be most valuable to help business leaders make better decisions in these challenging times.  Imagine if IT could not only help with that part of the puzzle, but analytic and collaboration technologies could help experts compare thoughts on the information, and social networks could help rapidly rally people around key actions…

In other words, we should not simply fixate on the money/budget side of things, but we should realize that dramatic changes often happen with very little money/time and we have a lot of the relevant knowledge, skills, and cheap tools that can be key to making the change happen!

Malcolm was also kind enough to sign copies of his latest book Outliers, which I am already about 1/3 through reading.  It has me thinking about what being born in May of 1968 has made possible (or not)…