Gladwell's Outliers

Finished this book months behind schedule. Like the other Gladwell books it is an easy read, insightful and mostly entertaining. The thesis in not so detailed terms is that geniuses, stars, proteges and the ultra successful one in a million stories are less about those people being gifted or somehow smarter than most people, it is more the sum of numerous factors in their lives: where they grew up, how they were raised, what era they were born in, what opportunities they had and what cultural factors influence their lives.

The best part of the book was the chapter that assessed several aviation disasters related to Korean Airline's horrible run of accidents from the 1960's through the 90's.

Of interest:

1. Most airline disasters are never linked to just one catastrophic event  or mistake. Instead they are usually created by a chain of minor and manageable events, in fact on average seven events that occur in sequence that get decidedly worse and in fact cause human error to inevitably creep in.

2. Communication was the number one cause of these aviation disasters. And mostly the communication challenges were between the team/crew in the cockpit.

Both one and two are eerily familiar to anybody who has been in high-pressure situations where things start to go wrong. I don't mean to equate airline disasters with say a marketing rollout that goes wrong or a website launch that gets compromised but the inherent human pressures can be similar.