Outliers! When Malcolm Gladwell released his book last November, he did not expect it to debut at the number one position on the New York Times bestseller lists. It did, and did better – Outliers made the “10,000 hour rule” common parlance in business circles, at least in the West. Gladwell compared case studies of various successful and not-so-successful lads and hypothesized that the most critical success factor to surpass in any area was simply practising a particular task for around 10,000 hours. That’s three to four years, in normal circumstances. You could buy that argument when it comes to analyzing individual performance, but businesses? We suspect that’s another ball game altogether.
But Gladwell’s premise surely throws up a correlation in business that forwards the supposition that the more a corporation perseveres in a particular area/function/location/market, the more the probability of the entity’s success. Or the older an organization is, the better its performance.
We ran the test on B&E Power 100’s top ten companies. Leave two companies (Bharti Airtel, rank 5, set up in 1995; Reliance Communication, rank 9, set up in 2004), all other companies are a quarter of a century to two centuries old – from the youngest Infosys (rank 7, 28 years old) to SAIL (#6, 55 years) to Tata Steel (#8, 102 years old) to State Bank of India (#3, 203 years old), Gladwell’s rule, albeit moderated to suit us, seems to be rocking business proficiency too well.
You can shout – we did too – what about the Googles, the fresh-off-the-blocks who can beat the world at the blink of an eye? Exceptions, dear, exceptions do exist even in well tested homogenous statistical groups, and technically, those exceptions are called outliers...
But Gladwell’s premise surely throws up a correlation in business that forwards the supposition that the more a corporation perseveres in a particular area/function/location/market, the more the probability of the entity’s success. Or the older an organization is, the better its performance.
We ran the test on B&E Power 100’s top ten companies. Leave two companies (Bharti Airtel, rank 5, set up in 1995; Reliance Communication, rank 9, set up in 2004), all other companies are a quarter of a century to two centuries old – from the youngest Infosys (rank 7, 28 years old) to SAIL (#6, 55 years) to Tata Steel (#8, 102 years old) to State Bank of India (#3, 203 years old), Gladwell’s rule, albeit moderated to suit us, seems to be rocking business proficiency too well.
You can shout – we did too – what about the Googles, the fresh-off-the-blocks who can beat the world at the blink of an eye? Exceptions, dear, exceptions do exist even in well tested homogenous statistical groups, and technically, those exceptions are called outliers...
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