Woody Allen famously said that “80 per cent of success is showing up”. Malcolm Gladwell would probably add that it is showing up in the right place, at the right time. Then he would say that the remaining 20 per cent is down to realising that you are in the right place at the right time and working hard enough to make the most of it.

Mr Gladwell, columnist on the New Yorker and author of The Tipping Point and Blink, is in Britain promoting his latest book Outliers. The subtitle of this book is The story of success.

Of course, if you’re looking for the secret of success, it isn’t here. The author demonstrates through a series of stories about extraordinary and ordinary people that success is elusive. It comes down to a series of interwoven events not all of which are within an individual’s control.

Typical of the tales is that of top lawyers in New York, many of whom were born of Jewish migrants, who worked in the garment industry in the Bronx or Brooklyn in the 1930s. Hardly a series of events you would want to engineer.

Mr Gladwell has many interests, not all of them explored in his latest publication: one is that of disadvantages that turn out to be advantages – and at a London Business Forum event to promote the book last week he explored the idea with British business leaders: “When is a disadvantage an advantage? All the things that look like disadvantages in their [the Jewish lawyers] lives turned out to be advantages. That raises the interesting question about how many things that look like disadvantages are advantages.”

Mr Gladwell describes Outliers as “an investigation of the ecology of success, the circumstances, environments and backgrounds that predispose people to doing well. A kind of corrective to the valorisation of the individual that I think has distorted our understanding of achievement.”

He is passionate about the role of society in helping people to achieve their potential. “The problem with the notion that it [success] is individually driven is that there is no role for society. Society becomes a passive player, so this book is really just interested in shifting people to the position of ‘actually society isn’t a passive player, it plays this enormous role’. Now, what people would like to do with that is up to them. I don’t write books that are political prescriptions. They are supposed to be conversation starters.”

Outliers will prompt conversation: in one example, he illustrates how school entry dates play a key role in determining academic success. Ergo, simply changing the school system could improve children’s chances of success. It is something that will surely get the middle-classes chattering.

Just as success is a collective responsibility, so is failure. He tells the story of Korean Air, which through cultural change reduced the number of plane crashes. “We are so used to the idea that if you are failing at something, primary responsibility for correction is yours. But in the case of the pilots, primary responsibility isn’t theirs, really. They need to collectively set out to transform culture – culture is by definition not an individual thing, it is something that we share.”

In the book, he also shows how IQ alone is no indicator of success and that anything over 120 is a waste. But the common thread through all the tales in the book, from Bill Gates to himself, is the need for hard work – 10,000 hours of hard work.

“It seems to be impossible to achieve any kind of true expertise unless you have practised for 10,000 hours. If you think of that as four hours a day, it is ten years,” he says. His own 10,000-hour apprenticeship was as a reporter on the Washington Post.

“There are Presbyterian overtones [to the book] about diligence, humility and hard work. There are all kinds of slightly antiquated notions but unfairly antiquated notions,” he said.

It is this hard work and his up-bringing within a family that valued “meaningful work” that brought Mr Gladwell his own succes s. The final chapter in what he describes as his most personal book is about his own background. He shies away from describing himself as successful, instead mumbling that he has been lucky, worked hard and is just doing his best. As a result, Outliers might be his most successful book yet.

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