Mingling With Malcolm Gladwell

Best-selling book author Malcolm Gladwell hosted an exciting Mingle earlier this week, the first of its kind as far as we know. The Mingle was part of the Launch Party of F5 Expo, which will be held in Vancouver on April 7. Malcolm is the keynote speaker and will be discussing where business opportunities in social media begin and where they end.

What made this event so special was the fact that Gladwell joined an online group from his New York home, while Launch Party guests watched the event live from Vancouver. The Q&A session quickly jumped into topics Gladwell touched in his book “Outliers”. When do you really do well at what you do and do modern technologies allow us to learn faster and move to the edge that separates the main population from those who excel at certain tasks? Personally, I found Gladwell’s note that the success of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is based on “watch, learn and perfect swiftly and effectively” most interesting. You just know that many of us all will go out and buy an iPad. Or be at least jealous of those who will buy one.

It was Malcolm Gladwell’s first mingle, but there was virtually no learning curve and adjusted to our online 3D environment and the audience in front of him instantly. In fact, a sense of a pioneering event was omnipresent. When asked about his thoughts about Mingleverse by Tuan Nguyen of Tom’s Hardware, he said “it feels like I am in an episode of Star Trek.” That note brought back memories of “to boldly go where no man has gone before”, which surely would be flattering, but it was much more the new way of communicating Gladwell was referring to – which was equally flattering.