Malcolm Gladwell addresses Richmond. No, really.

The video is Malcolm Gladwell speaking for an hour to the movers and shakers of Calgary, Canada back in March of 2008. He was invited to a thing called ACAD SmartNight, hosted by Alberta College of Art + Design. Why'd they invite him? To talk, in general terms, about "revitalizing their community."

If you're from Richmond, his words and terms will resonate. If not, they'll likely resonate anyway. His hour begins at the 31:00 mark of the video.

Okay. At about 50 minutes, Gladwell's talk is worth the time and it'll give you a taste of his current book, Outliers: The Story of Success. For background, the book (and part of the video) explores the idea that success is the result of a few things (the bolded terms below, except for concerted cultivation and meaningful work, are my clunky headlines):

• Head Starts - or first mover's advantage; birth day and administrative age-sorting rules favor kids in sport, academics, etc in terms of maturity advantage, with domino effects as we age: good for those at the front of the line, nost so for those further back.
• The Lucky Sperm Club - middle class and higher kids get antsy, helicopter parents as adjunct tutors/facilitators with a checkbook.
• Concerted Cultivation - those same middle class and higher kids are exposed to a certain "entitlement mentality" via their parents - if you have a question, ask it; if you want something, expect that it is is possible if you expend effort.
  
• Cultural Sensibility - if your familial/social/ethnic group decides to be "about" something: hard work, craft-skill, the value of an education, collaboration or any other collection of admirable values, you will imprint to that mosaic. And this basket of ideals will be a firm launch pad for whatever talent you may have while others with comparable talent but lacking those mosaic values will face tougher odds. This happy accident of almost subconcious self-determination is one positive aspect of what he calls community.
  
• Meaningful Work - we create structures and social orders that benefit and perpetuate these ordering (adminsitrative and counting) frames more than they aid the greater number people working within them. The frames are usually culturally inflexible since those who designed them had first say and therefore designed to what they knew and wanted - to what advantaged them. First say often becomes final say. These barriers/structures outlast their makers and live on, imposing a false standard or claiming false utility. Meaningful work, the stuff that engages our talents and assets, regardless of our background, faces these arbitrary barriers. For no good or practical reason, talent is lost and new Bill Gateses--the unlucky or poorly positioned ones--don't happen.

History and geneology and timing mate with talent to make success is mostly it. Gladwell leads off the book (and the talk) by telling a marvelous story about an "anachronistic" small Pennsylvania town called Roseto, settled by new emigrant Italians in the late 1800s. I won't spoil the surprise, but suffice to say there's a certain bondedness and shared cosmology--a particular flavor of community--in the small town that accrues some interesting benefits. Watch, or buy the book to get the story.

All in all, the book is an anecdotal argument--chock full of them, ranging from Gates' unique formative experiences as a kid born in 1955 with then-unprecedented adolescent access to early computer terminals, to the dynamics of Chinese rice farming and its unique conceptual advantages and lessons. I might quibble with some of his correlation-is-causality assertions, but I buy his overall drift. In the end, success is the sum of parts, many of which we don't recognize because of their background and cultural/historic nature. Yes, some are "born on third base and think they hit a triple." And, yes, too many of these latter types comprise a narrow archaic definition of American "success" that needs a recalibration to match and catch up to our social and economic changes of the last 50 to 100 years.

That's my simplistic overview. For a decent discussion of Gladwell and whether he has a tipping point, try Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

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Now, for Richmond and what Gladwell's story of success points toward. In the video, he flatters the folks from Calgary at the 41:00 mark

You're all here today because you want to start a conversation about Calgary's future. and because Calgary has been presented with an extraordinary, once in a century opporttunity. You're a medium size city that's about to become a big city, a regional city that's about to become an international city. You're a prosperous city that's about to be come a really, really wealthy city. You have an opportunity to build something, a cultural and creative community of a truly world class level. But the question you want to ask yourselves is what kind of community you want to build. [Emphasis mine- fouro]

That will sound very familiar to Richmonders because you can't swing a cat around here without hitting some group or collection of groups parleying endlessly about "who we are." In their own way, in their own narrow subsets, they are casting about and asking questions about "community."

And that's not a bad thing. But, much as we heard at a certain political party's convention last year, "Community" and the "organizing" of it draws suspicion--or sneers and hoots--from many, even in Richmond's army of talkers. They get, derisively so, but misguidedly so, that community is a "soft" thing. And their definition of community, their love of and interest in the thing, ends at their nose or at the front door of their organization or interest. Included in this mix are many who will loudly proclaim they are "about results" and are "anxious to get on with it." They are about "hard" things: For a thing to be real to them, they must be able to touch it, measure it, and claim it. They want shovels in the ground, ribbon cuttings, and a guaranteed path to Earnings Before Interest, Tax, Depreciation and Amortization.

Soft versus Hard.

Do you see the paradox? Community is a complex system. We all know that. But, what community comprises primarily is an idea binding a collection of affinities in motion: A shared notion of what matters. Gladwell doesn't say as much, but that's what he's getting at. Community is an intrinsic good, not an instrumental one. (We'll get more into this melding of soft into hard, and into realizing it, in an upcoming post.)

The things that impelled narrow "success" in Gladwell's examples in Outliers were structural: Junior hockey players born early, fell into the league's age sweet spot. A calendar drawn up, ostensibly to organize things, unintentionally set up a structural advantage toward kids born in Jan, Feb, March. Because of this, those kids, with their bodies slightly more mature than other seemingly "identically-able" 10 year-olds born later in the year, went on to dominate and were positioned to be identified and culled as potential talents by coaches. (I have a 10 year-old, and 10 and 1 month is far different, mentally and physically, to his now 10 and 9 months.)

This simple "born lucky" aspect is perpetuated each year because the math didn't change--the more advanced 10 year-old becomes the more advanced 13, 14, and 17 year-old. The reason? His Outlier advantage was derived from an accident of birth that positioned him for extra notice and attention. It really is as simple as the old adage: The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Now, extrapolate that to a city. Who gets heard? Who got heard in 1955 when an interstate was being planned? Who gets heard or noticed when someone says: Downtown Richmond needs Economic Development and incentives? Who gets heard when someone says SOLs will have a downside for employers looking for versatile problem solvers? Who gets heard when somone asks: What does a "City of the Future" walk and talk like--what does it care about, Mayor Wilder?

Since this is a blog post, I'm already way over my word limit so I'll wrap it up for now.

I intend this to be the first of many posts using Gladwell and guys like Richard Florida and even Jim Crupi as examples of trees obscuring our little central Virginia forest. Their concepts and recommendations are real and often useful, but they presume some ability and awareness--some readiness--in Richmond that's just not there. Buying a Hawai'ian shirt doesn't make you Magnum P.I., and inviting trendy authors or consultants to a town unreconciled with its identity and heritage is no formula for success. And, when I say, there's no readiness, I'm generally not talking about the multitudes. I speak specifically of leaders and influencers. They're a well-meaning group for the most part, but they're also stuck in a deeply cynical loop of frustration and over-complication due, in most part, to a mistaken application of history and it's lessons and value, things unique to Richmond. And, if there's one thing Richmond deeply, desperately wants, it is to Be Unique.

As you read, make up your own mind. I'm gonna include examples from my prior work, or my company's, with Jamestown, Colonial Williamsburg and Virginia Tourism and others. In the spirit of open source, I'm gonna reveal some of the stuff and conversations that we've been involved in with people whose jobs it is to guide Richmond to better things. As you might guess, a lot didn't get done or acted upon. For not very good reasons born of those silos and parochialism mentioned above.

We're good at studies and working groups in Richmond. Some say "We'll get back to you" should be on our license plates. As my partner, Shelli Brady, the ex-planning commission vice-chair and early champion of Manchester says, "Meetings and formulas are usually a dodge. You can do some social engineering with spaces, but that's no substitute for leadership with courage and heart." Indeed, "heart" not love is what Gladwell speaks of with his little town of Roseto, Pennsylvania.

Richmond doesn't want to be Loved. It wants, needs, to love itself.

And it can't do that until it is comfortable with itself; until it finds context to focus all that disconnected pretext of history and anxiety, and hopefulness.

I do love my city, so I'm taking a chance here. But, as I wrote the other day, Chance favors the bold, right?