Gladwell, the journalist turned guru

Gladwell’s real gift is packaging these ideas in a way that makes them palatable. "[He] acts almost like a translator between the scholarly world and the practical world," says Frank Flynn, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Columbia Business School, who uses many of Gladwell’s articles in his MBA classes. Gladwell deflects the charge that he’s just a savvy marketer of ideas, standing by his earnest intentions to help frame people’s thinking. "When I was writing The Tipping Point , I realized that in order for people to talk about something . . . they need some way to describe and name things," he says. "So I always like to try to come up with simple, sort of catchy ways of capturing complex ideas."

Link: Fast Company | The Accidental Guru.