It's hard not to be charmed by Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell. Compared with the plunging value of Alberta's oil and gas, and the diminishing stocks of fish, timber and autos we glean from other parts of the country, it just may be that Gladwell is our most successful export to the U.S.

Author Malcolm Gladwell. (Brooke Williams/Little, Brown and Co./Associated Press)

A staff writer at The New Yorker, Gladwell currently has three books on the bestseller list. His most recent, Outliers: The Story of Success, is just out in hardcover and it's No. 1 on the non-fiction lists on both sides of the border. His other two, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking are riding high on the paperback lists.

Not bad for a young man from rural, southern Ontario. But then Gladwell, whose father is a mathematician and mother, a Jamaican-born psychotherapist, is someone who seems to have discovered early the value and sheer delight of surprise.

Attending the University of Toronto, he kept a big poster of Ronald Reagan on his wall and played at being a rebel conservative in a liberal setting. It's the sort of contrary stance that serves him well.

No doubt he was charming playing at opposition; he also toyed with a career in advertising.

But then, after a brief stint at a conservative magazine, he found his métier. He went on to report for 10 years for the quite liberal Washington Post. Then he switched and began writing longer feature pieces for The New Yorker.

The Tipping Point is a book-length version of one of his magazine articles. In fact, he always manages to write these proof-of-concept articles first, before he turns them into longer manuscripts. Like the marketers he writes about, he tests the waters.

Social epidemics

For those who haven't read or encountered Gladwell in his numerous books, articles and interviews, here's the shorthand on how he operates: he takes social science (especially social psychology) and other research, jiggles it in his magic bag, then presents an argument embroidered with dozens of anecdotes and telling stories.

A Gladwell piece is like a good solid tree festooned with glistening ornaments. No wonder he sells so well at Christmas (and throughout the year).

His other strength is that he is lucid and writes in plain English, unlike many of the academics he popularizes. Nevertheless, his non-fiction writing is both an imaginative act and a journalistic feat: he reframes all the scholarly research in service of a compelling theme that includes a useful, and often novel, take-home message.

The Tipping Point is about "that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behaviour crosses, tips and spreads like wildfire."

The secret to creating a new hip trend is to understand how epidemics work. Hush Puppies, Gladwell pointed out, were an old-fashioned crepe sole shoe worn by un-hip middle-age salesmen. That is, until trendsetters began appearing at cafes and fashion shoots sporting the shoe. The uncool became chic and soon the epidemic spread.

Gladwell also took the epidemic motif and showed, using the broken-windows theory, how crime can become rampant when places are allowed to run down.

In neighbourhoods defaced with graffiti and abandoned cars, crime spreads in the face of social indifference. So when New York City police began to crack down on petty crimes, they found that larger felonies decreased as well.

Well-paid performer

The success of his books led to Gladwell's second job and it also pays pretty well. For corporate events, he earns up to $45,000 a performance, explaining his theories and retelling his stories.

That's real money for a night's work. In a single evening he makes more than most Canadians do in a year.

And what do the business types in the audience get for their money? A splendid performance. If you want to see Gladwell work an audience, watch him talk about the secret behind creating a winning spaghetti sauce.

A great storyteller, he presents his tale as a mystery and then peels off the layers and tops it off with a message about the scope of human desire. I won't ruin it for you. It's a compelling bit of theatre whether you care about spaghetti sauce or not.

Becoming more serious

Gladwell has his detractors, of course. One of them, Richard Posner, a Chicago judge and prolific author himself, skewered Gladwell's second book, Blink, by picking apart his evidence and his arguments.

Posner puts down Gladwell as someone who writes books for people who don't read them. And there have been other dismissive reviews from writers who are less severely intelligent than Posner and can barely disguise their envy.

Perhaps as a result of these attacks, Gladwell acknowledges that his most recent book, Outliers: The Story of Success, is more socially serious.

The old boy-conservative (he's now 45) is showing his liberal stripes. He's interested in equality, the hallmark of a progressive, and wants to show how people succeed for reasons other than raw talent.

In Outliers, Gladwell tells us that successful hockey players are often those born in the beginning of the year because through most of their early years they are bigger and more confident than their relatively younger counterparts.

He also shows us how poor, black kids who are fortunate enough to get into a charter school by the lottery system can succeed. And, how Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, isn't that special, just damn lucky.

There could have been dozens of Bill Gates everywhere, if only the conditions were ripe and more prevalent.

Bill's luck

In Bill Gates's case, he was fortunate enough to be sent to a high school that had a computer. That was almost unheard of in the 1960s. As a result, the adolescent Gates tapped away at the terminal, endlessly programming.

According to Gladwell, Gates was also obsessed with computers, which clearly played a part in his later successes. He'd sneak out of his house in the middle of the night to break into a local university where there was a computer no one was using. Then he'd program from 2 until 5 in the morning, slip back home, then get up for school.

For Gladwell, what is important is that all success is contingent — a crapshoot. Successful people are lucky, born at the right time, the right place and under the right stars and historical circumstances.

Gladwell's intention is to dethrone the great self-help myth of the self-made man or woman.

A quibble

People who read Gladwell for tips on success will be puzzled by this current message. But I have a different quibble with a writer whom I admire and learn from.

We all stand on the shoulders of not only giants, but generations of ordinary people. In Gladwell's case, his last chapter is a loving paean to his extraordinary mother, a light-skinned black woman who benefited from her own particular historical circumstance: when pale Negroes in Jamaica were considered special and allowed to receive an education.

So, yes, she too was fortunate. But when we read about her, we marvel at her character. And who knows how that was forged? There's no social science formula.

We all know people who have been born with everything going for them and simply coasted, seemingly satisfied to live a routine and undistinguished life. I understand the impulse to take the great-man or woman theory down a peg.

But, surely, the mystery of success belies sheer luck and circumstance. Gladwell knows he's lucky —perhaps even blessed, to use a word he wouldn't use — and he wouldn't be who he is without a dozen odd and timely occurrences. But like Bill Gates, he is also driven.

Isn't it funny how the best want to downgrade their achievements because they have the ability to understand how everything coalesced around them?

In this case, Gladwell's modesty is part of his charm. The best are not brazen and, from their success, a new humility emerges. That's another take-home message from the amiable Mr. Gladwell.