Geordieland – no digital backwater

They used to say that the high tide of economic prosperity reached Newcastle (aka Geordieland) last and went out first. However, has the Blair-Brown spending given the NorthEast a post-industrial future – or is the economy still very precarious?

Outliers… Malcolm Gladwell’s book… would have a field day if you looked at Newcastle 1830 to 1870… the invention of electricity from coal-fired power stations… the invention of the railways… the invention of the light bulb…

But, Newcastle is reinventing itself as a world city – an Ideopolis – with embedded university, airport to anywhere… still the joie de vivre of a port town with sunny weather (remember the Romans didn’t settle Manchester because it rained too much!)

Check out the biggest thing happening in Newcastle this year: Thinking Digital- a British-born TED conference, hosted by an inspired Korean-American, Herb Kim,  tasked with bringing cohesion and fighting spirit to the NorthEast’s digital business through his organisation Codeworks…

Malcolm Gladwell in The Week on brainfood

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, has just released his latest book: Outliers: The Story of Success. Being a wired kinda guy, it’s all collected on his website here.

If you’ve never seen Gladwell’s TED lecture on Spagetti Sauce – and the difference between ‘push marketing’ and mass customisation (aka how choice is good economics)… then click here for a treat.

In this week’s edition of The Week, Gladwell lists six books of essential reading. The amazing thing about the internet is that you can fish the library to get a taste of this ‘stuff’ without even needing to buy the book:

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis – qed google gobsmack… watch this lovely YouTube video trailer for the book

Should I be tested for Cancer? Maybe not and here’s why by HG Welch – (Well, in the case of this book – I googled and got the whole book – click here!

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner – book and blog click ici.

Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt

Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man by Garry Wills – again, boy, Google have the whole book up on the web!

The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger Martin – this time, I give you the Wikipedia cheatsheet 

 

Outliers has an interesting thesis. That there are no geniuses – just people who’ve done 10,000 hours of practise in the right subject at the right time and probably ahead of everyone else. So Mozart was doing more piano, younger… because his dad was a concert player himself. Bill Gates and Paul Allen were doing code in an area of computing in their school holidays, only to have greatness thrust upon them.

Two cliches: ‘Practice makes perfect’ and ‘the harder I work, the luckier I get’. Again, good news for us folk who presume we’re average: keep presuming, keep at it, No Surrender.