That story in Gladwell about the (IIRC) Korean Air having to switch cockpit languages to English in order to escape the intrinsic layers of deference built into the language was hardcore. They were going to get delisted in Canada if they didn't do it.
Yeah, better than crashing into a mountain. That cockpit voice recording was really chilling. Gladwell gets a lot of flack, but he's told some interesting stories.
And your further point about businesses needing it too should be expanded to organizations of all kinds. This is a human problem, which means it's an ego problem, on both sides.
He recently did a mea culpa about the tipping point stuff. Glad he did.
I really, really disliked Gladwell. And yet Pushkin (his podcast network) carries some of the best stuff ever (Jill Lepore). And I found I was agreeing with a lot of Gladwell's (and Michael Lewis') overall "punching up" worldview. So I was having trouble reconciliing my two views of him.
As we've seen with Lewis' recent hagiography for that crypto freak: people are just people, they make mistakes, everyone's got blind spots, we don't have to agree on everything to learn from each other.
> Gladwell gets a lot of flack, but he's told some interesting stories.
Isn't the flack he's getting due to exactly that, that his stories would be interesting if true but often aren't?
I haven't followed stories about him, but I doubt that all or even most of his stories were made up. I mean, the Korean Air (IIRC) one can't have been fudged, right?