Malcolm Gladwell on the Tipping Point for Changing Team Dynamics

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0:35The versatile Equinox tackles your entire day. The spacious Traverse fits your crew and your whole weekend. And tracks bring style with value you can count on. All infused with tech that has your back. So your drive always hits the right chord. Chevrolet. Together, let's drive. I want to talk about another alluring idea in the new book, and that is the magic third. Simplifying, but when the number of, for example, minority people on a board, in a neighborhood, on a campus, rise to more than a third, interesting things can happen. A lot of this thinking begins with this legendary paper by Rosabeth Cantor.

1:17She was brought in on a consulting job to a company that had just hired its first group of women in their sales team. And the women weren't doing well, and they wanted to know why. And so they bring in Rosabeth to do an analysis. She says, the women are talented. There's nothing wrong with your company culture. She said, your problem is you didn't hire enough women. Group proportions matter. When the numbers of outsiders or newcomers reach a certain threshold, the newcomer is allowed to be themselves. They're heard, they're comfortable, they're listened to, they're no longer tokens. And when they're below that threshold, they're not themselves.

1:54They're under an enormous amount of pressure. No one's seeing them for who they really are. If you're building a kind of a team, and intellectual diversity is extremely important to the success of that team. If you want to have four different kinds of voices, you have to make sure that these divergent groups are each represented in sufficient numbers, that they can be themselves. The reason we want people from different backgrounds is we want the benefit of their difference. And Kantor is saying, okay, if you want the benefit of their difference, you've got to think about how many of them there are.