By Stephanie Yap

With his lanky frame and trademark halo of hair, Malcolm Gladwell looks every bit an eccentric genius as he strides on the stage in Shangri-la Hotel's Island Ballroom.

He looks sheepish at the enthusiastic applause that greets him, shrugs slightly with his hands in his pockets and modestly bobs his head in acknowledgement.

Then, not once referring to any notes, he launches into the keynote address, Judgement In An Age Of Uncertainty. He speaks with an easy cadence in his youthful tenor voice, gesturing and strolling about the stage to emphasise points, delivering anecdotes and asides with charm and a great sense of comic timing.

His every word is lapped up by the audience of business types at The Premier Business Leadership Series, which was presented by business analytics software and services company SAS on Wednesday last week. This was despite the fact that many of them had probably already read his second best-selling book, Blink, on which his speech was based (in a nutshell: rely on your gut feeling).

Given his confidence and dynamism on stage, it is a surprise when you meet the 45-year-old Canadian writer a half hour later. Polite but quiet, even subdued, he peeks at you from beneath his lashes during the interview and uses his right hand to intermittently tug at his afro.

He apologises that he is jet-lagged, having come from Europe two days before, and laughs goodnaturedly when you ask him, in reference to Blink, for his snap judgement of Singapore.

'I have come from Zurich and the feeling you get in the Zurich airport and the feeling you get in the Singapore airport are very very similar,' he says.

'The interesting thing about Switzerland is that you forget how small it is, and it's the same thing with Singapore.

'The hard thing about understanding Singapore, which plays such a prominent role economically, is that it is physically tiny. You think you're in the capital city of some enormous country and then you realise, no, this is it.'

Gladwell, who has a day job as a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, shot to worldwide fame when his first book, The Tipping Point, was published in 2000. It has sold more than a million copies worldwide.

He has since written two more books, both of which attempt to analyse social phenomena and which explain academic research in the social sciences in terms that a layman can understand.

Penguin, which distributes his books here, says he is currently one of its top 10 best-selling nonfiction authors in Singapore. His most recent book, Outliers, about why some people succeed where many others fail, has sold about 45,600 copies in Singapore within the past two months, while The Tipping Point and Blink each continue to sell about 26,000 and 20,000 copies respectively a year.

Besides book sales, the journalist rakes in a reported US$40,000 (S$58,000) for each of his approximately 25 speaking engagements yearly. He is popular with the business crowd who hope to translate his insights into management strategies.

'When you are a journalist, you are in the business of explaining things and I don't see a difference in explaining things in writing and explaining things in talking. It's just a kind of different form of the same inherently pleasant thing,' he says nonchalantly.

Oddly enough for someone who has obviously succeeded at what he does - he must be one of few journalists who could afford to buy a US$1.5 million apartment in Manhattan's West Village last year - he says that journalism was something he 'stumbled into'.

Born in Hampshire, England, to an English mathematician father and a Jamaican psychotherapist mother, he grew up the youngest of three brothers in Elmira, a small rural town in Ontario, Canada, as his father taught at the nearby University of Waterloo.

One of Gladwell's earliest passions was reading about American politics. 'I read a lot of history, growing up. We weren't really a newspaper family and we didn't really read magazines either. I just read books as a child and I read a lot about American politics, Nixon and Vietnam and Watergate, all the kinds of things that were in the air.

'It's funny because I'm no longer interested in American politics, but when I was a kid, I was. Canadians are naturally obsessed with their larger neighbour, the way I am sure Singaporeans are obsessed with China.'

A champion middle-distance runner in high school, he says he had an undistinguished academic career and majored in history at the University of Toronto's Trinity College only because 'I couldn't think of anything else to take'.

He says with a wry smile: 'My university career was not a well thought-out endeavour, I was just doing whatever came to mind. Most of what I am interested in, I've gotten interested in since I left.

'Some people are enormously influenced by their college years, I really wasn't. I sort of couldn't wait to get out.'

When he graduated in 1984, Canada was in the midst of a recession and so he went to the United States to seek his fortune. He tried, and failed, to get a job in advertising, then started writing for several papers and magazines before being hired by the Washington Post as a business and science reporter.

'I came into journalism really by accident. I was always interested in business but I just couldn't find the job I wanted and so I just kind of tumbled into journalism instead,' he says, adding that even for a long time after becoming a journalist, he dreamt of going to business school.

'I think that the world of business is a wonderful combination of things that are intellectually rigorous and things that are very practical and hands-on. There aren't a lot of jobs that have that combination of things.

'I liked how, and I still like, the fact that the kind of issues that business people deal with are so central, really the kind of immediate things that we deal with on a day-to-day basis.'

In 1996, by which time he had become the Washington Post's New York bureau chief, he was hired by The New Yorker as a staff writer after catching the eye of one of the editors of the prestigious magazine.

'It is the dream job, I think it's the last great job in journalism,' enthuses the bachelor, who believes that getting The New Yorker gig, rather than writing The Tipping Point, was his big break.

'I mean, it's an opportunity to write on whatever you want, at great length.'

And what he wants to write about, he says, are everyday occurrences, which is how he has come to be an authority in explaining social phenomena.

'Since writing for The New Yorker, which I have been doing now for 12 or 13 years, I guess my impulse is always to think about the ways in which I can differentiate myself from other writers. I don't really want to be doing what everyone else is doing, and too much of journalism, I thought, was obsessed with the bizarre,' he says.

'Initially, I was attracted to it because it seemed a kind of novel way of exploring things. But now I think that ordinary things are more interesting on some level than complex or unusual things, I feel there is more to be said about them.'

He obligingly describes a typical workday of his: 'I sleep a lot, so I wake up quite late, maybe nine o'clock or something. And then I venture out into the world with my laptop.

'I don't write in an office, I write in cafes. I try and write in the morning for a few hours, three to four hours if I can, then I spend the balance of the day reporting and setting up things and organising my life.'

A self-confessed introvert, he adds that despite moving from public place to public place on his bicycle, he needs to spend most of his day in solitude: 'I am an introvert, so I have to spend most of the day by myself. Then I'm in a position to talk to people by the end of the day.'

In his spare time, the former track star still enjoys running - 'I don't think of it as connected to my intellectual work in any way, I just like the feeling of moving through the air' - and hits the dirt in Central Park or along the Hudson River.

He muses, though, that he ultimately does not really see the need for hobbies.

'For me, I find my work so much fun that it's not like I need a hobby. I feel my work is my hobby. It's unnecessary to come up with some new exciting thing to divert me from my work.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times.