The No. 1 business book in the country is "Outliers: The Story of Success," the new book by Malcolm Gladwell, author of "The Tipping Point." "Outliers" is basically a collection of weird little scholarly studies and anecdotes strung along like pearls on a necklace, arguing that it's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart.

Lyrics from "Pippin" aside, Gladwell spends a lot of his time indicating that a strong factor in success is that the seed finds fertile soil -- as in his story of the kings of Silicon Valley, who were all born within two years of each other, because any computer geek older than that would have been ...  more...