Malcolm Gladwell, whose books include Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers, was a speaker for a symposium series presented by Johns Hopkins University on Tuesday night. Evan is a huge fan and has read all of his books, and I have read part of Blink (for a class-haha), so we were both very excited to hear him. He is such an interesting person and has quite the quirky personality. He spoke about the financial crisis and how he believes it was a situation where too much information/knowledge/expertise back-fired on the people in charge. He explained that sometimes a person can know too much, and they become over-confident and aren't able to really look at a situation or a change. It is this over-confidence that can get people into trouble. He had a good line about incompetent people and over-confident people - imcompetent people are never in the position to royally screw up. It's the smart people that have that power. "Incompetent people irritate me; over-confident people scare me," was the line he used.
Elizabeth Edwards, wife of John Edwards, will be the next speaker of the series on October 21. Also, Michael Steele, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, will be speaking in November alongside Aaron Schock (a Congressman from Illinois, who is the youngest member of Congress. As most of you know, these two people having different political views than we do. That being said, we're open to hearing other people's opinions. Sometimes doing that just reinforces what you believe in. :)
Woohoo...it's the weekend! I'll be leaving the office soon (shh!-I took a quick break!) and am looking forward to a relaxing weekend. Evan has a test next week that he'll be studying for, so please keep him in your thoughts as he prepares to take his first test in grad school!
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