|
[Sidney Weinberg, an uneducated Polish Jew from Brooklyn, rose from janitor’s assistant to become the senior partner at Goldman Sachs.] Weinberg’s outsiderness allowed him to play the classic “middleman minority” role. One of the reasons that the Parsi in India, the East Asians in Africa, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, and the Lebanese in the Caribbean, among others, have been so successful, sociologists argue, is that they are decoupled from the communities in which they operate. If you are a Malaysian in Malaysia, or a Kenyan in Kenya, or an African-American in Watts, and you want to run a grocery store, you start with a handicap: you have friends and relatives who want jobs, or discounts. You can’t deny credit or collect a debt from your neighbor, because he’s your neighbor, and your social and business lives are tied up together…The minority has none of those constraints. He’s free to keep social and financial considerations separate. He can call a bad debt a bad debt, or a bad customer a bad customer, without worrying about the social implications of his honesty.
-- Malcolm Gladwell, “The Uses of Adversity,” The New Yorker
|
