The Great Themes Series #1: Connecting Insights and Delivering Wisdom

Thoughts on Excellence Free E-Newsletter Series
Volume 24, Issue No. 1
September 15, 2025

By Dan Coughlin

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When I was a kid back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I heard about The Great Books Series. I was captivated by the concept that great ideas could be discovered simply by reading books. And so I began my life of reading. In those days I would read 15-20 books a month. These were not part of the Great Books Series, but rather age-appropriate books with a primary focus on biographies and fiction.

Then it all stopped in high school and college while I put aside reading books for doing homework. And then the first five years after college I read a few books. But starting in 1990 I was reminded of the concept that great ideas can be found in books, and then I became lit up with an obsession to read. From 1990 – 2025 I’ve now read over 700 books cover to cover.

I still have not read the Great Books Series, but I have immersed myself in many powerful themes through reading books. In this new series that I’m calling The Great Themes Series, I’m going to share with you some of the powerful overarching topics I’ve studied, and I’ll provide the names of some of the books I recommend for each theme.

Theme #1: Connecting Insights and Delivering Wisdom

Some authors have an uncanny ability to research data and little-known situations, connect them together into remarkably powerful insights, and then deliver them in the form of forceful wisdom. My definition of wisdom is the perspectives we have developed over our lifetime on a variety of topics. This is what we have to offer to other people. And sometimes breakthrough wisdom arises when someone connects insights from a variety of sources.

Malcolm Gladwell is certainly a master of this. In his books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and The Rise of Social Engineering he extracts insights from a wide range of incidents and delivers enormously useful wisdom.

The Tipping Point talks about how ideas spread. Here are some highlights:

The Three Rules of Epidemics:

1. The Law of the Few says that a tiny percentage of people, namely the Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen, do the majority of the work.
2. Stickiness means that a message must make an impact.
3. The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.

Starting with those three ideas and then building on them with myriad examples, Gladwell began a revolution in 2000. Organizations put in enormous effort in an organized way to get ideas to spread. They sought to find the Connectors, the people who would carry an idea to other people, the Mavens, the people who would teach the idea and explain how it works, and the Salespeople, the people who would convince other people of the value of the idea.

Twenty-five years later, Gladwell wrote a follow-up book called, Revenge of the Tipping Point, where he looked at how societal behaviors happen and explained why one group of people did certain things while others seemingly close by did the opposite.

Here are some of the highlights:

1. Overstories. In the forest, overstory is the upper layer of foliage. The size and density of this foliage affects the behavior and development of every species far below. In societies, the overstory is the combined set of influences in a given community. This can include repeated messages from parents or adults in a given area at a given time, popular tv shows or films or music at a particular time, or fashion trends. These overstories affect what people in a given time and place believe to be important, which affects their behaviors. If you want to change societal behaviors, change the overstory.
2. Superspreaders are the people who for one reason or another have enormous influence on large groups of people.
3. Social Engineering is when a group of people predetermine the makeup of a future group of people in an attempt to force dynamics that would likely not happen otherwise.

In reading this book I began to see much more clearly why two people of the same age from the same basic area could be so tremendously different. A lot of their thoughts and behaviors could be traced to their respective Overstories.

Jim Collins for his books, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies and Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t did an enormous amount of research in studying hundreds of companies to land on a handful of very powerful ideas. Here are some of them.

From Built to Last:

1. Clock Building, Not Time Telling. You can look at a watch and tell someone what time it is right now, or you can build a clock that can tell time forever. You can serve the customer yourself over and over, or you can build a great organization that serves many customers. Do you want to tell the time, or do you want to build a clock? That is a very important question to answer.
2. Preserve the Core/Stimulate Progress. Your core values and purpose as an organization should never change. Everything else should be up for discussion to change. This was a major finding from Jim Collin’s research of the greatest and most sustainable companies.
3. Big Hairy Audacious Goals. You need a very few very big goals to stir the thinking and the attentiveness of an entire organization. Select carefully and then puruse.

From Good to Great:

1. First Who…Then What. The idea is to get the right people in your organization, the wrong people out of your organization, and then let those people determine the path of the organization.
2. The Hedgehog Concept. Identify what you could be the best in the world at doing, what you are deeply passionate about, and what could drive your economic engine. The intersection of these three ideas is what you should do as an organization and/or as individual.
3. The Flywheel Concept states that each turn of your flywheel (the work you do) builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort, and it steadily turns faster and faster until there is a breakthrough.

Conclusion

Two authors, many years of research and reflection, four books, and a dozen ideas. The impact has been phenomenal over the past quarter of a century.

Can you step back and think about connections from the various parts of your life, and then guide those connections into practical wisdom to help other people become more effective?

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