Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

by Malcolm Gladwell

The standard immigrant-entrepreneur story is about the redemptive power of grit and ingenuity. To hear Markopolos tell it, his early experiences in the family business taught him instead how dark and dangerous the world was: I saw a lot of theft in the Arthur Treacher’s. And so I became fraud-aware at a formative age, in my teens and early twenties. And I saw what people are capable of doing, because when you run a business, five to six percent of your revenues are going to be lost to theft. That’s the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ statistics. I didn’t know the statistics when I was a young ’un. That organization didn’t exist. But I saw it. I saw our chicken and shrimp sprout legs and walk out the back door on a regular basis. They would throw cases of that stuff in the back of their cars. That was the employees.