MALCOLM Gladwell's two humongous bestsellers, The Tipping Point and Blink, share a shake-and-bake recipe that helps explain their popularity.

Both popularise scientific, sociological and psychological theories in a fashion that makes for lively water-cooler chatter about Big Intriguing Concepts. Both books are filled with colourful anecdotes and case studies that read like entertaining little stories. Both use catchphrases (such as the "stickiness factor") to plant concepts in the reader's mind. And both project a sort of self-help chirpiness which implies that they are giving the reader useful new insights into the workings of everyday life.

Outliers, Gladwell's latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicises the weaknesses of his methodology. The book, which purports to explain the real reason that some people – such as Bill Gates and the Beatles – are successful, is peppy, brightly written and provocative in a buzzy sort of way. It is also glib, poorly reasoned and thoroughly unconvincing.

Much of what Gladwell has to say about superstars is little more than common sense: that talent alone is not enough to ensure success; that opportunity, hard work, timing and luck play important roles as well. The problem is that he then tries to extrapolate these observations into broader hypotheses about success. These hypotheses not only rely heavily on suggestion and innuendo, but they also pivot deceptively around anecdotes and studies that are selective in the extreme.

To Gladwell, the stories of the Beatles and Bill Gates are also distinguished not by "their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities". The Beatles became the Beatles, he suggests, because they happened to be invited, repeatedly, to Hamburg, where they had to perform many hours an evening for many nights – practice time that enabled them to hone their craft.

Gladwell does not explain why other groups who practised as much as the Beatles never became one of the seminal rock groups of all time, or why groups such as the Rolling Stones or the Beach Boys, who didn't play as many Hamburg shows as the Beatles, also went on to shape music history.

In much the same fashion, Gladwell suggests that Bill Gates became Bill Gates because he was lucky enough to attend a high school that "had access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968" and because he had opportunities to spend hours working on computer programming before dropping out of Harvard to start his own software company.

Both the Beatles and Gates, Gladwell argues, exceeded or came close to what he calls "the 10,000-Hour Rule" – the number of hours of practice that a neurologist named Daniel Levitin says are likely to be required "to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – in anything".

Gladwell similarly raises the notion that cultural traditions may play a role in plane crashes, that the 1990 crash of Avianca Flight 52 over Long Island might have had something to do with the pilots being Colombian.

Drawing on the work of the psychologist Robert Helmreich, Gladwell argues that the pilots came from a culture with "a deep and abiding respect for authority" – which suggests that the first officer was reluctant to speak up when the exhausted captain failed to do so, and that both men failed to talk forcefully to the air traffic controllers, who were tough New Yorkers, unaccustomed to the pilots' polite language.

Such assessments turn individuals into pawns of their cultural heritage, just as Gladwell's emphasis on class and accidents of historical timing plays down the role of individual grit and talent to the point where he seems to be sketching a kind of theory of social predestination, determining who gets ahead and who does not – and all based not on persuasive, broad-based research but on a flimsy selection of colourful anecdotes and stories. v