book review david and goliath malcolm gladwell

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By Joe Nocera

• Oct. 11, 2013

To judge by “David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell’s favorite word is “we.” In fact, it’s been his favorite word since his first book, “The Tipping Point,” launched his enormously successful career writing about how the world doesn’t necessarily work the way “we” think it does.

His book “Outliers” was about (among other things) how success requires ingredients that are different from ones “we” normally assume — to wit, talent counts for far less than hard work, luck and background. Before that, “Blink” proposed that one’s first impression turns out to be right surprisingly often — contrary to the belief many of “us” hold. And “David and Goliath”? It’s about the advantages of disadvantages — and the disadvantages of seeming advantages. Or, as Gladwell puts it: “We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is — and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage.”

The “we” of course does not include Gladwell. That’s the whole point of a Malcolm Gladwell book. He has delved into the literature; he has interviewed lots of people — scientists, economists, deep thinkers and others who wind up in the book — and he has divined meaning and found counterintuitive connections that would otherwise elude the rest of us.

Those connections can be quite dizzying. In “David and Goliath,” Gladwell links people who are dyslexic with a hero of the civil rights movement and the citizens of London during the blitz. According to him, they all managed to turn disadvantages into advantages. On the flip side — those whose advantages aren’t so advantageous after all — include students who are not at the top of their Ivy League classes, teachers of extremely small ­classes and very wealthy parents.

As always, Gladwell’s sweep is breathtaking, and thought-provoking. What it is not, however, is entirely convincing.

You don’t have to be a knee-jerk contrarian to realize that there is a good deal of common sense in Gladwell’s thesis. It’s just that it’s not always as counterintuitive as he makes it out to be. When he writes about the actual example of David and Goliath, he makes the point that David — quick and accurate with the slingshot — was in fact the one with the advantage over Goliath, who was “too big and slow and blurry-eyed to comprehend the way the tables had been turned.” “All these years,” he adds, “we’ve been telling these kinds of stories wrong.” But have we really? It strikes me that many Americans already understand the advantages of the seeming underdog, thanks in part to an example that Gladwell does not include: the way America’s immense military power could not win the Vietnam War, or tame Iraq and Afghanistan.

Similarly, Gladwell devotes a chapter to people with dyslexia, making the point that the skills they nurture to compensate for their condition can sometimes lead to a life of extraordinary accomplishment. He cites a study — and Gladwell always seems to find the perfect study — by a researcher at City University London that purports to show that “somewhere around a third” of all successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. (One of Gladwell’s prime examples is David Boies, the well-known lawyer; my wife works for his firm.) But this insight about those with dyslexia also strikes me as fairly common knowledge, documented at least anecdotally in recent years.

On the other hand, one of the most unconventional theories in “David and Goliath” is that for certain people, losing a parent early in life can be an advantage. He cites the work of Marvin Eisenstadt, a psychologist who did a study showing that “of the 573 eminent people for whom Eisenstadt could find reliable biographical information, a quarter had lost at least one parent before the age of 10” — and 45 percent had lost a parent before the age of 20. The central figure Gladwell leans on to make this case is a doctor named Emil J. Freireich, who made extraordinary advances against childhood leukemia. The section about Freireich is where Gladwell really starts making the kinds of connections he is famous for. It also illustrates the book’s primary shortcomings.

The chapter starts with Freireich’s childhood, which was marked by his father’s presumed suicide. Then it cuts to the blitz — the eight months of German bombing raids on London during World War II — to alight on a curious fact: up to 40,000 people were killed and 50,000 injured in the attacks, but to the surprise of the British government, people didn’t panic; many, in fact, simply went about their lives. For Gladwell’s purposes, this puzzle is best explained by J. T. MacCurdy, a Canadian psychiatrist who posited that because most people did not experience a bomb going off very close to them, they weren’t traumatized; instead they experienced “excitement with a flavor of invulnerability.” MacCurdy called this group “remote misses.”

And what do remote misses have to do with Freireich’s extraordinary achievements? Although it takes a while to get there — with further crosscutting into dyslexia, the life of the civil rights activist Fred L. Shuttlesworth and the work Freireich did on children who had leukemia, putting them through hell to find ways to save them — the answer appears to be that sometimes people who lose a parent early in life can be categorized as remote misses. Their difficult childhoods ultimately give them strengths that many of us lack. On the other hand, Gladwell also acknowledges that many others who lose a parent early on “are crushed by what they have been through.”

But isn’t that like saying, “Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”? Some people overcome difficulties. Others don’t. Gladwell can’t really say why Dr. Freireich is in the former category and not the latter. The best he can do is say that “we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma,” like Freireich, even though that means that many others who have experienced trauma will not recover the way he did. To which the reader is likely to respond, “And . . . ?”

I’ve long admired Gladwell’s work in The New Yorker, which employs many of the same literary techniques but is more persuasive, perhaps, because it is more contained and less ambitious. “David and Goliath,” on the other hand, is at once deeply repetitive and a bewildering sprawl. There are chapters, especially toward the end, whose relation to the rest of the book are hard to ascertain, even with his constant guidance.

Maybe what “David and Goliath” really illustrates is that it’s time for Malcolm Gladwell to find a new shtick.

DAVID AND GOLIATH

Underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants.

By Malcolm Gladwell

Illustrated. 305 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $29.

Joe Nocera is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.

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David & Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell – review

M alcolm Gladwell has long traded in paradox. The paradoxes of his two previous bestselling theses – Blink and Outliers – included the fact that they almost exactly contradicted each other: one was a hymn to the power of instinctive thought; the other a paean to the overwhelming importance of long and dedicated study. What they shared was the author's lucrative obsession with the counterintuitive. Gladwell is most attracted to stories in which individual insight (either from a painstaking outlier, or a eureka-moment blinker) overturns received wisdom – stories which generally have the useful subtext of burnishing his own reputation for intellectual surprise, for pulling the zeitgeist out of the hat. It was, in this sense, probably only a matter of time before Gladwell turned his attention to the David and Goliath legend.

Of course, all these Sunday school years, we have collectively been reading the giant-killing myth with the wrong emphasis. The story of the Israelite shepherd and the Philistine warrior is not, for Gladwell, primarily a tale of faith-based triumph against overwhelming odds, but rather a neat demonstration of shifting paradigms. Goliath in his clunking armour and spear was not so much an indomitable opponent, but a man hopelessly weighed down by old-fashioned thinking. He was never going to be a match for the modern "slinger", David, with his improvised weaponry and his refusal of convention. What counts most in the conflict is not the relative strength of opponents, but the rules under which they engage. Davids have always and will always decapitate Goliaths, Gladwell suggests, because they represent the limber, quick thinking of progress in the face of the stolid, lumbering status quo. In one sense, David couldn't lose. That's the likable theory, anyway.

And of course Gladwell has no end of stories to back it up. There's the junior basketball coach, a recent Indian immigrant to California, with a team of "skinny blond girls" who refuses to play basketball the way Americans play it – that is to say, with teams effectively taking it in turns to attack and defend. He has his girls – who can't dribble or shoot or pass too well – play to their few strengths: they defend the whole court, they harry and they disrupt and they frustrate. And, of course, they get to the national finals. This refusal to accept the conventional approach to a competitive situation, this insistence on imposing your own game on more powerful or gifted opponents is to understand "the advantages of disadvantages (and the disadvantages of advantages)". That strategy becomes, for the heroes of this book, a model for success of all kinds.

Smugness, overconfidence, is often a casualty in these American parables. Parents who believe they are doing the best for their children by paying their way into the most exclusive schools, or pushing them into the most elite universities, are among those seen to come a cropper. Paying for the advantage of smaller class sizes is shown in the research produced by Gladwell to become a positive disadvantage for kids if the numbers fall below a certain level – between 18 and 24 seems optimum. A very small class, of 12, say, produces outcomes no better than a class of 30 – and is probably harder to teach. This is the "lesson of the inverted U-curve" (from The Tipping Point on, the author has always loved a graph): bigger is only better up to a point (and so is smaller).

By a similar logic – that we measure ourselves most significantly against our peers – getting a place at a very academic university only benefits those in the top 20% at that university. The rest would be likely to fare better, it seems, not only psychologically but educationally, in the top 20% of a lower-ranked institution. Advantages are not always what they appear.

And neither are disadvantages. Gladwell, as is his habit, pushes this proverbial wisdom to its logical conclusion, making the case that obstacles of all kinds are generally to be desired – not by the individual who suffers them necessarily but by society, for the qualities of courage and determination that they engender. Thus, the story of the severely dyslexic David Boies, who becomes a stellar legal advocate because of his extraordinary ability to hear nuance in a witness's evidence (a habit learned in childhood when he strained desperately to understand what was going on in class). Or that of Gary Cohn , who became so good at bluffing as a result of being a slow reader that he bluffed his way into a job at Goldman Sachs (and became the president).

When the survival of adversity becomes a shared achievement, it can have even more profound effects, Gladwell argues. At one point, he examines the psychology of the Blitz spirit. The intention of the Luftwaffe bombing campaign was to destroy the resolve of Londoners; its effect was exactly the opposite. In fact, the Nazis would probably have had more success in this aim had they not dropped a bomb at all. The reason for this? The fear of bombardment is far more psychologically disturbing than the survival of it. Despite the casualties – or rather because of them – those who survived the daily random assault commonly developed a sense of invincibility, one that only grew with every near miss. Like most of this book, that idea is not, if you stop and think, so surprising. The great pleasure of it is having Gladwell do the stopping and thinking for you.

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DAVID AND GOLIATH

Underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants.

by Malcolm Gladwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2013

In addition to the top-notch writing one expects from a New Yorker regular, Gladwell rewards readers with moving stories,...

A far- and free-ranging meditation on the age-old struggle between underdogs and top dogs.

Beginning with the legendary matchup between the Philistine giant and the scrawny shepherd boy of the title,  New Yorker  scribe Gladwell ( What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures , 2009, etc.) returns continually to his main theme: that there are unsung advantages to being disadvantaged and overlooked disadvantages to being “advantaged.” Though the book begins like a self-help manual—an early chapter on a middle school girl’s basketball team that devastated more talented opponents with a gritty, full-court press game seems to suggest a replicable strategy, at least in basketball, and a later one shows how it’s almost patently easier to accomplish more by being a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond—it soon becomes clear that Gladwell is not interested in simple formulas or templates for success. He aims to probe deeply into the nature of underdog-ness and explore why top dogs have long had such trouble with underdogs—in scholastic and athletic competitions, in the struggle for success or renown in all professions, and in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies the world over. Telling the stories of some amazingly accomplished people, including superlawyer David Boies, IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad, and childhood-leukemia researcher Jay Freireich, Gladwell shows that deficits one wouldn’t wish on anyone, like learning disabilities or deprived childhoods, can require a person to adapt to the world in ways that later become supreme benefits in professional life. On the other hand, children of the newly wealthy who have had every good fortune their parents lacked tend to become less well-equipped to deal with life’s random but inevitable challenges.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-316-20436-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013

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More by Malcolm Gladwell

BOOK REVIEW

by Malcolm Gladwell

THE CULTURE MAP

Breaking through the invisible boundaries of global business.

by Erin Meyer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 2014

These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.

A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.

“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.

Pub Date: May 27, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014

BUSINESS | PSYCHOLOGY

THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.

Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-670-88146-5

Page Count: 430

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

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Book review: malcolm gladwell's david and goliath.

The range of stories Gladwell presents is quite impressive. From the opening biblical story to a discussion of the number of students in a school classroom, the impact of dyslexia, the curing of leukemia, the battle for Civil Rights, French revolutionaries during World War II, etc… One has to wonder: where does Gladwell find these stories?

The simple answer can be found in the end notes (which I encourage people to read).  Gladwell primarily employs stories previously told in academic journals and academic books.  For example, nearly a dozen different academic sources are employed to tell the story of David and Goliath.

Of course, someone could just go read the original academic sources.  But I suspect there is a problem with that approach.

To illustrate, let me repeat something that Alfred Marshall , the father of microeconomics, wrote in a 1906 letter to A.L. Bowley . [1]  Marshall’s letter serves as a famous comment on the role that abstract math plays in academic research:

Step One: Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. Step Two: Keep to them until you have done. Step Three: Translate into English Step Four: Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life. Step Five: Burn the mathematics. Step Six: If you can’t succeed in (4), burn (3). This last I did often.

The point Marshall is making in this letter is simple: academic research should be connected to “real life.” But unfortunately, I don’t think Marshall’s advice is often followed. Abstract reasoning in academia – reasoning that is only accessible to other academics (and often, not many of those) – is prized. Actually connecting what is being said to real life is not considered very important.  As a consequence, much of what is said by academics is not read by many people (the inside joke is that the average number of readers of an academic article is essentially one).

So the stories that academics tell just remain in journals that few people ever see.  Consequently, it seems there is a clear market opportunity for people who have some ability to write.  Specifically, Gladwell’s success telling these stories suggests other writers could follow his lead.  Yes, it is possible that the writing skills of Gladwell are quite rare (he is quite good). But the ability to take the first step (i.e. read the stories) should not be that rare.

Of course, there are a few steps after the visit to your local university library.  Gladwell clearly interviews the researchers. He also makes a clear effort to “illustrate what they are saying with examples that are important in real life.”  And finally, he makes an effort to show how a collection of different stories really have a clear connection.   So what Gladwell does goes beyond just being a “good writer.”

I believe there are more than 600 academic journals just in economics.  That is a huge number of potential stories just in the economics field.  All one has to do is start reading!

[1] This was noted in Harry Landreth and David Colander . History of Economic Thought, 3 rd Edition . Houghton Mifflin Company. 1994.

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Book Review of David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell

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Genre: Medical Applied Psychology Author: Malcolm Gladwell Title: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants ( Buy the Book )

Table of Contents

Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath : Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants eloquently challenges many of society’s preconceived notions about advantages and disadvantages in adversity.

Gladwell’s challenges are captured in three main theories:

• the advantages of disadvantages and the disadvantage of advantages
• the importance of “desired difficulties,” and
• the limits of strength.

The book centers on the ultimate underdog story of David and Goliath and the parallels of that ancient battle in our modern life.

Goliath was advantaged because he was battle-tested, strong, and fierce, while David was a shepherd boy, who slew the giant by a miracle from God. We see David as an underdog because of our lens; the same lens with which we view our own everyday Goliaths.

Gladwell explains that David was really at an advantage because he was a trained type of soldier called a slinger.

Slingers had the same deadly effect as a modern handgun with pinpoint accuracy.

Society tells us that, because Goliath was big and David was small, David was an underdog; however, because David was the underdog, he was able to change the rules of engagement and use his strengths (and maybe a little providence) to defeat his Goliath and save a nation.

The first segment of the book analyzes the advantages of disadvantages and the disadvantages of advantages in a number of contexts from military battles to basketball and from Ivy League college to Parisian art societies.

Gladwell uses historical examples of paradigms of strength and prestige that would be considered a giant against a lesser opponent. He then aptly illustrates how the very strength of a traditional approach can become a disadvantage because of the inherent constraints. Whereas, the smaller and apparently inferior approach can be an advantage when the rules of engagement are changed in the same way that David changed them against Goliath.

The second segment focuses on the importance of “desired difficulties.” Gladwell describes desired difficulties as challenges that people are forced to face that initially discourage them.

Although these difficulties can have devastating effects, if one can learn to adapt and overcome the challenges, the capabilities they develop often prove to be advantageous. Examples include the development of extraordinary memory skills to compensate for dyslexia, an uncommon self-reliance that results from the loss of a parent, and an entire country that finds inspiration from the survival of continuous bombing attacks.

In the same manner, Gladwell opines that each of our difficulties can be desirable and our giants defeated if we turn them into strengths.

The third part of David and Goliath exposes the limits of strength. Gladwell makes the case that strength can be overused and eventually will result in diminishing returns.

Understanding that strength has its limitations is a key aspect of understanding our challenges. The book uses historic known examples of the limits of strength during the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Northern Ireland and during the civil rights movement in the United States.

Gladwell also compares stories of parents after horrific murders of their children. One parent was able to convince the government that it should prosecute repeat offenders with the full strength of the law, which cost millions of dollars but had an unintended inverse impact on impoverished communities. Conversely, the other parent chose to publicly forgive and became an inspiration to her community by refraining from retribution.

David and Goliath is a compelling collection of stories and analysis that give its readers hope that their giants are not as invincible as they might perceive. The book provides useful context for business leaders engaging in difficult conversations with teams and individual employees facing adversity and will serve as a tool to change a potential negative situation into a positive.

Introduction:

In David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell employs a unique writing style to convey his theories. He uses historical figures and events to demonstrate valuable perspectives on important life situations.

Gladwell’s objective is to change the reader’s perspective on challenging situations from negative to positive and give hope by providing compelling case studies that align with the biblical story of the brave shepherd boy, David, in a life or death battle with the apparently superior warrior giant, Goliath.

The book is divided into three distinct and memorable theories – “the advantages of disadvantages,” “desirable difficulties,” and “the limits of power.” Each theory enables the reader to change the situational rules of engagement and achieve improbable victories in life.

The biblical story of David and Goliath is hailed as one of the greatest underdog stories of all time.

The Israelite and Philistine armies were at impasse on opposite sides of a valley with both sides unwilling to attack and risk giving up their strategic position. Goliath, the mightiest warrior in the Philistine army, challenged the Israelites – if any man could defeat him, then the Philistines would become slaves to the Israelites. Conversely, if Goliath won, the Israelites would become slaves to the Philistines.

The fate of an entire nation rested on the shoulders of whomever would face the challenge. David, a faithful shepherd boy delivering food to his older brothers in battle stepped forward to show the power of his God. Rather than accepting the notion that David’s victory was a miracle, Gladwell makes the case that David was not disadvantaged and that Goliath’s strength and approach to the battle were his biggest weaknesses.

Goliath was expecting someone to fight him in close combat with the same weapons.

Gladwell speculates that Goliath wore over one hundred pounds of armor, which limited his movement. David was an experienced projectile warrior, who could accurately sling a stone with the velocity of a modern handgun at 200 yards. Therefore, David’s strength perfectly aligned with Goliath’s weakness.

The story clearly demonstrates the mistake society often makes when perceiving strengths or weaknesses of individuals facing adversity. Each of Gladwell’s three paradoxical theories applies to David’s victory over seemingly impossible odds.

Theory: The Advantages of Disadvantages

Gladwell’s lesson is that we should establish rules of engagement in difficult situations designed to make our weaknesses our strengths. He uses three common people and the story of Lawrence of Arabia who overcame tremendous odds in his battle with the Turks to illustrate the paradox.

First, Gladwell tells the story of Ranadive, an Indian immigrant, who reluctantly agreed to coach his daughter’s middle school basketball team. Having grown up playing cricket and soccer with no experience in basketball would appear to be a disadvantage. However, the inexperience allowed him to approach the game with a fresh set of eyes unencumbered by traditional rules, such as giving up 70% of the court to opponents on their inbound pass.

He challenged the status quo by making conditioning the team’s strength and full court pressing the opposing teams throughout the game. Every practice focused on conditioning so that they could maintain aggressiveness for an entire game. Ranadive’s “disadvantaged” team made it to the state championship.

On the surface, this looks impossible, but when you consider how profoundly Ranadive changed the rules, it makes perfect sense.

Similar to Ranadive, Lawrence of Arabia was not a standard British Army officer. He was an archaeologist who did not speak in technical military terms and had little regard for military traditions.

In 1917, Lawrence led an Arabian revolt against the Turkish army occupying Arabia. He led a task force of nomads, who were not military trained, or battle-tested but were mobile and tough, on a 600-mile march in the heat of summer.

The Turkish forces, with superior numbers, ammunition, and supplies, were caught completely off guard, and their resources became their weakness rendering them immobile and defensive. Lawrence’s nomads had knowledge of the terrain, survival skills, and the courage to make this offensive attack and made the lack of materials their advantage.

This audacious journey allowed them to be unpredictable and efficient, and their disadvantage became their advantage.

The parallels between Ranadive’s and Lawrence’s story are significant. In the same way that Lawrence was not a traditional general, Ranadive was not a traditional basketball coach.

Society has inaccurately generalized that this is a disadvantage.

In both scenarios, this perceived disadvantage is the very factor that allowed them to be successful. With a fresh set of eyes, they were able to think outside of the box, change the rules of engagement, and show the “Goliaths” that they are not as advantaged as they might think.

Full personal commitment and effort, in both cases, proved to be the difference maker.

Theory: The Disadvantages of Advantages

Teresa Debrito, principal of Shepaug Valley Middle School, has a common story that Gladwell uses to prove the converse of the advantage of disadvantages – the disadvantages of perceived advantages.

During Teresa’s career, she had seen her school grow to maximum capacity and then shrink to the point there were barely enough kids to fill a classroom. Common belief is that there is strength in small classes so the ratio of students to teacher is smaller, but studies tell a different story.

Gladwell introduces the concept of the “inverse U-Curve,” which is based on the premise that a single factor can be a strength, but only to a point. Once the curve peaks, the strength begins to diminish and begins to create problems as opposed to solving them.

While Gladwell recognizes that a classroom of 30:1 can provide challenges, the data shows, if the class becomes too small, the “strength” will adversely affect the learning environment. Classrooms need to provide a setting where students feel free to speak and are comfortable with struggling, so if the class is too small, less confident students will feel uncomfortable because they will feel forced to participate.

Smaller classes have also proven to be a more difficult environment to cultivate active discussion.

Diversity of thought is needed in a classroom to contribute to the growth of a student and to create an environment in which students are constantly learning from one another. Teresa Debrito’s school struggled to create this environment needed to enhance the learning of its students because it did not have enough students; thus, the strength became a weakness.

Another example Gladwell uses to prove this point is the experience of an unnamed Hollywood actor, who learned the value of money at a young age because his father grew up in the depression.

As a child, this actor was forced to be creative to make money, so he set up businesses in which he would find work and hire kids in his neighborhood to rake leaves in the fall or shovel snow in the winter.

Through these experiences, he quickly learned the value of hard work, and while he eventually became a successful actor, he always made sure he held onto those values he learned as a child. According to Gladwell, “he was successful because he had learned the long and hard way about the value of money and the meaning of work as well as the joy and fulfillment that comes from making your own way in the world” (pg. 47).

However, money did not solve all his problems.

Society reasons that, with more money, parenting becomes easier because there is not a struggle to provide financially, thus making you a more successful parent.

The actor found that instilling his values into his own children was nearly impossible because there was no need to struggle. Gladwell goes on to explain the difficulty as a parent in telling a child “no” when they ask for something that is not a necessity – like a pony.

Saying “no, we will not” is much harder for a parent than “no, we cannot.”

Similarly, “no, we will not” is difficult for a child to understand when he sees everything the parents are able to afford, which leads to natural feelings of being cheated. Saying “no, we cannot” is much easier for a child to process and leads to healthier motivation.“We cannot” requires an honest conversation about values that needs to be skillfully communicated.

These values are much harder to communicate when the conversation contradicts the life style.

The next story that Gladwell used to further this idea that disadvantages may actually be advantages is the story of Caroline Sacks. Caroline was a very intelligent student and quickly rose to the top of her class in high school.

When touring colleges, she fell in love with The University of Maryland but was admitted to the more prestigious Brown University. She chose Brown over Maryland because society would have her believe that was the right choice, but was it?

Over the course of her first semester, she quickly became aware of how intelligent her peers were and how quickly they mastered the material. She began to feel inadequate. She was a “small fish in a big pond.”

The very thing that made Brown so attractive was contributing to her inadequacy.

She lost confidence in herself and eventually abandoned science, a passion of hers that she had from a very young age, to pursue a less intensive degree in liberal arts. Caroline Sacks experienced “relative deprivation,” which is defined as comparing ourselves to people in the same situation; in other words, the “pond” that we are in is all relative.

When the students around Caroline were succeeding and she was not, her perceived failure was debilitating. If Caroline had chosen the University of Maryland, she believed she would still be pursuing her passion for science because she would have been a “big fish in a little pond.

The likely result is that she would have had more opportunities for success and the confidence to tackle difficult challenges. The prestigious “giant” was not the best choice because the perceived advantage became a disadvantage.

According to Gladwell, the difference between success and failure often is not a matter of intelligence, but rather a problem of confidence.

Gladwell also uses the historical example of the most famous impressionist artists who changed the course of art history because they decided to be a “big fish in a little pond” and consciously decided not to let the world dictate what was acceptable.

In the mid-1800’s, when Paris was at the center of the art world, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro were struggling artists.

Artists had one goal in this era – to be accepted into the “Salon”; to be accepted into the Salon was viewed as the pinnacle of an artist’s career. The Salon “accepted” two thousand paintings every year, and when an artist was accepted, the value of his work soared.

Acceptance, though, came at a cost.

To be accepted into the Salon, artists had to conform to the very specific tastes of the judges. The paintings that were accepted were similar in that they were “microscopically accurate” but lacked expression. It was in this environment, that Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro invented an individual style that they called “Impressionism.”

These impressionists “had an entirely different idea about what constituted art… brush strokes visible… figures were indistinct,” leading spectators to view their art as amateurish.

To gain acceptance, artists were forced to create work that they did not find meaningful.

Also, with the number of paintings accepted every year, their art would be lost in the clutter, making it very hard to stand out. They were “small fish in a big pond.” But, the impressionist group had enough introspection to ask themselves whether the prestige of institutions was in their best interest.

They eventually opened their own exhibit that became wildly successful and revolutionized the art world. In so doing, they decided to be “big fish in a little pond,” where they had the freedom and confidence to make art that aligned with their passion. They realized that the costs of being a “little fish” were too great.

The examples of Caroline Sack and the impressionists beautifully illustrate Gladwell’s point.

The Salon and Brown University were more prestigious and, by the world’s standards, were the right option, but upon closer inspection, the Salon and Brown were giants.

Their prestige was limiting, not enabling.

The apparent disadvantage of being an outlier, the University of Maryland and a personal exhibit, is not a disadvantage at all. Monet was able to weigh “prestige against visibility and selectivity against freedom,” which is something that Caroline Sacks was unable to do.

Gladwell makes the case that we need to challenge the programmed definition of what an advantage is or is not and constantly reevaluate the battles between giants and underdogs. Doing so will allow us to find the disadvantages that can be the very advantage that maximizes our opportunities.

Theory: Desirable difficulty

Part Two of David and Goliath explains how difficulties can have desirable outcomes when we adapt new skills to make up for the lost “advantage.”

Gladwell questions what really constitutes a disadvantage and whether it should even be avoided. Throughout the chapter, the author proposes that adversity from a “remote miss” creates better outcomes in the long run.

He makes the case that a disorder, such as dyslexia, forces individuals to adapt, and this adaptation can become an enormous advantage because it equips them with the skills to solve problems and process information differently than someone without a similar adversity.

Gladwell relays the story of David Boeis, who was severely inhibited by dyslexia growing up. He was so bad at reading that he was forced to become a great listener just to keep pace with his classmates.

He developed such great listening abilities that he could recite books from memory and pretend he was reading.

His memory became a formidable asset.

Through his struggle, he learned a skill that eventually led to monumental success as a cross examiner in the court room. Boeis went on to become one of the top litigators in the country because he remembered every detail of every testimony.

He listened to the inflection of the witness’ testimony and would pick up on details and contradictions that a normal lawyer could not. His adapted skill set, which he developed in place of his ability to read, led to his success.

While David Boeis was able to confront his limitations, most people are not able to overcome these disabilities; however, those like Boeis, who are able to overcome the “disadvantage” are better off than they would have been without the struggle.

Gladwell opines that

“what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.” pg. 113

Dyslexia does not benefit everyone; there are a remarkable number of individuals with dyslexia in prison who were overwhelmed by their failure at mastering the most basic of academic tasks. Yet, this same neurological disorder can have the opposite effect for those that are able to push through.

To further develop his point of desired disadvantages, Gladwell uses another character named Jay Freireich.

Jay was a Hungarian immigrant and the product of a very traumatic childhood.

He lost his dad at a young age to suicide, had an unloving mother, and grew up in abject poverty. However, Jay was gifted academically and eventually became a doctor, but he struggled with interpersonal relationships because he lacked empathy.

A trait attributed to his harsh upbringing. Because Jay had not been shown empathy as a child, he did not know how to express empathy as an adult. However, his harsh upbringing allowed Jay to have the grit and fortitude to focus solely on childhood leukemia.

Jay was quoted saying

“I never sat with a parent and cried about a child dying.”

Most doctors did not last in Jay’s line of work, but because he lacked empathy, combined with an unwavering commitment to his patients, he tried procedures that no one else was willing to try.

Jay’s research was instrumental in bringing about the development of the version of chemotherapy that we know today.

Gladwell concludes that, because of Jay’s adversity, he saved thousands of lives. Jay Freireich’s “remote miss” emboldened him to take actions that no one else would.

Similar to Jay’s individual story, Gladwell draws on the story of 8 million Londoners during World War II, when they lived in fear of Nazi Germany’s daily bombings, which killed 600,000 and wounded 1.2 million.

The Germans’ strategy was to cause mass panic and chaos, but they were wrong about the effect of their bombings because they did not consider the power of near misses. Instead of losing hope, the survivors were encouraged and felt invincible, as if they could survive anything by sheer will.

Londoners were thrown into three categories of people –

• people killed
• near miss and
• remote miss.

Gladwell’s analysis is that the group of people killed were not a factor because the morale of a nation is dictated by the morale of the survivors. While a near miss of the people who experienced the trauma first hand could be debilitating, a remote miss by those who only heard the sirens, saw the planes, and a bomb dropped a block over, had the opposite effect.

Over time, they realized that the only thing to fear was fear itself.

Londoners developed a sense of invincibility through their survival.

Ironically, the Germans’ plan backfired because they did not anticipate the advantage that a remote miss could create. The citizens were not thrown into chaos; rather, they were emboldened with a new-found sense of pride in their country. One event would impact different people based on the degree of trauma.

These difficulties can be profoundly damaging to one group while leaving another better off than before.

Gladwell points to a shocking correlation between extraordinary accomplishments and losing a parent at an early age. The difficulties these children experienced enabled them to accomplish challenges that others were not able to accomplish.

The author concedes that he in no way believes a child should have to lose a parent to be successful, nor does he recommend it, but he makes a case that there is something in the hardship of losing a loved one in formative years that inspires individuals to honor those they lost by having an impact on society.

Gladwell draws the analogy that those who can overcome the loss of a parent can be considered a remote miss. Gladwell sums up his point by stating:

“the existence of these eminent orphans does suggest that, in certain circumstances, a virtue can be made of a necessity.” pg. 143

In the same way that bombing London had the opposite of the intended effect and instead emboldened the Londoners, Jay’s traumatic childhood gave him the fortitude to turn an apparent disadvantage into an advantage.

Fred Shuttlesworth, a key ally of Martin Luther King Jr., is another historical figure that Gladwell uses to expound on his point.

Shuttlesworth led the fight against racism in Birmingham, Alabama before King arrived. On Christmas morning 1956, his house was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan.

Like the Germans, the KKK was trying to intimidate him into submission, but they misunderstood the difference between a near and a remote miss. Shuttlesworth survived and became more emboldened than ever. When police warned him to leave town, Shuttlesworth’s response was:

“Well officer, you are not me, go back and tell your Klan brothers that if the Lord saved me from this, I’m here for the duration. The fight is just beginning.” pg. 150

Similarly, Wyatt Walker served as another one of King’s allies, working behind the scenes and making decisions that no one else would.

King was the overwhelming underdog.

However, he was from a community that has always been an underdog. One that was used to battling Goliaths, like Bull Connor, the racist Birmingham police chief. The African American culture told stories of “trickster heroes,” such as Brer Rabbit, who used his wits to outsmart his larger opponents and escape unfavorable situations.

The civil rights movement needed a national push to have an impact.

The strategy was to find the means to create a crisis to make “racist Alabama” tip their hand. Wyatt’s role was to be Brer Rabbit and create mischief and confrontation, luring Bull Connor into exposing the South’s ugly side to the world.

The plan was to put 1,000 people in jail simultaneously and overcrowd the jail so that the authorities could no longer hide the problem. Wyatt created illusions of mass rallies by strategically holding them at times when they would attract the most spectators who would appear to be “participants.”

With 16 true participants, the papers reported 1,400.

Eventually, Walker began recruiting children of the age of 16 to take part, and he used any resource he could think of to get as many kids out in the streets as possible. Walker knew Connor was itching to use his K-9 corps, and everyone in King’s camp knew what it would look like if someone published a photograph of a police dog lunging at a child.

After a calculated instigation, the famous picture was captured and published on the front page of every newspaper around the country.

Blinded by his perceived advantages, the “giant” Bull Connor was unable to see the true strategy and was not motivated to understand his enemy. The black community was not a trickster by nature but by necessity of their disadvantage.

Understanding their enemy was essential to their survival.

They knew Bull Connor’s hubris and used his force against him.

Learning differences, like dyslexia, can destroy opportunities and create an uneven playing field or they can force people to compensate by developing skills that can prove to be advantageous. Being bombed can be a near miss experience that traumatizes or a remote miss that emboldens. An unsupportive childhood can leave one hopeless or it can create a relentless drive to serve and accomplish.

Gladwell’s last lesson of desirable difficulty is the freedom to change the rules when you have nothing else to lose that only underdogs possess.

According to Gladwell:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” pg. 117

PART THREE:

Theory: the limits of power..

Gladwell illuminates another paradox of power and strength; when they are overused, they become a weakness. To do this, Gladwell uses the example of the Protestant oppression of Catholics in Northern Ireland.

In the 1970s, every Catholic residing in the neighborhood of Ballymurphy in West Belfast lived in fear of Protestant terrorism. Despite the British Army’sintent to defuse tensions, they made the situation worse because of their predominantly Protestant ties.

Tensions between the two warring factions soared, which led to curfews and the threat that anyone suspected of terroristic activity would be sent to jail or shot.

A report by two prominent economists supported the army’s strategy, which opined that the solution to discourage criminal activity was to raise the punishment to the level in which the cost of the crime was no longer worth committing the crime.

The belief system was to use strength to overpower insurgents until order was created.

When the riots escalated from throwing rocks to gasoline bombs, the British made a critical mistake – they fell into the trap of believing that demonstrating their strength of resources, weapons, soldiers, and experience would discourage the insurgency. However, the insurgency only escalated because the British Army did not understand when law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience.

By the mid-1970s, the British instituted internment and suspended civil rights. Every Catholic household in Northern Ireland had been searched twice on average and ten or more times in some neighborhoods.

One in four Catholic men in Northern Ireland between the ages of sixteen and forty-four were arrested at least once. The British army employed an overused strength. Their strength of power and military dominance empowered the insurgents and became a weakness.

At some point, people in this situation are not going to think “rationally.”

The Catholics were so outnumbered and out manned, being arrested or killed became a badge of honor they wore proudly. Gladwell’s point is that, at some point, even the best-intentioned application of power and authority begins to backfire.

Gladwell contrasted Wilma Derksen as a present-day example of a strength being controlled.

A month after Wilma’s daughter was abducted, authorities found her dead in a shed with tied wrists and ankles. After her daughter’s funeral, a man, who lost his own child, shared his destructive experience. He was on medications, lost his wife, and was completely consumed by his distress.

Wilma saw this man as a warning and resolved to avoid living the rest of her life like this man.

The next day, Wilma chose to forgive the murderer at a press conference. Wilma’s Mennonite faith is based on “forgiving your trespassers so that you may be forgiven.”

Wilma chose not to indulge her vengeful desires because she witnessed that it would be all-consuming and cause her to miss important things she had before her. Wilma began seeing the benefits of forgiveness by understanding that strength fueled by vengeance is pointless because it only causes destruction.

Mike Reynold’s daughter was also murdered; but, unlike Wilma, he chose to use the strength of his story to incite change. The perpetrator was a repeat offender on parole. Mike promised his daughter on her death bed that he would never allow something like this to happen again.

Mike believed the penalties for repeat offenders were too low.

In his mind, by increasing the penalty, crime could be deterred. He created the three strikes rule that resulted in 25 years to life after your third offense regardless of crime.

At first, crime rates went down, but then people were being incarcerated 25 years for non-violent crimes. When researchers reviewed the data more closely, they found that the new law was destroying homes in impoverished communities and did nothing to address the real issue behind violent crimes. It was also costing the state government millions of dollars to hold more prisoners for such an extended period.

Moreover, prison actually has an inverse effect on crime because it decreases employment opportunities and increases the financial strain on families. Research showed that if more than two percent of the neighborhood goes to prison in any given neighborhood, the number of people sent to prison compared with the crime rate in that same neighborhood begins to reverse.

Gladwell summed up the contrasting the stories of Wilma and Mike as follows:

“When a man employs the full power of the state in his grief, he ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgiveand saves her friendship , her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.” pg.262

When we compare these cases, the limits of strength are illustrated.

More is not always better.

Society would have us believe that the more powerful we are, the stronger we are. This greatest “advantage” only serves to make things worse.

The British created chaos by extreme responses of power and authority designed to restore order. The three strikes law lowered the rate of crime but, paradoxically, increased the number of violent crimes while also costing the state of California millions of dollars.

The limits of power require that those in positions of authority accept that what they thought of as their greatest advantage has real constraints.

Society would have us believe that disadvantages create underdogs, intellectual differences destroy opportunities, and strength has no bounds. Malcolm Gladwell effectively challenges these presumptions by explaining the cost of having an advantage and the freedom that is given in a “disadvantage.”

Underdogs can change the rules of engagement to fit their terms and catch “giants” off guard.

Gladwell uses history to defy the presumption that intellectual differences end with hardships. He adds that the adaptations in place of inadequacies can serve as advantageous benefits when opportunities present themselves. Gladwell also communicates that strengths have limits and, when overused, will turn into a disadvantage.

While David and Goliath is more about inaccurate societal beliefs and personal behaviors and less about business strategy, it provides valuable insights to some of the patterns of the human experience that underly their success, both as individuals and as groups.

The book is an important tool for business leaders to engage their clients and employees in difficult conversations about their beliefs as well as how to channel negatives into positives and to avoid the temptation of overusing their strengths, and, thus, creating a weakness.

Britt always taught us Titans that Wisdom is Cheap , and principal can find treasure troves of the good stuff in books. We hope only will also express their thanks to the Titans if the book review brought wisdom into their lives.

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Book Review: David and Goliath, by Malcolm Gladwell

The Gladwellian explanation for why the small guy sometimes triumphs

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In his 2008 bestseller, Outliers: The Story of Success , Malcolm Gladwell famously identifies an “iron law of Canadian hockey: In any elite group of hockey players — the very best of the best — 40% of the players will have been born between January and March.” Gladwell explains this phenomenon through the relative age effect — the theory that Jan. 1 cut-off dates mean that kids born early in the year are bigger and stronger than those born later; the stronger kids make the team, practice more and the gap inexorably widens. So, if you want to produce the next Crosby, aim for January. Seems straightforward, right?

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According to the sociologists Benjamin Gibbs, Jonathan Jarvis and Mikaela Dufur, it’s anything but. In a study published last year in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport , the trio argues that if you redefine “elite,” Gladwell’s theory crumbles. Gibbs and his team looked at Canadian-born players on NHL All-Star teams and Canadian Olympic hockey rosters from recent years. They found that, on average, just 17% of those players were born in January, February or March. On Canada’s 2010 gold medal-winning team, a mere 13% adhere to the “iron law.” An early birth date may be advantageous if your goal is simply reaching the NHL. However, at “the most elite levels of play, the relative age effect reverses.” In other words, to achieve true hockey greatness, an early birthday is a disadvantage.

How could this be? Why would the weaker kids, the kids who get less practice, rise to the top? It’s precisely this kind of question that Gladwell asks in his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants , which is both a sequel and rebuttal to Outliers ; it proceeds from the now-familiar Gladwellian premise, that context often supersedes character, while insisting that obvious advantages — like being the strongest kid on the team — are not always obviously advantageous. Instead, he argues, apparent strengths may often be weaknesses, and weaknesses may be strengths.

Gladwell opens by retelling the titular, archetypal tale. Clad in bronze and heavily armed, the towering Goliath seems a sure bet against David, who carries only a shepherd’s stick and a satchel into the Valley of Elah. Until, that is, David produces a slingshot and a small, flat stone, winds up and flings the stone at Goliath’s forehead at roughly 34 metres/second — almost equivalent to “a fair-size modern handgun.” Thanks to David’s willingness to break with the era’s ritual of “single combat” — close-range, one-on-one fighting — Goliath never stood a chance The tale of Vivek Ranadivé, which Gladwell first recounted in the 2009 New Yorker piece that inspired the book, follows a similar arc. An Indian immigrant to California, Ranadivé knows nothing of basketball when he agrees to coach his daughter’s team, which comprises the 12- and-13-year-old “daughters of nerds and computer programmers.” Ranadivé finds it absurd that although a full-court press — in which defenders contest opponents for the court’s entire length — is permitted, it is seldom used. So, he decides his girls will press all the time, every game. The strategy is exhausting and highly effective. The girls dominate more skilled teams, ultimately advancing to the national championships.

The full-court press, like the slingshot, defies the game’s unwritten rules. But underdogs implicitly understand that the rules are skewed against them. “Because [David] has nothing to lose,” Gladwell writes, “he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules.” Ranadivé’s strategy infuriates his opponents — but who has time for etiquette when your only hope is defy it?

Certainly not Martin Luther King, Jr., nor fellow civil rights activists Wyatt Walker and Fred Shuttlesworth. Gladwell recounts the men’s orchestration of Bill Hudson’s iconic 1963 photograph depicting a German shepherd attacking a passive black teen. The photo appeared on newspaper front pages across America, instigating a tipping point in public opinion. The trio, we learn, worked to create that image, compelling thousands of youth to come to Birmingham, knowing that they may die there. The move was morally ambiguous but brilliant, a classic example of underdog tricksterism, says Gladwell. Shuttlesworth justifies it succinctly: “We got to use what we got.”

King and co. have in ample supply a quality shared by all game-changers. “Innovators need to be disagreeable,” Gladwell writes. “They are people willing to take social risks — to do things that others might disapprove of.” This, perhaps, is why nearly a third of prominent entrepreneurs — from Hollywood producer Brian Grazer to Goldman Sachs president Richard Cohn — are dyslexic. Dyslexia, perhaps, is occasionally an example of what psychologists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork call “desirable difficulties.” For Grazer and Cohn, childhoods spent compensating for shortcomings made them exceptional bluffers and risk-takers. Both men, Gladwell writes, “learned something in their struggle that proved to be of enormous advantage.”

The same could be said of pioneering cancer researcher Emil Freireich, who — like 12 of 44 U.S. presidents — lost his father young. “Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions,” says psychologist Dean Simonton. “In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.”

The book’s David stories — featuring characters that seem weak but are strong — outshine its Goliath stories, where the strong are surprisingly weak. Instead of focusing on people, Gladwell’s Goliaths are mostly institutions, and his arguments — Ivy League schools are desirable only for the top two-thirds of students; draconian law enforcement actually increases crime — are more abstract.

David and Goliath may lack the vocabulary-changing, world view-flipping oomph of Gladwell’s previous books. It may lack an “iron rule” — an idea so influential, I remember friends timing their pregnancy accordingly. (Of course, we now know this was a mistake; turns out late birthdays may be “desirable difficulties” for hockey players.) Then again, maybe something will stick. Who knows? In a sense, this uncertainty is the core of Gladwell’s work: He’s not a self-help author, nor a clairvoyant. He’s a journalist, presenting counterintuitive, empirically grounded ideas through masterfully told stories, aspiring to shed light on the ultimately unanswerable question: Why is the world not always as it seems?

Benjamin Leszcz is a Toronto-based writer, and a partner in the strategic communications agency Whitman Emorson.

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Book Review: David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell

Plot Summary: Gladwell investigates the phenomenon of underdogs and why they are so often able to topple the “giants”.

My Thoughts: I loved Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (I didn’t love Blink or  Outliers quite as much) and I have always been drawn to triumphant underdog stories, so I thought I would love his latest look at social phenomena. Unfortunately, David and Goliath just didn’t do it for me.

As always with Gladwell’s books, there were some fascinating examples of his overall theory, but the ratio of fascinating to boring examples was too heavy on the boring this time around .  He used a mix of examples from present day and history to make his points. The present day ones were thought-provoking and I found myself telling people about them while I was reading this book, but I was bored to tears by the historical ones. And, it was a stretch that these situations clearly illustrated his points about the giants and underdogs.

Part 1 covers people’s tendency to misunderstand factors that are commonly thought of as “advantages”. I loved the examples he used here, particularly why extremely wealthy parents can have more problems successfully raising children and the “big fish/small pond” effect with college choices (i.e. students do better being a big fish in a smaller pond than a small fish in a big pond…choosing Harvard isn’t always the best option). 

Part 2 covers the “theory of desirable disadvantages” – how certain disadvantages can actually have positive effects. Gladwell was more hit and miss on the examples in this section. I loved his study of the strangely high percentage of successful entrepreneurs who are dyslexic (i.e. Richard Branson, Brian Grazer, Charles Schwab) and the percentage of successful people who lost a parent when they were young (i.e. Wall Street’s Gary Cohn, ground breaking child leukemia doctor “Jay” Freireich, and over a quarter of U.S. Presidents). But, his examples of a dyslexic associate of MLK Jr.’s successes during the Civil Rights movement and the London citizens during the Blitz of WWII didn’t connect for me.

Part 3 covers the limits of power and is mostly devoted to the British Army’s actions to contain civil unrest in Ireland. This is where Gladwell completely lost me and I really wondered how the Ireland situation related to his overall theme…plus, I was SO bored and had trouble following this story. By this point, I was just ready for the book to be over.

There are some great nuggets in David and Goliath , but not enough to warrant reading the entire thing. You can probably get the good points through a Google search – plus, I’ve given them to you here!

You May Like: Moneyball  by Michael Lewis The Presidents Club  by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy

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Book Review — "David and Goliath" by Malcolm Gladwell

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“David and Goliath” by Malcolm Gladwell moldered on my nightstand for many months before I recently picked it up. I had reservations about delving back into a Gladwell book. Not only had I read “The Sports Gene,” which to me did a much better job of exploring the 10,000-hour rule Gladwell wrote about in “Outliers,” but I was channeling the Gladwell fatigue emanating from many quarters, and which I suffered from a bit myself. I’ve read his books and his writing in the New Yorker for years, which has resulted in a creeping intolerance for Gladwell’s approaches to framing ideas and his style of writing. This feeling of Gladwell déjà vu isn’t helped by the fact that his books’ designs are so monotonous — white cover, stark type, single iconic image, same trim size.

I waded in thus encumbered with doubts and reluctance, and vowed to limit my initial excursion into Gladwellia to a dash across the border to see if I’d return later.

Needless to say, the book drew me in, and I finished it within a few busy days.

What caught my attention from the start were the subtleties Gladwell uncovered in the David and Goliath story. We’ve generally absorbed David and Goliath as the story of the little guy surprising the big guy, but it turns out to be much more subtle and interesting than that when the context is better elucidated and some historical elements are expounded upon. Gladwell does this deftly and economically, getting you into the heart of the matter before you know it.

Innovation is one of Gladwell’s favorite topics, and the book makes you think differently about what it takes to be innovative. Our cliché about innovation is that someone has to be able to “think outside the box,” but Gladwell spends much more time exploring how adversity can bring forth personalities capable of changing the world. It’s not just the ability to think outside the box that matters — one has to possess a personality capable of persevering through rejection, repudiation, and setbacks in order to make the world work differently. Such personalities are often hardened by setbacks encountered at a young age.

The type of setback matters, as does the response to it. These concepts are captured using the analogy  of bombings — “direct hits,” “near misses,” and “distant misses.” Gladwell draws on how the Blitz during World War II affected London and England in general. Instead of instilling panic, as the Nazis had hoped and as British leadership had feared, there were three actual effects. First, those who were hit directly died, and were unable to spread panic. Those who suffered near misses were injured, and also were unable to spread panic. So the vast majority of Londoners at the time suffered “distant misses” — sirens, a few minutes of hiding in the basement, maybe a distant explosion, and then the resumption of daily life. In this manner, most of the population became indifferent to the bombings, believing through experience that they were unlikely to be hit. In fact, many felt invulnerable after a while, as if charmed. As this cycle continued, the city became psychologically impervious. The German plan had backfired, as the British moved into a confident retaliation mode.

Dyslexics, orphans, and victims of prejudice are profiled. As Gladwell writes, some suffer direct hits, and their setbacks take them out of the game. Others are near misses, and suffer a little but survive. And some are distant misses, people who come out with a galvanized sense of self after learning to deal with their hardships or differences. These people are the focus of the book, as are the limits of power (and its significant potential to backfire if mishandled).

“David and Goliath” covers a lot of ground, and there are many branches from the main river that bisects it. One interesting branch for me was a section on “tricksters,” who come in two varieties — those who fool their adversaries into doing exactly what they want, and those who “fake it until they make it.”

“Faking it until you make it” is a common thread behind success (and probably explains the “ impostor syndrome ” so many adults feel at some point in their careers). It is a thread that many traditionalists find hard to accept. A great story in the book along these lines comes from Brian Grazer, a major Hollywood producer of hits like “Apollo 13,” “A Beautiful Mind,” “8 Mile,” “24,” and “Friday Night Lights,” to name a few. (As an aside, Grazer has hair that competes with Gladwell’s for antigravity effect.) A dyslexic, Grazer learned as a survival adaptation how to talk his way through any situation. He became a consummate and confident dealer of concepts and negotiator at a young age. He also learned to persist and to take the lead. So, when as a young man he got a job in the mailroom at Warner Brothers, he would make calls and work deals from this position, introducing himself as, “Brian Grazer of Warner Brothers.” He didn’t mention he was working in the mailroom at the time.

Many stories are agonizing to read — there are stories about the civil rights movement, the religious conflicts in Ireland, and others. The moral of some of these stories can be murky at best. This is one unusual lesson about change the book teaches, as noted above — most success stories are full of compromises, exchanges, chicanery, and actions we might find hard to accept in a purist moral framework or as an enforcer of polite society.

This purist moral framework itself comes into question when the harsh California “Three Strikes” law is put under the microscope, in a larger section dissecting the notion that rational cost-benefit calculations by members of society lead to predictable outcomes. That is, make something more costly, and a rational person will choose not to engage in that activity. Beyond questioning whether criminals are rational, the section also examines how carefully power has to be wielded, and how simplistic cost-benefit approaches can backfire in complex ways.

One of the most horrible sections of the book deals with a physician discovering viable treatments for childhood leukemia. In our modern medical miracle world, we often forget the devastating and horrendous diseases our predecessors suffered through and somehow found a way to treat, prevent, and cure — from polio to rheumatic fever to childhood leukemia, the realities of these illnesses are jarring and nauseating. But one man, who had suffered a very difficult upbringing, had the nerve and tenacity to essentially mistreat children for a period, causing them great pain, going against the orthodoxy, demanding results, and angering many around him — all for the sake of finding a treatment. His own childhood adversity created a mentality capable of inflicting hardship on others for the purpose of a greater good, and also gave him an appreciation that hardships were generally temporary. He knew pain was temporary. He had experienced it himself.

There are two general dispositions I could see benefiting from this book. First, there are those people who naturally and habitually push against the status quo. For them, the book will likely be affirming and energizing, and may clarify that while their driven personality can cause friction, that friction is necessary and their ability to withstand it a sign of the innovator or change agent. Second, there are people who have to deal with innovators but who don’t quite understand them, what drives them, and why they sometimes seem obnoxious. For them, this book may help reveal the inner workings of those stubborn, driven, and sometimes troublesome individuals, and also create second thoughts about the cost of suppressing them contrasted against the benefits of supporting them.

David was a distant miss. He had never seen war, but he’d seen his flock terrorized by wild animals, and had acquired a sling and the skill to use it. He’d survived many attacks, and had taken out many attackers. In his own way, he was battle-hardened, but the battle was not the one he was about to enter into with the giant Goliath. It did not matter. The lessons absorbed elsewhere transferred that day, his confidence in his abilities was high, and the giant fell. There were many with slings there that day, but only one had the personality to take on a giant.

One of the most unpleasant lessons in the book is that hardships can toughen people, and we need people with those hard edges in order to make progress. Gladwell asserts that this unpleasantness is important to progress. If we keep everything pleasant, we make no progress. As scholarly publishing is in some turmoil about access models and who pays what, the psychologies of criticism, attack, accommodation, manners, and progress have become relevant.

But make no mistake — the lesson of David and Goliath is not that the small upstart or the most unpleasant person wins. Rather, it is that those who have suffered hardships, who have gained a level of callousness, who have had significant skills fired in the kiln of adversity, and who are intolerant of the status quo — these are the people who most often prevail. We might not always like them, they may do things we think are inadvisable, but they are our giant-killers.

P.S. Gladwell needs to make his next book bigger and with a red cover. At this point, his books’ generic designs are working against him.

Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson is the CEO of RedLink and RedLink Network, a past-President of SSP, and the founder of the Scholarly Kitchen. He has worked as Publisher at AAAS/Science, CEO/Publisher of JBJS, Inc., a publishing executive at the Massachusetts Medical Society, Publishing Director of the New England Journal of Medicine, and Director of Medical Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics. Opinions on social media or blogs are his own.

16 Thoughts on "Book Review — "David and Goliath" by Malcolm Gladwell"

Good review but from what is abstracted, revelation of the ‘school of hard knocks’ is not new.

• By Robert Cooper
• Feb 26, 2014, 6:00 AM

It’s tempting to reduce it in that way, and that’s part of the reason I hesitated to read it. I thought, “I know the lessons of David and Goliath,” and so forth. Well, either it’s Gladwellian magic or the book actually has a lot of layers, intricacies, subtleties, and great stories.

For instance, the concept of the limits of power, how misapplied power backfires, and how hidden power is triggered and released, all go beyond “the school of hard knocks” simplicity. How the interplay between personalities in an insurgent movement occurs — who lulls the incumbents vs. who sneaks up and undermines them — is really interesting. How we overestimate the power of the powerful, how the powerful overestimate their power, etc., are all brought to life in really interesting ways.

As for the individuals who create change, the way some compensate for congenital defects and how these compensatory skills set them apart is also far different from “the school of hard knocks” simplicity.

So, while it’s tempting to think of “David and Goliath” as something you already understand, very quickly the book surprised me with twists on the story that took me in new directions, and followed it up with really interesting explorations of the nature of power, the assertion of power, and how power backfires or comes from surprising wellsprings.

• By Kent Anderson
• Feb 26, 2014, 7:14 AM

“Rather, it is that those who have suffered hardships, who have gained a level of callousness, who have had significant skills fired in the kiln of adversity, and who are intolerant of the status quo — these are the people who most often prevail.”

It seems to also be those willing to take a chance – a risk. But the beauty is that they may not even perceive it as a risk. They simply think – it will work OR whatever could go wrong is worth it OR we can fix it later.

It’s interesting when thinking about the “school of hard knocks” to also notice that the same hard knocks seem to inspire different lessons. Some people come up strategizing and fighting and others become lifelong victims (and there’s a whole spectrum between that). So there’s more to this than simply hard knocks.

• By Ann Michael
• Feb 26, 2014, 8:18 AM

This quote, I worry, might well apply to people like Adolf Hitler.

• By Sandy Thatcher
• Feb 26, 2014, 11:59 AM

You’re right — again, this is why the abuse of power is part of story. On a smaller scale, the story of the “Three Strikes” law in California vs. another approach taken by people who didn’t depend on “big power” is illustrative. Hitler believed in “big power.” It has its limits, and often backfires.

• Feb 26, 2014, 1:17 PM

Stubbornness is indeed a key trait for innovative people, for two opposite reasons. First there is the well known wall of skepticism to get through, but there is also the hoard of helpers who threaten to pull the new idea apart by taking it in all directions at once.

• By David Wojick
• Feb 26, 2014, 8:58 AM

Great review. It is so difficult to try to “explain” how his books make you think. I loved the bit about dyslexia, and about the doctor and leukemia. I would love to meet him!

• By maureen scott
• Feb 26, 2014, 9:26 AM

The leukemia doctor was Sidney Farber. If he tried his “experiment” today he’d be reviled. Not to mention no self-respecting IRB would ever allow it.

He knew that folate stimulated the bone marrow and leukemia was a disease affecting the bone marrow. So he gave some of his patients folate. They promptly died.

As a result he went looking for a compound that suppressed folate. He found one and gave that to some of his patients. He induced a [temporary] remission in 10 of 16 patients. They did eventually die, but he was on to something. See http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM194806032382301

Everyone knows the second part of the story. Few people remember the first part.

• Feb 26, 2014, 9:56 AM

I intend to read the link you sent through, what is IRB? Maureen

• Feb 26, 2014, 10:05 AM

IRB = Institutional Review Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board

• By David Crotty
• Feb 26, 2014, 10:06 AM

Having yet to read the book, it might be unfair to comment on the substance of it more than has been done (but I don’t need to abide by the rules any more than David). I’m sure Gladwell weaves a skilful web and has a reader disagreeing only to find that his disagreement is anticipated and countered. That Gladwell writes well is certainly not in doubt. That the book is perhaps but a skilful replay of an old moral tale is not a criticism. To ‘see through’ Gladwell and continue to read and enjoy him is perhaps the highest accolade for a writer. Gladwell is good writer and good entertainer. I’m pretty sure Goliath had as many or more ‘hard knocks’ before he got to face the simplicity of a shepherd’s sling. I would also think it likely that following the encounter those who make the rules on such representational fighting banned the sling as an unfair weapon ~ or made the contest one of slings and arrows. I have no idea what happened to David long term. Maybe he became a big man. His future post-Goliath seems rather important to know. I suppose I could read the Bible.

• Feb 26, 2014, 9:41 AM

Nearly 6 months after publication, the hardcover edition is still ranked in the top 100 on Amazon and has generated 1200 reviews. I doubt Little, Brown will change anything for Gladwell’s next book.

• Feb 26, 2014, 9:42 AM

I know. I think I’m the one who will have to adjust. It’s funny how this did make me judge a book by its cover, but in a different sense — more about it looking like another widget out of the Gladwell factory.

• Feb 26, 2014, 10:42 AM

I’m afraid Gladwell is no longer an author who produces books, but a brand that produces products.

• Feb 26, 2014, 10:48 AM

Indeed – a brand factory for which there is a good send-up: http://malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com

• By Michael Clarke
• Feb 26, 2014, 10:09 PM

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The Trouble With Malcolm Gladwell

I thought he was sincerely misunderstanding the science, but he knows exactly what he is doing..

Photo illustration by Slate , photo by Zereshk via Wikimedia Commons, painting by Claude Vignon

Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker  writer and perennial best-selling author, has a new book out. It’s called David and Goliath: Misfits, Underdogs, and the Art of Battling Giants .   I reviewed it on Sept. 28 in The Wall Street Journal.  (Other reviews have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times,   the Guardian,  the Financial Times, the Millions , and Slate , to name a few; the Guardian has even “digested” the book into a 600-word satire. ) The WSJ editors kindly gave me about 2,500 words to go into depth about the book, but there were many things I could not discuss or elaborate on. So here are some additional thoughts about Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath,  the general modus operandi of his writing, and how he and others conceive of what he is doing.

There were some interesting reactions to my review. Some people tagged me as a jealous hater. One even implied that as a cognitive scientist (rather than a neuroscientist) I somehow lacked the capacity or credibility to criticize anyone’s logic or adherence to evidence. A more serious response, of which I saw several instances, came from people who said in essence “Why do you take Gladwell so seriously—it’s obvious he is just an entertainer.” For example, here’s Jason Kottke:

I enjoy Gladwell’s writing and am able to take it with the proper portion of salt … I read (and write about) most pop science as science fiction: good for thinking about things in novel ways but not so great for basing your cancer treatment on.

The Freakonomics blog reviewer said much the same thing:

[C]ritics have primarily focused on whether the argument they think Gladwell is making is valid. I am going to argue that this approach misses the fact that the stories Gladwell tells are simply well worth reading.

I say good for you to everyone who doesn’t take Gladwell seriously. But here’s why I take him seriously: because I take him and his publisher at their word. On their face, many of the assertions and conclusions in Gladwell’s books are clearly meant to describe lawful regularities about the way human mental life and the human social world work. And this has always been the case with his writing.

In The Tipping Point , Gladwell wrote of sociological regularities and even coined entirely new ones, like “The Law of the Few.” Calling patterns of behavior “laws” is a basic way of signaling that they are robust empirical regularities. Laws of human behavior aren’t as mathematically precise as laws of physics, but asserting one is about the strongest claim that can be made in social science. To say something is a law is to say that it applies with (near) universality and can be used to predict, in advance, with a fair degree of certainty, what will happen in a situation. It says this is truth you can believe in, and act on to your benefit. “The three rules of the Tipping Point—the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context … provide us with direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point,” Gladwell writes (emphasis mine).

A blurb from the publisher of David and Goliath avers: “The author of Outliers explores the hidden rules governing relationships between the mighty and the weak, upending prevailing wisdom as he goes.” A rule is a causal or at least regularly occurring pattern in the workings of the world. If you say you are exploring hidden rules that govern relationships, you are promising to explicate social science. But we don’t have to take the publisher’s word for it. Here’s the author himself, in the book, stating one of his theses:

“The fact of being an underdog changes people in ways that we often fail to appreciate. It opens doors, and creates opportunities and educates and permits things that might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.”

The emphasis on changes is in the original (at least in the version of the quote I saw on Gladwell’s Facebook page). In an excerpt published in the Guardian, he wrote, “If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening.” I added the emphasis on “create” to highlight the fact that Gladwell is here claiming a causal rule about the mind and brain, namely that having dyslexia causes one to become a better listener (something he says made superlawyer David Boies so successful).

Perhaps I am misunderstanding what Gladwell means when he talks of laws, rules, and so on. Maybe he uses these words figuratively, rather than literally, and I am being too tough on him to assume otherwise. Reasonable people may differ, but based on my reading of all of his books, I don’t think this is right. Gladwell has often said that he regards social science as an important and wonderful enterprise; just this weekend in his New York Times Book Review interview he said, “The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world.” He added that a famous academic book by Nisbett and Lee Ross, The Person and the Situation, is “the template for the genre of books that The Tipping Point and Blink and Outliers belong to.” And he told this month’s Costco member magazine :

There is this tremendous body of knowledge in the world of academia where extraordinary numbers of incredibly thoughtful people have taken the time to examine on a really profound level the way we live our lives and who we are and where we’ve been. That brilliant learning sometimes gets trapped in academia and never sees the light of day. I’m trying to give people access to all of that brilliant thinking. It’s a way of going back to college long after you’ve graduated.

To me, all this suggests that Gladwell thinks he is conveying scientific knowledge to the masses, and wants to be judged on whether he has succeeded. He has certainly reached the masses—he was on the cover of the Costco Connection !—and I don’t begrudge him this at all. The question then is whether he is accurately conveying the science. Not whether he is making little mistakes or leaving out details that would bore the nonspecialist, but whether he is getting the big ideas right.

I’ve gone on at length with these examples because I think they also run counter to another claim that is sometimes made about Gladwell’s writings: That he does nothing more than restate the obvious or banal. I couldn’t disagree more here. Indeed, to his credit, what he writes about is the opposite of trivial. If Gladwell is right in his claims, we have all been acting unethically by watching professional football, and the sport will go the way of dogfighting, or at best boxing. If he is right about basketball, thousands of teams have been employing bad strategies for no good reason. If he is right about dyslexia, the world would literally be a worse place if everyone were able to learn how to read with ease, because we would lose the geniuses that dyslexia (and other “desirable difficulties”) create. If he was right about how beliefs and desires spread through social networks in The Tipping Point, consumer marketing would have changed greatly in the years since. Actually, it did: Firms spent great effort trying to find “connectors” and “mavens” and to buy the influence of the biggest influencers, even though there was never causal evidence that this would work. (Read Duncan Watts’s brilliant book  Everything Is Obvious, Once You Know the Answer — reviewed by me here —to understand why.) If Gladwell was right, also in The Tipping Point, about how much news anchors can influence our votes by deploying their smiles for and against their preferred candidates, then democracy as we know it is a charade (and not for the reasons usually given, but for the completely unsupported reason that subliminal persuaders can create any electoral results they want). And so on. These ideas are far from obvious, self-evident, or trivial. They do have the property of triggering a pleasurable rush of  counterintuition, engaging a hindsight bias, and seeming  correct once you have learned about them. But an idea that people feel like they already knew is much different from an idea people really did know all along.

Janet Maslin’s New York Times  review  of David and Goliath  begins by succinctly stating the value proposition that Gladwell’s work offers to his readers:

The world becomes less complicated with a Malcolm Gladwell book in hand. Mr. Gladwell raises questions — should David have won his fight with Goliath? — that are reassuringly clear even before they are answered. His answers are just tricky enough to suggest that the reader has learned something, regardless of whether that’s true.

(I would only add that the world becomes not just less complicated but therefore also better, which leaves the reader a little bit happier about life.) In a recent interview with the Guardian,  Gladwell said, “If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn’t read them: You’re not the audience!”

I don’t think the main flaw is oversimplification (though that is a problem: Einstein was right when he—supposedly—advised that things be made as simple as possible, but no simpler). As I wrote in my own review,  the main flaw is a lack of logic and proper evidence in the argumentation. But consider what Gladwell’s quote means. He is saying that if you understand his topics well enough to see what is erroneous or missing, then you are not the reader he wants. At a stroke he has said that anyone equipped to critically review his work should not be reading it. How convenient! Those who are left are only those who do not think the material is oversimplified.

Who are those people? They are the readers who will take Gladwell’s laws, rules, and causal theories seriously; they will tweet them to the world, preach them to their underlings and colleagues, write them up in their own books and articles (David Brooks relied on Gladwell’s claims more than once in his last book), and let them infiltrate their own decision-making processes. These are the people who will learn to trust their guts ( Blink ), search out and lavish attention and money on fictitious “influencers” ( The Tipping Point ), celebrate neurological problems rather than treat them ( David and Goliath ), and fail to pay attention to talent and potential because they think personal triumph results just from luck and hard work ( Outliers ). It doesn’t matter if these are misreadings or imprecise readings of what Gladwell is saying in these books—they are common readings, and I think they are more common among exactly those readers Gladwell says are his audience. These readers are not unintelligent or uncritical; like everyone they are simply people who are not experts in every topic and trust writers to teach them about subjects they don’t know.

Sometimes Gladwell characterizes his work as something other than explaining science. In a recent interview on the Brian Lehrer show , Gladwell said that he puts the story first and the science second, and that he thinks discussions of the concerns of “academic research” in the sciences—i.e., logic, evidence, and truth—are “inaccessible” to his readers:

“I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research … for ways of augmenting story-telling. The reason I don’t do things their way is because their way has a cost: it makes their writing inaccessible. If you are someone who has as their goal … to reach a lay audience … you can’t do it their way.”

This quote and another, from his interview in  The Telegraph ,  about what readers “are indifferent to,” suggest that Gladwell sees a conflict between logical argument and what readers want:

“And as I’ve written more books I’ve realized there are certain things that writers and critics prize, and readers don’t. So we’re obsessed with things like coherence, consistency, neatness of argument. Readers are indifferent to those things.”

Note, incidentally, that he mentions coherence, consistency, and neatness. But not correctness, or proper evidence. Perhaps he thinks that these are highfalutin cares for writers and critics, or perhaps he is some kind of postmodernist for whom they don’t even exist in any cognizable form. In any case, I cannot agree with Gladwell’s implication that accuracy and logic are incompatible with entertainment. If anyone could make accurate and logical discussion of science entertaining, it is Malcolm Gladwell.

Perhaps … perhaps I am the one who is naive, but I was honestly very surprised by these recent quotes. I had thought Gladwell was inadvertently misunderstanding the science he was writing about and making sincere mistakes in the service of coming up with ever more “Gladwellian” insights to serve his audience. But according to his own account, he knows exactly what he is doing, and not only that, he thinks it is the right thing to do. Is there no sense of ethics that requires more fidelity to truth, especially when your audience is so vast—and, by your own suggestion, so benighted—as to require oversimplification and to be unmoved by consistency and coherence? I think a higher ethic of communication should apply here, not a lower standard.

This brings me back to the question of why Gladwell matters so much. Why am I, an academic who is supposed to be keeping his head down and toiling away on inaccessible stuff for others to bring to light for the masses, spending so much time on reading Gladwell’s interviews, reviewing his book, and writing about him? I think that what Malcom Gladwell says matters because, whether academics like it or not, he is incredibly influential.

As Gladwell himself might put it: “We tend to think that people who write popular books don’t have much influence. But we are wrong; their influence may be perverse and often baffling, but it is influence nonetheless.” Sure, Gladwell has huge sales figures and is said to command big speaking fees, and his TED talks are among the most watched. But James Patterson has huge sales too, and he isn’t driving public opinion or belief. I know Gladwell has influence for multiple reasons. One is that even highly-educated people in leadership positions in academia—a field where I have experience—are sometimes more familiar with and more likely to cite Gladwell’s writings than those of the top scholars in their own fields, even when those top scholars have put their ideas into trade-book form like Gladwell does.

Another data point:  David and Goliath  has only been out for a few days, but already there’s an article online about its “business lessons.” A sample assertion:

Gladwell proves that not only do many successful people have dyslexia, but that they have become successful in large part because of having to deal with their difficulty. Those diagnosed with dyslexia are forced to explore other activities and learn new skills that they may have otherwise pursued.

Of course this is nonsense—there is no “proof” of anything in this book, much less a proof that dyslexia causes success. I wonder if the author of this article even has an idea what proper evidence in support of these assertions would be, or if he knows that these kinds of assertions cannot be “proved.” In any case, we can expect David and Goliath to be cited as evidence—sometimes definitive evidence—many more times. People take Gladwell seriously.

Here’s one final indicator of Malcolm Gladwell’s influence—and I’ll be upfront and say that it comes from an utterly nonscientific and imprecise methodology—that suggests why he matters. I Googled the phrases “Malcolm Gladwell proved” and “Malcolm Gladwell showed” and compared the results to the similar “Steven Pinker proved” and “Steven Pinker showed” (adding in the results of redoing the Pinker search with the incorrect “Stephen”). I chose  Steven Pinker  not because he is an academic, nor because he’s a co-author of mine, but because he has published a lot of best-selling books and widely read essays and is considered a leading public intellectual, like Gladwell. Pinker is surely more influential than most other academics. It just so happens that he published a critical review of Gladwell’s previous book —but this also is an indicator of the fact that Pinker chooses to engage the public rather than just his professional colleagues. The results, in total number of hits:

Gladwell: proved 5,300, showed 19,200 = 24,500 total

Pinker: proved 9, showed 625 = 634 total

So the total influence ratio as measured by this crude technique is 24,500/634, or more than 38-to-1 in favor of Gladwell. I wasn’t expecting it to be nearly this high myself. (Interestingly, those “influenced” by Pinker are only 9/634, or 1.4 percent likely to think he “proved” something as opposed to the arguably more correct “showed” it. Gladwell’s influencees are 5,300/24,500 or 21.6 percent likely to think their influencer “proved” something.) Refining the searches, adding “according to Gladwell” versus “according to Pinker,” and so on will change the numbers, but I doubt those corrections would significantly redress a 38-to-1 difference. And if you are worried that I have rigged the results by trying a lot of comparisons until I found this one, I give you my word that Steven Pinker was the first and only one I tried. And I fully understand that properly tracing and comparing influence would require much more work than this. As I said, it is just one suggestive data point—a story, if you will. (“Did you know that Malcolm Gladwell is 38 times more influential than Steven Pinker? I read it on Slate !”) And I am foregrounding this story’s evidentiary limitations, rather than ignoring them.

When someone with the reach and persuasive power of Malcolm Gladwell says that he is a storyteller who just uses research to “augment” the stories—who places the stories in the lead and the science in a supporting role, rather than the other way around—he’s essentially placing his work in the category of inspirational books like The Secret. As Daniel Simons and I noted in  a New York Times  essay, such books tend to sprinkle in references and allusions to science as a rhetorical strategy. The titular “secret” of The Secret is in fact a purported scientific law—the “Law of Attraction.” Accessorizing your otherwise inconsistent or incoherent story-based argument with pieces of science is a profitable rhetorical strategy because references to science are crucial touchpoints that help readers maintain their  default instinct to believe what they are being told . They help because when readers see “science” they can suppress any skepticism that might be bubbling up in response to the inconsistencies and contradictions. I believe that most of Gladwell’s readers think he is telling stories to bring alive what science has discovered, rather than using science to attach a false authority to the ideas he has distilled from the stories he chooses to tell.

In his Telegraph  interview,  Gladwell again played down the seriousness of his work: “The mistake is to think these books are ends in themselves. My books are gateway drugs—they lead you to the hard stuff.” And David and Goliath does cite scholarly works, books and journal articles, and journalism, in its footnotes and endnotes. But I wonder how many readers will follow those links, as compared to the number who will take its categorical claims at face value. And of those that do follow the links, how many will realize that many of the most important links are missing?

This leads to my last topic, the psychology experiment Gladwell deploys in David and Goliath to explain what he means by “desirable difficulties.” The difficulties he talks about are serious challenges, like dyslexia or the death of a parent during one’s childhood. But the experiment is a 40-person study on Princeton students who solved three mathematical reasoning problems presented in either a normal typeface or a difficult-to-read typeface. Counterintuitively, the group that read in a difficult typeface scored higher on the reasoning problems than the group that read in a normal typeface.

In my review, I criticized Gladwell for describing this experiment at length without also mentioning that a replication attempt with a much larger and more representative sample of subjects did not find an advantage for difficult typefaces. One of the original study’s authors wrote to me to argue that his effect is robust when the test questions are at an appropriate level of difficulty for the participants in the experiment, and that his effect has in fact been replicated “conceptually” by other researchers. However, I cannot find any successful direct replications—repetitions of the experiment that use the same methods and get the same results—and direct replication is the evidence that I believe is most relevant.

This may be an interesting controversy for cognitive psychologists, but it’s not the point here. The point is that Gladwell makes absolutely no mention of any uncertainty over whether this effect is reliable. All he does is cite the original 2007 study of 40 subjects and rest his case. As I mentioned in my review, in 2013 this is virtual malpractice for a sophisticated writer whose beat includes social science, where the validity of even highly cited results has come into question. Readers who have been hooked by Gladwell’s prose and look to the endnotes of this chapter for a new fix will find no sources for the “hard stuff”—e.g., the true state of the science of “desirable difficulty”—that he claims to be promoting.

And if the hard stuff has value, why does Gladwell not wade into it more deeply and let it inform his writing? He doesn’t need to make his whole book about the troubles with replication and false positive results in social science (though I’m sure he could write a more interesting book on this topic than almost anyone else could). But why not, when addressing the question of how to pick the right college, discuss the intriguing research that considers whether going to an elite school really adds economic value (over going to a lesser-ranked school) for those people who get admitted to both? Or, when discussing dyslexia, instead of claiming it might be a gift to those who have it and is certainly a gift to society, how about considering seriously the hypothesis that this kind of early life difficulty jars the course of development, adding uncertainty (increasing the chances of both success and failure, though probably not in equal proportions) rather than directionality. There is so much more that Gladwell could have done with the fascinating and important topics in David and Goliath and his other books.

At least the difficulty finding a simple experiment to serve as illustration might have jarred Gladwell into realizing that there is no relevant nexus between the typeface effect, however fragile or robust it might turn out to be, and the effect of a neurological condition or the death of a parent. Pretending the connection is any more than metaphorical just loosens the threads of logic to the point of unraveling completely. But perhaps Gladwell already knows this. After all, in his Telegraph interview, he said readers don’t care about consistency and coherence, only critics and writers do.

I can certainly think of one gifted writer with a huge audience who doesn’t seem to care that much. I think the result is the propagation of a lot of wrong beliefs among a vast audience of influential people. And that’s unfortunate.

A previous version of this article appeared in Christopher Chabris’ blog under the title “ Why Malcolm Gladwell Matters (and Why That’s Unfortunate) .”

Read Dan Engber’s review of David and Goliath, “ Gladwell is Goliath .”

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David and Goliath

Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

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By Malcolm Gladwell

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• Social Psychology
• Praise for Outliers : "In the vast world of nonfiction writing, Malcolm Gladwell is as close to a singular talent as exists today... Outliers is a pleasure to read and leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward." David Leonhardt, New York Times Book Review
• "The explosively entertaining Outliers might be Gladwell's best and most useful work yet...There are both brilliant yarns and life lessons here: Outliers is riveting science, self-help, and entertainment, all in one book." Gregory Kirschling, Entertainment Weekly
• "No other book I read this year combines such a distinctive prose style with truly thought-provoking content. Gladwell writes with a high degree of dazzle but at the same time remains as clear and direct as even Strunk or White could hope for." Atlanta Journal Constitution
• "[An] important new book...Gladwell intelligently captures a larger tendency of thought-the growing appreciation of the power of cultural patterns, social contagions, memes...Gladwell's social determinism is a useful corrective to the Homo economicus view of human nature." David Brooks, New York Times
• "Thought-provoking, entertaining, and irresistibly debatable...[ Outliers ] is another winner from this agile social observer." Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor
• " Outliers is required reading for boardroom and watercooler crowds alike." Men's Health
• "In Outliers , Gladwell ( The Tipping Point ) once again proves masterful in a genre he essentially pioneered-the book that illuminates secret patterns behind everyday phenomena." Publishers Weekly
• Praise for The Tipping Point "A fascinating book that makes you see the world in a different way." Fortune
• "Gladwell's theories could be used to run businesses more effectively, to turn products into runaway bestsellers, and perhaps most important, to alter human behavior." New York Times
• Praise for Blink "A real pleasure...Brims with surprising insights about our world and ourselves." Salon.com
• "Intoxicating".Gladwell is an engaging writer and a first-rate tour guide.? Thane Rosenbaum, Los Angeles Times
• "BLINK moves quickly through a series of delightful stories?.Always dazzling us with fascinating information and phenomena." David Brooks, New York Times Book Review

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Malcolm Gladwell

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David and Goliath

Malcolm gladwell, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Gladwell begins by recounting the battle of David and Goliath , an Old Testament story which takes place when the Israelites and the Philistines encounter each other in the valley of Elah. Neither army wants to advance for fear of rendering themselves vulnerable, so the Philistines send Goliath—their largest warrior—to engage in one-on-one combat. At first, none of the Israelites want to face Goliath because he’s so large, but then a small shepherd boy named David volunteers. King Saul tries to dissuade David, but he eventually agrees to send him because nobody else will go. David runs into the valley carrying nothing but his staff and several smooth stones, which he puts in a sling and sends hurtling through the air. The projectile strikes Goliath in the forehead and sends him to the ground, and David uses this opportunity to pick up Goliath’s sword and cut off the giant’s head. Gladwell argues that this story is informative because it not only demonstrates that underdogs can beat “giants,” but that the very qualities that make a person powerful are often the qualities that lead to defeat. Conversely, some disadvantages can actually become beneficial. To illustrate this, he notes that Goliath fails because he’s too large to react to David’s projectile. What’s more, David wins because his smaller size allows him act fast, and the fact that he’s not a trained warrior forces him to think outside the box, which is how he comes up with the idea of using a projectile to slay Goliath.

Setting out to examine the nature of underdog stories, Gladwell turns to Vivek Ranadivé , an Indian immigrant who lives in California and becomes the coach of his daughter Anjali ’s basketball team. Vivek Ranadivé has no basketball experience, and the players on his team aren’t particularly talented. However, Ranadivé notices that most basketball teams only play defense underneath their own hoop even though it’s legal to apply defensive pressure as soon as the ball is inbounded. Accordingly, he teaches his team to play the full-court press , a defensive strategy that utilizes the entire court. This tactic makes up for the team’s lack of skills, and it catches other teams by surprise. Using this approach, Ranadivé’s team goes to the national championships, though they’re forced to stop running the play in their final game when a biased referee takes out his frustration on them by calling unfair fouls. Once the team stops playing the full-court press, they lose, but not before demonstrating their ability to compete with much better teams.

Gladwell argues that Ranadivé’s team’s disadvantages contribute to their success, since they would never have played the full-court press if they hadn’t been forced to think of ways to take pressure off of their weaknesses. This suggests that the things people conceive of as advantages and disadvantages aren’t always accurate, since disadvantages can become beneficial in certain circumstances while advantages can become hindrances in others. Gladwell applies this line of thought to education, focusing on Shepaug Valley Middle School in Connecticut, where Teresa DeBrito is the principal. Although most people in the United States assume smaller class sizes lead to better student performance, Gladwell notes that the research on this matter is inconclusive. What’s more, some teachers would rather have large classes than extremely small classes, since it’s difficult to engage students when there are only a few children in the room. For this reason, DeBrito worries that enrollment at Shepaug Valley is shrinking. To illustrate the problem, Gladwell suggests that making classes smaller is beneficial when there are already too many students (around, say, 30 children). If, however, a class is already small, making it smaller will only have a negative impact on the overall environment. The ideal class, then, has a medium amount of students. And yet, prestigious institutions continue to advertise small class sizes, and parents still gravitate toward this model.

The reason people continue to covet small classes, Gladwell upholds, is because society puts too much emphasis on whatever’s considered desirable. For instance, most people believe that Ivy League schools set students up for success no matter what. To explore this idea, Gladwell tells the story of Caroline Sacks , a young woman who excels in school. Sacks wants to be a scientist for her entire life and is accustomed to being the best student in her class. When it comes time to decide where to go to college, she decides on Brown University over the University of Maryland—a seemingly reasonable choice, considering Brown’s prestigious reputation. However, going to Brown is discouraging for Sacks because everyone around her is so smart and competitive. By Sacks’s sophomore year, she is so dispirited by her chemistry courses that she decides to quit studying science. Gladwell notes that this is a very common occurrence at prestigious schools. In fact, research shows that students who want to become scientists would be better off going to “mediocre” schools (where they’d be a “Big Fish in a Small Pond”) than they would be if they went to Ivy League schools (where they’d be a “Small Fish in a Big Pond”), since Ivy League schools are so competitive that many perfectly capable students drop out of the sciences because they’re too discouraged to go on.

The difficulties Sacks faced at Brown were dispiriting, but Gladwell asserts that there are such things as “desirable difficulties,” or challenges that lead to positive outcomes. To illustrate this, he introduces David Boies , a man who struggles in school because he has dyslexia. Because Boies finds it difficult to read, he develops extraordinary listening skills, which later help him excel as a lawyer because he knows how to listen in court for subtleties that other prosecutors overlook. He is now one of the nation’s most sought-after litigators. Going on, Gladwell notes that dyslexia actually functions as a “desirable difficulty” rather often. He tells the story of Gary Cohn , whose dyslexia forces him to become acquainted with failure so that, when it comes time to put himself out there to secure a job as an options trader on Wall Street, he feels he has nothing to lose. Consequently, he goes to great lengths to obtain an interview despite knowing nothing about finance, and eventually lands the job and moves on from there to become the president of Goldman Sachs. In both of these cases, Gladwell adds, there’s something else at play too: a personality trait known as “disagreeability,” which helps a person cast aside any worry about what others might think.

To further demonstrate the unexpected benefits of hardship and the value of “disagreeability,” Gladwell considers the life story of a doctor named Jay Freireich . Freireich grew up in extreme poverty after his father committed suicide when he was just a young boy. Throughout his childhood, he knew all kinds of struggle, so he was especially motivated to succeed when he went to medical school. His first job is on the childhood leukemia ward at the National Cancer Institute—perhaps the most depressing posting a doctor can receive, since childhood leukemia is so relentless and causes immense suffering. Because Freireich feels like he’s been through worse, though, he refuses to get depressed about the apparent hopelessness of his job, and this attitude enables him to keep working to find a cure. To do this, though, he has to try a number of unorthodox tactics that enrage many members of the medical community. Nonetheless, he doesn’t care what other people think because he’s focused on finding a cure. And though some of his methods put children through pain, he figures that since they’re going to die anyway, he might as well do whatever it takes to find a treatment. In this way, he comes up with a new method of treating childhood leukemia, which now has a 90 percent cure rate.

Gladwell turns his attention to the civil rights movement, claiming that one of the reasons activists like Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Baptist minister Wyatt Walker were able to successfully stand up against segregation was that they were used to being underdogs. Moreover, Wyatt Walker understood that sometimes standing up against authority means thinking outside the box and using clever tricks. When trying to attract attention to the Movement, he travels to Birmingham, Alabama in the hopes of getting the racist public safety commissioner, Bull Connor , to do something that will attract outrage across the country. At first Walker is unsuccessful, but he eventually helps stage a large protest made up of schoolchildren, coaxing Bull Connor to send police dogs after them so that reporters take pictures of angry officers sending bloodthirsty dogs at children. This results in a photograph that strikes a nerve in the national discourse about racism and segregation. According to Gladwell, this is a perfect example of how underdogs can use alternative strategies to use their opponents’ power against them.

Still examining the nature of authority, Gladwell pivots to consider the Troubles, the 30-year conflict that took place between Northern Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant communities, as well as the British military. In particular, Gladwell tells the story of an incident that took place in the small Catholic town of Lower Falls, where the British Army (which was biased against the Catholic community) came to search for illegal weapons. This incites rage amongst the residents, who throw stones at the soldiers as the British forces retreat after completing the search. And though the British Army could simply keep going, they turn around because they’ve been ordered to meet resistance with harsh punishment. This leads to a bloody conflict that results in a multi-day curfew, during which residents aren’t allowed to leave even to eat. The curfew only ends when a steady stream of Catholic women from a nearby neighborhood march to Lower Falls, showing solidarity with the residents and forcing the soldiers to leave, since they don’t know how else to respond to the women’s nonviolence. The primary mistake the British made during this encounter, Gladwell upholds, is that they overestimated the effectiveness of their own authority.

With this in mind, Gladwell tells readers about how a Californian man named Mike Reynolds influenced the state to institute a Three Strikes Law after his daughter was murdered by two ex-convicts. In the aftermath of this tragedy, Reynolds sought to address California’s high crime rate, eventually helping pass Three Strikes, which ensured that third-time offenders would go to jail for 25 years to life. Reynolds is quite proud of this, but Gladwell—along with many criminologists—thinks that Three Strikes did more harm than good, since it overcrowded the prison systems and possibly even had a negative effect on the crime rate, though researchers are conflicted about the actual impact of the law. All the same, Gladwell asserts that Reynolds’s efforts to change the penal system were perhaps misdirected, ultimately relying too heavily on the idea that strict laws and merciless authority are capable of bringing about positive change.

In a final examination of the idea that some forms of authority are simply useless when facing underdogs, Gladwell considers the life of a Protestant French pastor named André Trocmé , who openly shelters Jewish people during World War II. Even though the entire town of Le Chambon-sur-Ligne (where Trocmé lives) is forthcoming about helping Jewish people escape persecution, the fascists fail to stop them. Gladwell argues that this is largely because it’s so clear that Trocmé doesn’t care what will happen to him. No matter what, he’s going to stand up for what he believes in. Consequently, the fascists don’t know what to do with him, since killing him would do little to squash what he stands for and the movement he represents. In turn, Gladwell maintains that even the most frightening forms of authority are often rendered powerless by the underdogs who dare to stand up to them.

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DAVID AND GOLIATH Mass Market Paperback – May 6, 2014

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• Print length 320 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Back Bay Books
• Publication date May 6, 2014
• Dimensions 4.25 x 1 x 7 inches
• ISBN-10 0316285250
• ISBN-13 978-0316285254
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Editorial Reviews

"A real pleasure...Brims with surprising insights about our world and ourselves."-- Salon.com Praise for Outliers : "In the vast world of nonfiction writing, Malcolm Gladwell is as close to a singular talent as exists today... Outliers is a pleasure to read and leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward."-- David Leonhardt , New York Times Book Review Praise for The Tipping Point : "A fascinating book that makes you see the world in a different way."-- Fortune " Blink moves quickly through a series of delightful stories. Always dazzling us with fascinating information and phenomena."-- David Brooks , New York Times Book Review " Outliers is required reading for boardroom and watercooler crowds alike."-- Men's Health "[An] important new book...Gladwell intelligently captures a larger tendency of thought-the growing appreciation of the power of cultural patterns, social contagions, memes...Gladwell's social determinism is a useful corrective to the Homo economicus view of human nature."-- David Brooks , New York Times "Gladwell's theories could be used to run businesses more effectively, to turn products into runaway bestsellers, and perhaps most important, to alter human behavior."-- New York Times "In Outliers , Gladwell ( The Tipping Point ) once again proves masterful in a genre he essentially pioneered-the book that illuminates secret patterns behind everyday phenomena."-- Publishers Weekly "Intoxicating. Gladwell is an engaging writer and a first-rate tour guide."-- Thane Rosenbaum , Los Angeles Times "No other book I read this year combines such a distinctive prose style with truly thought-provoking content. Gladwell writes with a high degree of dazzle but at the same time remains as clear and direct as even Strunk or White could hope for."-- Atlanta Journal Constitution "The explosively entertaining Outliers might be Gladwell's best and most useful work yet...There are both brilliant yarns and life lessons here: Outliers is riveting science, self-help, and entertainment, all in one book."-- Gregory Kirschling , Entertainment Weekly "Thought-provoking, entertaining, and irresistibly debatable...[ Outliers ] is another winner from this agile social observer."-- Heller McAlpin , Christian Science Monitor

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Back Bay Books (May 6, 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316285250
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316285254
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.25 x 1 x 7 inches
• #4,243 in Popular Social Psychology & Interactions
• #4,412 in Decision-Making & Problem Solving
• #7,163 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences

About the author

Malcolm gladwell.

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. Prior to joining The New Yorker, he was a reporter at the Washington Post. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He now lives in New York.

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