David and Goliath

Everyone loves an underdog and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants is classic Malcolm Gladwell. It’s full of clever contrarian wisdom told through compelling stories of interesting people’s lives, interwoven with ‘now we know differently’ scientific evidence.

In the book’s opening, Gladwell turns on its head the classic story of the diminutive, unprotected and almost unarmed David triumphing against all the odds versus the gargantuan, heavily armoured and armed Goliath. It turns out the innocent shepherd was a highly trained sling-shot specialist, who effectively brought a gun to a knife fight with an old man with giantism, who saw double, could hardly move and whom he shot in the forehead from a safe distance.

‘Things are never as good or as bad as they seem’ could have been an alternative title for this collection of topsy-turvy tales that give hope and guidance to entrepreneurs, challenger brands, campaigners, reformers, minorities and underdogs everywhere. The book is about the unseen disadvantages of presumed advantages and the surprising advantages of seeming disadvantages.

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 we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage.' It turns out that many of the things we put in the asset and liability columns of life’s balance sheet should be swapped.

Let’s start with assets that turn into liabilities. Gladwell introduces us to the idea of inverted U-curves. These are things, like money, that are assumed to get better the more you have but that in fact, beyond a certain point, show diminishing advantage. In the US, salaries of more than $50,000 a year translate into little increase in happiness and actively turn into a disadvantage as they increase further: incredible wealth tends to decrease happiness. In one example that should surprise everyone, the very real benefits reaped from reducing class sizes from 30 or 40 to 20-odd, start to reverse once the class goes down to around 12 or less. In an even more shocking example, it turns out that going to an elite university can be a disadvantage and students may be better off deliberately pitching down, rather than up.

Gladwell explains this through the story of Caroline Sacks, a gifted student at the top of her high school class, who made it to an Ivy League college to study science. She enjoys a first flush of excitement at being in a whole class of bright students but, as the year progresses, she has trouble coming to terms with not being top of the class, precipitating a major confidence crisis and change of direction.

The data shows that had she gone to a lesser college, where she was still top of the class, she would have been likely to still be in science – and to be just as successful a scientist as those from the top of the Ivy League class who so intimidated her. In fact, Gladwell even makes the case that a less gifted student who is top of the class at a fifth-rate college will do almost as well as those graduating top from the Ivy League. It seems it really is better for your career to be a ‘big fish in a small pond’.

On the flipside of the balance sheet are the liabilities that turn into assets. These tend to be of the ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ variety. In one chapter, entitled ‘You wouldn’t wish dyslexia on your child. Or would you?’, Gladwell suggests that skills nurtured to compensate for a condition can sometimes lead to a life of extraordinary accomplishment, citing one study that shows around a third of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic.

Another chapter reveals that 'of the 573 eminent people for whom [sociologist Shmuel] Eisenstadt could find reliable biographical information, a quarter had lost at least one parent before the age of 10' – and 45 per cent had lost a parent before the age of 20. Before getting carried away with the idea of ‘Desirable Difficulties’, Gladwell does acknowledge that many who suffer are crushed by the experience: prisoners are three times more likely to be dyslexic than the general population.

Those hoping for specific business examples of minnows trumping the mighty will be better off reading Adam Morgan’s Eating the Big Fish, or Dave Trott’s Predatory Thinking. But for those who enjoy contrarian wisdom wrapped in a compelling human story and seasoned with a sprinkling of slightly selective science, there’s much to savour in Gladwell’s latest.

John Kearon is founder, CEO and chief juicer of BrainJuicer Group Plc [email protected]. This review was taken from the January 2014 issue of Market Leader. Browse the archive here.

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