How David Beats Goliath

I have to confess having a love-hate relationship with Malcolm Gladwell. He writes very well and I’m always eager to read his next Big Think-Middle Brow article. I want to like his articles, but whenever I finish one, I feel like I just ate a bowl of whipped cream.
Gladwell has a winning formula. Take an interesting law of social science (or a humdrum truism) and show how it’s applied in several incomprehensively different scenarios. Self-parody lurks behind the scenes.
Seeing the scenarios is the payoff of any Gladwell piece. Personally, I fill out a little bingo grid before hand. In each box, I’ll write things like “wine-making in the Yukon” or “hedge funds during the Ming Dynasty.” Then I check off each one Gladwell references.
His latest article is about how underdogs can win by resorting to unconventional strategies—or as he says, how David can beat Goliath (Biblical reference…bingo!). Seems pretty obvious to me, but now I have to know the connections!
The connections Malcolm! What are the connections??
Twelve-year-old girls basketball and Lawrence of Arabia! No, I’m not making this up. Hell, I couldn’t make it up.
The coach of the 12-year-old girls team decided to press the entire basketball floor and challenge every in-bounds pass. This was an unconventional strategy. The opposing teams got flustered and often turned over the ball, and the weaker team could pull off the upset.
I have a great deal of sympathy for this type of thinking. How can you look at a game, or any activity, in a different way and challenge orthodoxy? That’s what investing is all about. For example, I think there’s good evidence showing that punting on fourth-down isn’t worth it. But it will be odd for a pro team to start doing that. I’ve also heard that shooting foul shots underhanded is far superior than overhand. Yet what macho ball player will start doing that? The numbers geeks have shown that stealing bases is very risky and you shouldn’t do it unless you’re pretty darn sure you’ll make it.
The crawl style of swimming was unknown to the West until a competition in 1844 when Native American crushed a bunch of British swimmers who used the preferred-method, the breaststroke. (I used to think the crawl style was called freestyle.) It’s rather disquieting to think that some strategy that has stood the test of time is simply wrong.The economist Joseph Schumpeter said that innovation isn’t merely part of the economy, it’s the heart of the economy.
So I do enjoy Gladwell’s pieces yet I feel as if he stretches his themes further than the facts allow. For example, the last scenario presents a computer programmer who wins a naval war-game contest by ignoring strategies and crunching the numbers in the rulebook. That doesn’t sound too innovative to me. I wouldn’t call it poor sportsmanship but it’s hardly within the spirit of the law. In that case, I’d rather go with Goliath.

Posted by on May 5th, 2009 at 11:41 am


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