Malcolm Gladwell's David & Goliath

David and Goliath Underdogs, Misfits, and The Art of Battling Giants

by Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell states in the Introduction that David and Goliath is "about what happens when ordinary people confront giants."  By giants, he means "powerful opponents of all kinds".  By sharing a variety of profiles of remarkable individuals, he explores two ideas:

           1. Much of what people consider valuable results from lopsided conflicts, because the act of                  confronting overwhelming odds produces "greatness and beauty"

           2. We often get these types of conflicts wrong, because giants' apparent strengths often are                   sources of their greatest weakness, and because being the underdog can change people 

               as being the underdog creates opportunities for them and educates them.

In the remainder of the Introduction, Gladwell shows that the story of David and Goliath has come to represent the archetype "improbable victory" tale only because we have failed to understand the events and characters of this story.  We have come to see this battle as a mismatch with an unlikely outcome because we only view "power in terms of physical might". However, a careful consideration of the conflict would reveal the advantages that David had going for himself: nimble swiftness over lumbering strength, and adept projectile hurling over up-close fighting, and eagle-like vision over blurred vision.

In Part One, Gladwell shares several stories to show the consequences of the error we make in reading David and Goliath - of having a too "rigid and definition of what advantage is." He also uses the stories to reveal "what it takes" to be the sort of person who doesn't, like David, "accept the conventional order of things as a given."

In this vein, he tells the stories of Lawrence of Arabia and Vivek Ranadive.  The former used his knowledge of the desert and surprise attack to help a rag-tag Bedouin tribe to defeat the much mightier Turkish army, while the latter used a game-long full court press strategy to coach a small and untalented girls basketball team to stunning victories over much taller and skilled opponents.

In a great chapter on what he terms the "Inverted U effect", Gladwell shows that an advantage can ironically become a disadvantage.  The Inverted U operates as follows: on the left side, "doing more or having more makes things better"; however, then you hit a "flat middle, where doing more doesn't make much of a difference".  Finally, you arrive at the right side, where doing or having more makes things worse.  

The two examples he gives of the inverted U are wealth and raising children, and class size. In the case of the latter, he presents evidence and testimony that very small classes are just as

dysfunctional as very large classes.  He concludes, "The inverted U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse." (68)

Gladwell also devotes a chapter to another example of where bigger and seemingly better doesn't always work to people's advantage.  This example has to do with the relative advantages of attending a modest university or college as opposed to attending a prestigious one. Here, Gladwell argues that something called relative deprivation creates a Big Fish-Little Pond Effect (80) at mediocre colleges that gives middling students a decided advantage over students in Harvard-type colleges where even very talented students compare themselves to brilliant top-achieving students, find themselves wanting, and become discouraged.  "The big pond takes really bright students and demoralizes them." (90)

The Inverted U Effect

In Part 2 of David and Goliath, Gladwell investigates the notion that disadvantages can sometimes prove to be assets. He terms such phenomenon "desirable difficulties". (102). He uses several profiles of people to demonstrate that hardships can drive some people to become smarter, stronger, or operate with more abandon and a greater sense of freedom.

He shares the remarkable story of David Boies as an example of the powerful compensation learning that can result from a disadvantage. Boies, despite suffering from dyslexia, became a highly successful trial lawyer.  His inability to read effectively drove him out of necessity to, instead, acquire knowledge through effective listening thus resulting in his becoming a skillful listener able to probe the testimony of people in court.

David Boies

Emil 'Jay' Freireich, whom Gladwell presents as an example of strength-from-difficulty, had an abysmal childhood - he lost his father at a very young age and was virtually abandoned by his mother as a boy.  Despite these hardships - in fact, because of them, he developed the fortitude and perseverance to become a hematologist who developed breakthrough treatments for childhood leukaemia.  Like Londoners who developed courage from the experience of remote misses during the Nazi bombings of that city, Freieich's hardships built him up rather than knocked him down.

Then there is Wyatt Walker of the American Civil Rights Movement, who despite being a part of the "underdog" oppressed black minority in the southern states, used a no-holes-barred trickster-like approach to goad the bigoted white establishment of the south into behaving in such a reprehensible way that it gained support for the Movement.

In the third and last part of the book, Gladwell looks at the limitations of power. He makes the point that power only has its intended effect when it is legitimate.  Legitimacy only exists when authority is predictable and fair and the people asked to obey it have a voice in it.

He shares the story of Rosemary Lawlor, an Irish Catholic wife and young mother who lived in Belfast during the clash between the British Protestant establishment and the Irish Catholic minority in Northern Ireland.  Her joining the protest along with thousands of others, despite the vastly superior and resolute British army, shows "that when law is applied in the absence of legitimacy", it produces opposition, not obedience.

Lastly, Gladwell compares the response of two parents to the murder of their child.  The first, Mike Reynolds, responded to the murder of his daughter in California with an understandable cry for retribution through a crusade to institute a get-tough-on criminals policy called Three Strikes whereby a mandatory 25-year sentence was imposed on anyone who committed the same crime 3 times. The other, Manitoban Wilma Derkson, chose to forgive.  Gladwell argues that while the latter David-like approach had lasting impact, the former Goliath-like expression of power ultimately failed because it lacked legitimacy. Although crime rates in California were lowered for a period of time
following the inception of Three Strikes, instances of violent crime increased in some areas of the state.