Business Insight Zone

Malcolm Gladwell is no stranger to the business world by now, what with the huge success of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. I can only wish that he had spent a little more time in his new piece for The New Yorker spelling out the business implications of his ideas. That’s not a criticism of the piece as it stands, so much as an acknowledgement that the ideas he talks about have enormous impact for the business world.

How David Beats Goliath

Following his typical M.O., Gladwell takes one idea or question — in this case, How do underdogs beat superior opponents? — and applies it across several fields.

He starts with a girls’ basketball team in Redwood City, California, which used a relentless full-court press to beat many teams that had better players and more experience. He extends the basketball lesson by interviewing Rick Pitino, the great college coach whose teams are likewise known for running the press. (Gladwell does not mention that John Wooden, whose record of ten national titles with UCLA remains unrivaled, also used the press.)

Gladwell extends his thesis through other examples, including the biblical story of David and Goliath, a war-games tournament, and T. E. Lawrence’s guerrilla tactics against the Ottoman Army in World War I. The commonalities he finds are that successful underdogs:

• Operate in real time, much faster than the established powers; and
• Replace ability with effort — especially effort targeted at the overdogs’ weakest points.

In basketball terms, the full-court press works so well because it takes good teams out of their zone of strength (executing a half-court offense) and forces them to play in uncomfortable, uncoordinated ways merely to bring the ball down the court at all. Lawrence’s attacks in Arabia worked so well because the tempo and fighting style of the Bedouin fighters he led was so different from the heavily-armed Ottoman troops they came up against. More than that, the Arabs sometimes did their damage without even encountering Ottoman forces — by sabotaging train lines in the middle of nowhere.

Gladwell didn’t mention another connection that I thought he might. When he talked about how Pitino coaches his players to look for and exploit the “rush state” in their opponents, and when he wrote that “David broke the rhythm of the encounter” with Goliath, I thought immediately of John Boyd, the fighter pilot whose work on “O.O.D.A. loops” has been praised by many, including Tom Peters and James Fallows. The acronym stands for “observe, orient, decide, and act,” and Boyd used it as a prescription for jet jocks (and, by extension, fighters of any type) to “get inside” the tempo — the corresponding loop — of an opponent.

Like most of Gladwell’s New Yorker pieces, the article is well worth reading, though I think he overdraws the moral of the story when he writes that

“We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around.”

Given the devotion that Gladwell and I share for Anders Ericsson’s work on “deliberate practice” and the enormous effort it requires, I’m all in favor of praising effort at every turn. Too many of us balk at becoming excellent not because we genuinely lack the talent (or because our organizations lack the resources), but because becoming excellent requires a lot of hard, frustrating work.

That said, Gladwell does make the point that excellent basketball teams can beat the full-court press with high skill of their own. Mind you, many excellent teams aren’t prepared to overcome the press, if only because they so seldom face it. What the girls from Redwood City did was to hit their opponents with concentrated effort, precisely aimed at a key point of weakness that very few other teams ever exploited.

Gladwell knows this — indeed, he spells it out — but he sells short the complexity of the idea he’s unspooling when he suggests that skill is the commodity and effort is the precious resource. Routine skill like, say, dribbling a basketball is indeed a commodity, at least among basketball players. And effort is hardly in short supply among the teams that Pitino beats with the full-court press. What’s rare is the combination of skill and effort and discernment shown by Gladwell’s chosen underdogs.

Bear with me, because I don’t mean to come down hard on Gladwell, and this touches on some of the implications of Ericsson’s work that I’ve been trying to sort out.

• Skill is common. Genuine, distinguishing skill is in short supply (just ask any HR manager).
• Hard work is common enough. Yet genuine, obdurate, deliberate hard work to get better is in short supply (ask any sports coach).
• The type of discernment shown by Lawrence in the desert, or by Michael Jordan on the basketball court, or by an entrepreneur like Tony Hsieh of Zappos . . . that’s scarce.

Gladwell has written a fascinating piece on underdogs. Read it. Focus on effort, just as he says. But focus even more on how the right kind of effort multiplies skill . . . when it’s guided by discernment.

~

Photo of Vignon’s renowned painting by Ed Uthman, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Category: Innovation & Entrepreneurship