Let me ask
you a series of questions:
Can a team
with only mediocre offensive skills and limited physical gifts regularly beat teams that are more
talented?
Are larger
classes sometimes better for learning than smaller ones?
Might an accomplished
young woman interested in science find career success by attending a state
university instead of the Ivy League school that admitted her?
Might a guy
with dyslexia (a serious disorder that affects reading ability) do well in a
legal career?
Can a
physician with a very troubled youth develop a breakthrough
protocol for treating a fatal childhood disease by ignoring colleagues and
forcing patients (and parents) to push through the pain?
Can an
oppressed minority gain rights and dignity through tricking the oppressor into
dumb moves?
Can the
campaign of a heart-broken father to limit crime after the murder of his
daughter backfire into promoting more crime?
Can forgiveness
provide a stable and fulfilling way of responding to horrific loss?
Can a small
group of dissenters thumb their noses at Vichy and Nazi officials and openly
harbor Jews, saving them from internment and death?
Can David
beat Goliath?
If you’ve
ever read any Malcolm Gladwell, you will know that the counter-intuitive
answers to some of these questions are Gladwell’s answers. Gladwell opens his
latest book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling
Giants by explaining how David’s victory over Goliath was not so great an upset
as we've come to believe. David, as an expert with the sling (not an unusual
talent in that time), held a real advantage over the armor-clad, pituitary case (Goliath) that he faced. Like the game of rock-scissors-paper, each strategy entails
an effective counter-strategy. So a girls basketball team, coached by an
Indian immigrant father with no basketball experience, used the unorthodox
strategy of an aggressive full-court press to win games and go the national
tournament. (Gladwell journeys into basketball lore to describe the education of
Rick Pitino about the value of the press. I must add that the press is under-utilized still.
I loved it.) If you don’t have rocks, use paper.
As Gladwell
often does in his writing, he weaves insights from social science into real
life tales, and in doing so, he challenges the easy assumptions we tend to make.
In two segments involving education, he challenges a couple of common assumptions,
assumptions that cost a lot of money and that have very serious repercussions.
First, he explores the assumption that smaller class size always improves
student achievement. Gladwell finds that class size, like many things in life,
has a sweet spot—a Goldilocks point—that is neither too large nor too small. In
smaller classes, there may not be enough variety to facilitate a desired
give-and-take for discussion and projects. Thus, the class never reaches its
full learning potential. Gladwell concludes (and I intuitively agree) that
outstanding teachers are the key to educational success, not simply more
teachers. Rather than paying outstanding, experienced teachers to retire early
to hire some additional new, untested teachers, we should work to keep
outstanding teachers working as long as possible. (Yes, I’m thinking of C, for
an example, although she’s still working.)
Another very
interesting point involving education addresses the issue of college choice.
Gladwell uses the instance of a young high-school student interested in science
who goes to Brown (an Ivy) rather that her home-state University of Maryland.
Because of the intense competition and high-skills range, Gladwell’s young
woman abandons science as her major. She tried to make it as a big fish in
a big pond, but as statistics show, this is tough. Those who succeed tend to be
those who succeed in comparison to their peers in a particular environment, whether at State U or an Ivy League
college. For young people making excruciating decisions about where to go to study or where to go to continue playing a sport, this is vital
information. (Of course, the Ivy League works well for some, as I know a couple
of Ivy League grads whom I think have done quite well.)
Another tale
that interested me especially was that of David Boies, one of the premier trial
and appellate lawyers in the nation. Boies has dyslexia, which makes reading
very difficult. To compensate, he learned to learn by listening—listening very
carefully. Boies didn’t go to college until a bit later in life. He ended up
graduating from Yale Law. (I guess his Ivy League choice worked out okay, too.)
One strategy he used in law school was to read the synopsis of a case rather
than a whole opinion (a lesson there, I think). And he listened—very carefully.
(I suspect that careful listening is a skill that most of us, including
lawyers—or especially lawyers?—too often fail to practice.) Boies chose
litigation as a field because it didn’t require as much reading as corporate
law would have. (Still, there’s still plenty to read in litigation.) Interestingly,
unlike most lawyers, Bois doesn’t read for pleasure, either, reporting that he
only reads about a book a year. Boies learned to compensate for his
disadvantage and by doing so, cultivated skills that allowed him to rise to the
top of his field.
From the
list of questions at the beginning of my review, you can discern some of the
other topics Gladwell addresses. Gladwell has mastered this genre. Gladwell,
along with Michael Lewis, Daniel Pink, and a few others, has learned how to
weave nonfiction narrative into social scientific insights in a manner that is
both instructive and entertaining. Gladwell’s counter-intuitive insights and
arguments challenge us to consider what things may not work the way that we easily
assume they do.
