Malcolm Gladwell’s new big idea: Underdog status can be advantage

Over the last 14 years, Malcolm Gladwell has produced one bestseller after another. His books are so buzzworthy their titles become catchphrases, like “Tipping Point” and “Outliers.”

Gladwell leads readers spellbound through stories that develop into counterintuitive insights into modern life.

His newest book is “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants” (Little, Brown; $29).

The book was inspired by a 2009 story Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker about a girls’ basketball team in Silicon Valley made up mostly of 12-year-olds who had never played the game. Their coach, a native of India, grew up on a diet of soccer and cricket but knew little of basketball. Clear underdogs, the team wound up playing at the national championships.

The coach couldn’t understand why teams generally did not contest the inbounds pass, so his team relied on the unconventional strategy of the full-court press. While not a popular strategy with opposing coaches, it worked.

The lesson, Gladwell explains, is that being an underdog can force people or organizations to try new techniques and out-of-the-box strategies to overcome obstacles, whether it’s a disability, lack of money or other potential impediments. His book is full of stories illustrating this theme.

Gladwell sat down to discuss his latest book and his writing.

Q. We don’t usually think of underdogs as having advantages against the powerful. Can you explain?

A. Yes, the key thing about the underdog strategy is that in order for the underdog to have an advantage, he or she has to depart from conventional strategy. There has to be a conscious decision by the underdog to adopt an unconventional strategy. These so-called advantages that come from disadvantage are only available to those who depart from convention ― and that’s not easy to do. There’s a reason most teams don’t run the full-court press. It’s hard!

In the story of David and Goliath, David does something really audacious and unusual. The conventions of hand-to-hand combat had been laid down for hundreds of years. And David just says, “Screw it.” He defies the conventions. It’s not an easy thing for people to adopt such strategies, even when those strategies are in their best interest.

Q. What are the implications beyond sports?

A. A lot of the book is about understanding how tenuous power is. The Northern Ireland chapter is the first I wrote and informed a lot of my thinking about the book. What I learned in writing that chapter was how little the overwhelming advantage that the British had in material resources mattered in that conflict.

What really mattered were persistence and anger and weapons of the spirit. The IRA was simply willing to fight longer and harder than the British, and they outlasted them.

It’s extraordinary, although no more extraordinary than what happened in Vietnam. So it makes you realize that things that you think of as powerful advantages don’t matter nearly as much as we think.

Q. Over the years, critics have accused you of oversimplifying complex subjects and cherry-picking social science research. How do you respond?

A. By definition, if you’re popularizing academic research, you have to, in a certain sense, distill the essence of that research. Otherwise, you’re not doing your job. The whole reason I exist is because academic research in its native form is very hard for the mass audience to follow. I do that work for them. So in a certain sense, I’m puzzled by this criticism. What’s incumbent is to do that research honestly and not to distort the research along the way. I’m aware that sometimes I don’t do it perfectly. But I think in the main I do a pretty good job.

By David Tarrant

(The Dallas Morning News)

(MCT Information Services)