Book review: Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath

All of Malcolm Gladwell’s five books have shown up on the New York Times Best Seller List at one point or another. Entrepreneurs and top-tier professionals often feel like they’ve discovered a new way of strategizing – like Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in Money Ball – after they digest one of Gladwell’s signature white-covered manifestos.

At the turn of the century, that may have been true. Gladwell received global recognition for The Tipping Point in 2000, an analysis of why trends and social phenomena spread throughout certain populations, while others do not. In 2005, he grabbed headlines once again for Blink: The Art of Thinking Without Thinking, in which he breaks down the human instinct of “thin slicing,” or mankind’s innate ability to make surprisingly accurate snap judgements of people and situations.

Historically, nonfiction readers have loved Gladwell. His books are always easy to apply to business life, but above all, his insights are thought-provoking for fresh entrepreneurs.

Gladwell’s latest work, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, has been on the shelves for a year. Despite once again making the Best Seller List, the book has been savagely ripped apart by the critics of all kinds, and rightly so.

The premise for David and Goliath is that everywhere we look in life, perceived advantages are often actually disadvantages. Conversely, perceived disadvantages can also prove to be the very building blocks of what make someone a winner. Gladwell’s thesis and principles, if they make sense, are actually quite compelling. But more often than not, his conclusions and causalities are far-fetched and easily debunked.

The book begins strongly with breakdown of the biblical battle between the giant soldier Goliath and the small shepherd boy David. Gladwell is able to effectively articulate why it stands to reason that David would be the obvious winner, as he was likely an ancient “projectile warrior” with impeccable stone “slinging” accuracy. He writes:

A typical sized stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of thirty-five meters would hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of thirty-four meters per second – more than enough to penetrate his skull and leave him unconscious or dead. In terms of stopping power, this is equivalent to a fair-size modern handgun.

However, this seems to be Gladwell’s only convincing passage in the introduction. For the rest of the section, he quotes The Holy Bible verbatim without questioning its validity, and hypothesizes that Goliath had some sort of pituitary tumor that may or may not have been the cause of mundane details in the story. Later, Gladwell presents several case studies that illustrate his ideas about why difficulties are sometimes desirable, when being a big fish in a small pond is ideal, and why power often has debilitating limits. A few of them include:

Vivek Ranadivé is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and now multi-billionaire who turned his daughter’s basketball team of unathletic 12-year-old girls into the top contenders of their league by playing the game differently. In 2010, Ranadivé became the co-owner and vice chairman of the Golden State Warriors.

A brilliant math and science student named Caroline Sacks (a pseudonym) may have ended up at a disadvantage when she attended the prestigious ivy league Brown University, where she was surrounded by hundreds of other smart people. Gladwell suggests that, in fact, Sacks would’ve been better off later in life had she attended a less prominent university where she could’ve had super-smart-person social status.

David Boies is severely dyslexic, but was able to become one of the top litigators in the world after his learning disability enabled him to sharpen his listening and memory skills, while also reading witnesses like open books instead of getting bogged down in reading words on a page.

Dr. Emil “Jay” Freireich assisted in developing medical cocktails to help cure Children’s Leukemia. The book paints Freireich as an angry and animated character who had been fired several times, was contentious by nature, and nearly devoid of all compassion. Gladwell argues that Freireich’s traumatic childhood and indifference to death was the overarching element that helped his successful drug treatment emerge.