Malcolm Gladwell: How David Beats Goliath(newyorker.com)
newyorker.com
Malcolm Gladwell: How David Beats Goliath
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
Key quotes:
* "David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability-and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life."
* "The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths [who have 10x more "power" than Davids], he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. ... [W]hen the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy ... David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, "even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t."
* "Insurgents, though, operate in real time [they don't batch-process]. Lawrence [of Arabia] hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance-and endurance battles favor the insurgent."
* "Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is "socially horrifying"-they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coordination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable-a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment-a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench-to have the audacity to play it that way."