PRASAD SETTY: Good
afternoon everyone. Welcome to our Talks at
Google session today. We are very fortunate to
have a guest amidst us who doesn't need
any introduction. Seriously, how many people
need an introduction to Malcolm Gladwell? [LAUGHTER] PRASAD SETTY: Malcolm was
the bestselling author of "The Tipping Point,"
"Blink," "Outliers," et cetera. He's received many honors. But I think what he's
probably proudest of having accomplished in his
life must be the fact that he was our very first Authors
at speaker way back in 2006. And so that has started
author's tradition where we now have had more
than 1,000 speakers come over to Google and share
with us their ideas. Malcolm has recently
written a new book called "David and Goliath." And that is what we'll
be talking about today. The format for this,
as you can guess, is more of a fireside chat. I have a set of questions that
many colleagues have shared with me, things that they'd
be interested in hearing Malcolm's perspectives on. But we'll certainly open it up
for a Q&A with all of you folks too. And so there are mikes. And when it's time, I'll ask
you to line up out there. And then we do have
certainly books to pass around of
"David and Goliath." So let's give a very warm round
of welcome to Malcolm Gladwell. [APPLAUSE] PRASAD SETTY: Malcolm,
just to kick this off, what would you like to
tell us about this new book and why you chose to write it? MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well,
it's a book called "David and Goliath." And it's about
underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants. It's about a number of things. But it's principally about
asymmetrical conflicts and the strategies that are
available to the weaker side. And then sort of
secondarily it's about the accuracy of our
assumptions about advantages and the nature of advantages
and disadvantages. So is our perception in an
asymmetrical conflict of one side is the favorite and the
other side as the underdog accurate? Or is it an illusion based
on our own faulty assumptions about the nature of advantage? And then the third
argument in the book has to do with
whether adversity is a more useful way of learning
certain kinds of lessons than conditions
without constraint. So it's called
"David and Goliath" because the story
of David and Goliath is in fact a
perfect illustration of this very thing. David's choice of
weapon, the sling, is actually an incredibly
devastating weapon. You place a rock
in a leather pouch, and you swing it around
at roughly six or seven revolutions per second. You release one of the chords. The rock goes forward
at speeds, depending on the weight of
the rock, speeds of probably 30
meters per second. The stopping power of a typical
projectile launched in that way is the equivalent of
a 45 caliber handgun. And the accuracy of people
in those years with one of these things
was extraordinary. We know from primitive
tries that somebody with a couple of
years of experience could hit the
center of that clock very easily from
where I'm standing. So David up against Goliath
has superior technology. Routinely slingers
defeated heavy infantry, which is what Goliath is,
in combat in ancient times. In fact, ancient
army's had slingers on their kind of payroll
for that precise purpose. The minute he
takes out the sling and it changes the rules of
combat, he is the favorite. He's not going to lose, right? There's only Goliath,
who's lumbering. And then the other
fascinating about that story is that Goliath-- there's
been all this speculation in the medical
literature about what's going on with Goliath
because there's all these weird things he does. He moves very slowly. He's led on to the valley
floor by an attendant. And the thinking is that he
has what's called acromegaly, which is the condition
caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland
that causes overproduction of human growth hormone. He's tall. He's a giant. Giants are often-- you know,
Andre the Giant had acromegaly. We think Abraham
Lincoln had acromegaly. When people are unusually tall,
that's one of the explanations. And acromegaly
has a side effect, which is that it compresses
the optic nerves. And people with acromegaly often
have severe vision problems. Goliath is probably half
blind, in other words. So a guy who's
half blind goes up against another guy with an
incredibly lethal weapon, accurate to within
a hair's breath from 50 yards away and with the
stopping power of 45 pistol. And yet for 3,000
years we've insisted that guy is an underdog. It's insane, right? It's the most irrational
reading of the allocation of advantages and
disadvantages in that conflict. So the question is if we
are so profoundly irrational in the way we have read the
relative strengths of the two parties in that most
famous of conflicts, how many other
situations do we misread? And that's what
the book's about. And I think the answer is lots. PRASAD SETTY: And you
do talk about quite a few real underdogs
in the book as well. And one of the examples you
were mentioning at lunch today was about this girl's
basketball team. Tell us about that and
how that was shaped. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well this
is one of the reasons I got started writing the book is I
ran into a guy who some of you may know, the guy who founded
Tibco, Vivek Ranadive. I met him at a conference and
didn't realize who he was. Weirdly, by the way, I
had another experience in this exact same thing where
I met someone at a conference, did not realize who
they were, and just had a conversation with
sports as a result. The first person I did
this with was Larry Page. I met him years
ago, and I thought he was just a graduate student. And I had no idea. And so I was like, where
did you got to school? He's like, oh,
I'm from Michigan. So we just talked about
Michigan State basketball for about 45 minutes. And then afterwards,
people were like, do you know who you
were talking to? I had no clue. Anyway, I did the same
thing with this guy, Vivek. So he started
telling me about how he coached his 12-year-old
daughter's basketball team. And because he's Indian, he
had no clue about basketball. So he goes to-- I mean-- [LAUGHTER] PRASAD SETTY: I
can relate to that. MALCOLM GLADWELL: OK. Good. Just checking. There was no natural
reason to assume he would know a lot
about basketball. PRASAD SETTY: Underdogs. [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL:
That's right, exactly. Although, only an India, a
country of a billion people, could claim to be an underdog. So Vivek goes and studies-- in
his kind of software engineer kind of way-- goes to
study basketball games and becomes convinced that
Americans are completely irrational in the way
they play basketball. Because he doesn't
understand why, if you are the weaker
party in a game, you don't do the full
court press all the time. Because you're going to
lose otherwise, right? And by not playing
the full court press, you are allowing your opponent
to do precisely the thing that your opponent
excels at, which is to pass and dribble and
execute choreographed plays. Why would you give them
the easiest possible route to doing the thing that
makes them better than you? So he says your only
hope is to slow them down and to defeat them at the things
they're not expert at, ie, play the full court press. If it fails, so what? You're going to lose anyway. But at least you've
raised your chances of losing from 95% to
something less than 95%. This is relevant to him because
his daughter's team is utterly without any talent whatsoever. These are the very, very,
very skinny, somewhat nerdy daughters of programmers
from Silicon Valley. [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL:
So he does this. And his strategy
is we're not going to learn how to shoot,
dribble, or pass. We're not even going to practice
any kind of offensive plays. What you're going
to do is I'm going to get you in really,
really good shape. And I'm going to teach you to
do this for the entire game. And what happens is that if
you do this for the entire game in a basketball game made
up of 12-year-old girls, the other team will not advance
the ball past mid court. And so Vivek's
team starts to win by scores like eight, nothing. [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL:
And they advance to the national championships. It's such a hilarious story. And, of course, the
opponents are so flummoxed by this, first of
all, and then outraged because the thing that Vivek
is playing with his girls is not actually
basketball, right? If you don't dribble,
pass, or shoot, and have no intention of so
doing, and if the score at the end of the game is
something like six, nothing, that's not basketball. That's another sport. And so they throw
chairs on the court. They challenge him to fist
fights in the parking lot. They scream at the refs. And he is sort of
massively different. To him this is more of
the strange idiosyncrasies of the American
sporting personality. And that is a lovely
illustration of my very point because why is he compelled
to follow this strategy? Because he's got nothing, right? He's got bupkis. His girls are incapable of
playing the game of basketball, right? So what does that do? It spurs him to find a
completely alternate strategy that's far more successful. And this is, of course, the
great story of innovation, right? That nothing acts
ts a greater spur to innovation then the
absence of advantage. So if that's the case,
there must be situations where it is not advantageous
to have advantages, right? The only situation
where he's better off is if his girls are
really talented. So there's a series
of conditions. You could have no talent,
you can have massive talent, and you can be
anywhere in the middle. The only situation
where he could also have reached the
national championship is in the 99th ninth
percentile condition where his team is
massively talented. But had he been at
anything other-- so he's in the 1% condition. That's advantageous
because that forces you to play the
full court press. The 99th percentile
condition is advantageous. But the two through
98 is not advantageous because you have no
incentive from to two to 98 to try anything new. Your instinct is just
to play the game the way the game is supposed
to be played. So had his girls been
even a little bit better, they would've been worse off. PRASAD SETTY: So
you're saying we should be as bad as we can be? MALCOLM GLADWELL:
Well, I'm saying there are situations where being
bad is highly advantageous. And I don't go into
this in the book, but if you've read
"Innovator's Dilemma," that's what "Innovator's Dilemma"
is all about, right? The disruptive
outsider is the one who is incapable of meeting
the marketplace needs as the market is
traditionally defined. They can't do it. So what they do they do? They try a completely
new half-assed approach, which in the beginning,
doesn't work. But by that very nature of
trying something completely outside the
mainstream, they end up upending the--
were they any good, they would never be
forced to do that. So it's the same
kind of principle. PRASAD SETTY: One of
the things that you talk about in the
book which hinders your chance of
improving your success is something that you say
that we're all susceptible to. And the acronym that you use
is EICD, Elite Institution Cognitive Disorder. Tell us about that
because that's something I'm sure we
don't know anything about. MALCOLM GLADWELL: I
gave a talk on this at the Google
Zeitgeist Conference. And because I was
having fun with it, I invented the acronym
for the conference. It's not actually in the book. Elite Institution Cognitive
Disorder is the mistaken belief that attending the most elite
institution you can get into is always in your best interest. This is false. There are a number of
many, many situations where it is not in your best
interest to go to, for example, the best school
you can get into. But rather it's in
your best interest to go to, at the very
most, your second choice, and probably, ideally, your
third or fourth choice. The reason is as follows. The best predictor of success
in a highly competitive environment like, for example,
law school, or more relevant, the one I use in my book
is getting a STEM degree, getting a science and math
degree-- science and math education at the
university level is marked by dropout rates
that are north of 50%. Most people who try to get a
science and math agree fail. So the question is if you would
like to get a science and math degree, what is the
optimal strategy? And the optimal
strategy is not to go to the best school you get into. Why? Because the best predictor
of success in getting a degree is not your absolute
level of intelligence but your relative
level of intelligence. It's your class rank. It's your rank relative to
your peers in your class, not your SAT score or your IQ. So basically anyone, if you
fall in the bottom third of your class, your
chances of dropping out rise astronomically. So you should basically
follow a strategy that minimizes your
chances of falling in the bottom third
of your class. What does that mean? Don't go to a good
school, right? Now what's fascinating
about this, the amazing thing
about this, is that we appear to have
consistently undervalued the psychological
costs of finishing in the bottom half of any
competitive situation. In other words,
what we overvalue is the prestige of
the institution. And what we undervalue
is the cost to you of not succeeding
at that institution. And so there's a
beautiful illustration of this in this study that
was done of economics PhDs. So what we do is we take
the top 30 PhD Programs in economics in America. And we break the
students down by how they rank in their
graduate class. And then we look at
their publication rate six years out of
attaining their PhD. These are those who
take the academic route. So in something like economics,
we use your publication rate as the number of
papers you get accepted by prestigious journals. It's used as a proxy for
your success as an economist. What do we find when
we look at that? What we find is the
95th percentile student at Harvard, Stanford,
Princeton, MIT, et cetera, publishes a lot of papers,
as you would expect. They're brilliant. But the drop off from the
95th to the 80th percent is astronomical. And by the time you get to
the middle of the PhD class at elite schools, they're
not publishing at all. In fact, the 95th
percentile student at the worst PhD
program you can find will publish more and be a
more successful economist then the 75th percentile student
at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. Now, there are many
explanations for that. But the most
parsimonious explanation is it is so traumatic and
humiliating and overwhelming to be in an elite program and
see a handful of people just beat the crap out of you, but
you are permanently impaired. And my message at
Google Zeitgeist was that I think
the logical response to this line of reasoning
is that you should hire only on the basis of
class rank and not on the basis of institution. In other words, you
should have don't ask, don't tell when it comes to
the name of your undergraduate and graduate institution. We should be indifferent to
where you went to school. We should only
care about how you ranked because if it's so
devastating to be in anything other than the top
third of your class, I don't want you if you weren't
in the top third of your class, right? Now I'm being playful
a little bit here. But the point is
do you see how we have allocated our strengths? And our notion of
what is an advantage and what is a disadvantage are
allocated in an irrational way. We've become obsessed with
the advantages of prestige. We have not paid attention to
the disadvantages of prestige. And that's a mistake. PRASAD SETTY: But
some people seem to get motivated by being
surrounded by people smarter than they are, right? So that's sort of-- MALCOLM GLADWELL: Not
economic PhDs apparently. [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL: No, I mean,
intuitively, I agree with you. I want to find reasons to
like elite institutions. All my friends went
to elite institutions. Should I have
children, I would want them to go to
elite institutions. But the problem is that when
we go and systematically look for those advantages,
we can't find them. I don't go into it in my book. But there's a long
and rich tradition in economics in
which people hunt for the value of
an elite education. And they can't find it. So we know that it is the
case that a student who goes to Harvard earns more money
in the course of their career than a student who goes to
the University of Tennessee. OK. But that doesn't tell
you anything at all. What you really need to do is to
find two students, both of who get into Harvard,
one of whom goes and one goes to
University of Tennessee. And then compare
their career earnings. And when you equalize
for the person, you can't find any difference. In other words, it's
not that Harvard is making you a lot of money. It's the kind of person who
gets accepted by Harvard makes a lot of money. And then there is an even
cleverer line of things. There's now been like
ten studies on this, and it's so interesting. They now look at
elite high schools. So what is the benefit of going
to a selective high school? Now, intuitively, you would
think it must show up. You must be able to see, whether
in test scores, or the quality of the college you go
to, or somewhere, we must see some impact of that. And we can't find advantage. Once you do that
equalization thing, if you are a smart
kid, in other words, it doesn't matter
what school you go to. Smart is smart, which is
an intriguing finding. PRASAD SETTY: [INAUDIBLE]. Thank you. I want to switch
topics a little bit. You know, you do
a remarkable job of popularizing social sciences. And by the way, I forgot
to introduce myself. I'm Prasad Setty. I'm part of people operations. And I lead the
analytics group, which is composed of many
social scientists who love the fact that
Malcolm's work gets their kind of thinking
into the public limelight. How do you distill and aggregate
all of this research that's done in the social
sciences and come up with what you think are
the most cogent arguments? Because as you've
mentioned, there are lots of studies
done on similar topics. And some of them point
towards one direction. Others point towards a
different direction, et cetera. MALCOLM GLADWELL:
Well, you're looking for trends in the research. And so, for example,
the studies I was just mentioning
about trying to measure the value of elite schools,
that's a very clear trend. And you've got a
cluster of studies that have been done in the
last two or three years using pretty rich data
sets that are all coming to roughly
the same conclusion. So that's the sort of
thing I'm looking for. What you want to steer clear of
are the one really wacky study that is sitting all by itself. That doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just you have to
approach it with more caution. But there's no shortage. I mean, the thing that's
fascinating about being a sort of student
of academic research is that the number of things
that on an academic level-- ideas that are being
pursued and conclusions that are being drawn that are
quite dramatically at odds with conventional
wisdom is enormous. If you're in the game
of, in other words, looking in academic
research for ways to challenge the way
we think about things, there's an embarrassment
of riches out there. I mean, it's not hard to do. So to me, what always
amazes me, is how much fascinating and
useful material lies buried in academia, just
never sees the light of day because no one bothers
to go and write about it and popularizing it. I mean, it's astounding
how-- you know, if you talk to academics,
the list of things that they think that the rest
of the world is doing wrong, it's like this long. So it's not a very
difficult process. [LAUGHTER] PRASAD SETTY: Related question. You use a lot of stories to
bring your thoughts to life. And the stories add a lot
of emotional richness, and we can really
connect with them. But how do you ensure that the
stories that you're picking are the most representative
of the phenomenon that you're trying to describe? Because you could
probably find a story to fit any theory that
you want, one story. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah. So there's a whole set
of trade offs here. Storytelling, by
definition, has one great disadvantage, which
is you are representing a single narrative,
a single experience. On the other side
of the equation, story telling has a
massive advantage, which is there is no better way
to communicate and move people than through story. So what I've always tried
to do is-- the reason I try to balance storytelling
and kind of social science research is that
I'm trying to find some kind of middle ground. I'm trying to find
an observation that is being made in the
literature or by academics and illustrated by
means of a story. So it's rare that the
story comes first. It's not that I hear something
cool and then hunt for data to fit that. It's the other way around. I look for an idea that's
been expressed in academia. And I say, well, how can I
make that story resonant, make that, sorry,
observation resonant? So you hunt for stories
that match this kind of idea that you feel has some
firepower behind it. But that said, it's a
necessarily imperfect process. All my books are
massively imperfect. I don't imagine that
anyone will ever agree with 100% of
the things in my book. I don't even want them
to agree with 100% of the things in the book. That's not what you want. You're not looking for converts. You want people to
start conversations. And writers who are looking
for converts are scary. I think what you're
looking for is you want people to
engage with the ideas. I did a piece for the "New
Yorker" a couple weeks ago about doping in sports. And I'm a big runner. I'm a huge fan of
track and field. If my favorite
runners were found to be using some kind of
PEDs, I would be devastated. Nonetheless, my piece
was all about look at it from Lance Armstrong's
point of view, right? Or look at it from Alex
Rodriguez's point of view. I simply pointed out
that the arguments that we use to justify our
prohibition on performance enhancing drugs or really lame. They're insanely lame. And you can't run around
condemning people and suing them and putting them
in jail, whatever we do, on the basis of
insanely lame arguments. So lame argument number
one, for example, the one that I cannot get over
is in baseball you are allowed, if you're a pitcher, to replace
your ulnar collateral ligament in your elbow, which is the
principal ligament you use when you throw a baseball-- to take
it out and replace it with a tendon taken from another part
of your body or from a cadaver if you so choose. This tendon will have
performance characteristics that are infinitely
superior to the ligament that nature gave you. You can swap it out, bring
in the bionic ligament, extend your career, be able
to the throw the ball harder. And what do we do? We think that's fantastic. 75% of pitchers in
the major league have had this procedure done. No one bats an eyelash. The guy who pioneered
the procedure is considered to be a hero. Alex Rodriguez is
a baseball player who decides to
take testosterone, a naturally-- he's not taking
something from a cadaver. He's taking a naturally
occurring hormone approved by the FDA and
available through prescription to everyone in this room. And he's decided to take it. And what happens? He's considered to
be a massive villain. Lance Armstrong takes his
own blood, his own blood, and reinjects himself
with his own blood, and he's considered a villain. So wait a minute. On the one hand,
people are importing tendons taken from cadavers,
which profoundly alters performance characteristic
of the arm they use to pitch. And that's fine. But you can't take
your own blood and reinject yourself with it. And if you do that,
you're a cheater. Explain to me why that's-- I am
perfectly willing to go after Lance Armstrong once
someone makes sense of that contradiction. So there's a case
where do I expect to convince all of
you of this argument? No. But if I, by writing
stuff like that, force people to just sit
down and actually come up with better arguments for why
we hate performance enhancing drugs, then I will
have succeeded I think. PRASAD SETTY: I
guess that gives us a new benefits idea for Google. Bionic ligaments for
our software engineers so they can code faster. [LAUGHTER] PRASAD SETTY: You talk about
how lots of studies in academia never find it to
the outside world. What can we, as society, do to
improve the chances of that? Because there is so much
knowledge, and it seems like it could be useful
in every day life. MALCOLM GLADWELL: It's a
really interesting question. In general, I think
we have to understand that the appropriate attitude of
non specialists to specialists ought to be one of respect,
not necessarily enthusiasm. You shouldn't always accept
what the expert says as true. But you should be respectful of
what they know and you don't. And I think that that is an
ongoing-- unless you take great pains as a society to
constantly reinforce that idea, that experts
deserve our respect, experts will not get respect. This is on display
right now, right? You have a group
of lawmakers who have no respect for the
expertise of the economics profession. I saw a guy on TV the
other day, some lawmaker from somewhere, who is
like, I don't know anything about economics. I know something about what
it takes to run a household. This is a guy who's in Congress. [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL: I mean,
that's problematic, right? But there has to be a kind
of-- this is something that you can't ever let
up on enforcing that as a core ethic in
a technologically complex society. Expertise is at the heart
of all progress, right? And you have to create
the social conditions under which expertise
is respected. And if you let down your
guard at all on that, crazy things start to happen. You have people
running around saying that they don't want to
vaccinate their children. And you have people running
around saying that it's fine if we defaulted in two weeks. You know, there's this kind of
madness that will take over. I mean, that's not an
answer to the question because it's really
hard to inculcate that. But the people in
this room and me, we're all the people who
have to do that kind of work. PRASAD SETTY: Makes sense. Why don't folks start
lining up at the mikes? I think we have one out here
if you want to ask a question. But I'll keep going
on until you do. As you think about all the
work that you have done, has there been an
insight or two that you have captured that's
really profoundly shaped your own behavior,
your own life? MALCOLM GLADWELL:
That's interesting. Well, "Blink," my
second book, it so profoundly undermined my
belief in my own capacity to make good
decisions that I feel I floundered for
several years after. But in all kinds of ways I
just came away from that book realizing the degree
that we massively underestimate the role of the
irrational in our own lives. And we're constantly
making up stories that make it sound to
ourselves like we are behaving in a logical,
commonsensical manner. And we're simply not. One of the guys I run with
is a social psychologist. And he was telling me about this
study that was done recently that looked at how the
willingness of a judge to grant parole varied
by the time of day. So right before lunch, judges
are really, really crabby and don't grant parole at all. And then when they come back
from lunch, their rates soar. That's the kind of thing where I
would imagine that if you lined up all the criminal
judges in America and you told them that,
they would dispute that so vigorously. They're convinced that they
approach every case the same. And you do the
simplest analysis, and you discover a very
disturbing pattern. Now, maybe some part of
that is auto factual. Who knows? But it certainly merits
some investigation, right? Well, I feel like there's
versions of that everywhere. And we're so resistant
to kind of acknowledging that about our lives. PRASAD SETTY: Why don't we take
one of the audience questions. AUDIENCE: So I was really
fascinated by your Zeitgeist talk about elite institutions. And thinking if we take
Google as a potential elite institution, I'm
curious of your thoughts on the potential damage we
may be doing to ourselves and our employees
because not everyone here can be the superstar. And yet most of the
people coming here were superstars before. So I'm curious if you have
any research or thoughts on the impact of that
for organizations. MALCOLM GLADWELL: So this
is an interesting question. So how do you restructure
organizations such that you minimize the
psychological damage of people at the bottom of the hierarchy? So one way is to limit the
notion of hierarchy, right? So the thing that is so toxic
about elite colleges in science and math programs is
that necessarily there is a hierarchy. You give out grades, and
you know were you rank. And you're in a classroom
setting where you're all trying to do the same thing. So you can easily compare
yourself to your peers and know whether you're behind. Those conditions
don't necessarily apply in the workplace. It's possible to
construct work places that don't have the toxic element of
hierarchy to the same degree. AUDIENCE: We shouldn't
give grades then at Google? MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, I don't
know how you-- no, I mean, it wouldn't be as
explicit as grades. But I'm saying that you can
organize a workplace in a very, very hierarchical way or
you could choose not to. The other thing it
would tell you is it would say something about
the size of teams as well. I mean, it would
seem to argue, I would think--
although maybe not. It's really about the
structure of teams. To the extent that you can
keep things that are as flat as possible, I think you
minimize the damage caused by hierarchy's. AUDIENCE: Hi. Thanks for coming to speak. So I just started in people
operations about a month ago. And since I've
been here, I've had a lot of people recommend
"Strength Finder" and other books like that,
and I've taken a look at it. And I can't help but
think that things like that are kind of, as the
great skeptic James Randi said, "flim flam," or like modern
day pseudo social science. And I'm wondering if you
have any insight into those because I know companies
spend a lot of money buying those kinds of books
for their employees. MALCOLM GLADWELL:
I have to confess I've never read any of those. I mean, I know that
they're very successful. AUDIENCE: In sales or in
what they set out to do? MALCOLM GLADWELL: In sales. [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL: But
I guess I would only say it's interesting
though that there is such a hunger for
that kind of thing. I will say this, people are
experience rich and theory poor. Most people
necessarily lack access to organizing principles
in their life. If you're not immersed
in the world of academia and you don't have the
leisure to follow and acquire grand theories, you don't have
theories to explain things. So whenever someone comes along
with an explanatory mechanism for something that you're
experience rich in, it's enormously attractive. So if "Strength Finder" is
lousy, it's incumbent on us just to come up with better
and more sophisticated ways of-- but it's
clear that there is a massive demand for
something to allow people to organize their experience. AUDIENCE: Hey Malcolm. My name is Mike. Thanks for being here. My question is
kind of going back to the value of elite
institutions again. So you talk about
how someone who goes to Harvard,
someone who goes to the University of Tennessee,
they are intrinsically going to do the same if they are
on the same intelligence level. So I guess my
question is, you know, you hear you're kind of the
average of the five people you hang around. You surround yourself with
people who are smarter than you, you will naturally
elevate your level. Do you believe in that? Or do you believe
that's kind of-- it seems like your
theory kind of puts demerits towards
that thought process. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well,
there's a couple of things. One is that one of the
implications of that argument is that there are a lot
more very able people at non-elite institutions
than we think. And actually this is kind
of a fascinating thing. So to take a step backwards,
the larger question is how efficient are elite
educational institutions as search engines for talent? What percentage of
qualified students do they actually uncover? And the answer is we used to
think they were very efficient. What we have
discovered recently is they're actually
quite inefficient. In other words, enormous numbers
of very, very intellectually capable people never even come
close to the 250 top colleges in the country. So non-selective colleges
have a much larger share of the intellectual aristocracy
than we would imagine. So to your question, if you go
to the University of Tennessee, you can find lots
and lots and lots of very, very intellectually
capable people to hang around with. And if you are that kid who
could have gone to Harvard, you will probably
gravitate to those five. So you'll be surrounded by peers
who may be every bit as able. But the difference is that
you will almost certainly be the top of your
class as opposed to running the risk at being
in the middle or the bottom. So you're getting two benefits,
intellectual benefits, as opposed to maybe only one. The other thing, of course,
is that-- well, I'll leave it at that. There are many, many parallel
arguments along these lines. Now, of course, not everyone
can follow this strategy. If everyone does, it
ceases to work, right? Everyone can't go down a notch. So the whole thing is if you're
going to follow this strategy, do it quick before I sell too
many books and the advantage is wiped out. AUDIENCE: So you said in
response to a previous question that it would be useful to
eliminate some hierarchy so that you get rid of this problem
of people being at the bottom. But how do we know that's the
bigger issue as opposed to it's just a great boost to people
when they are at the top? And if that was the
predominating factor, then maybe we should just have
more awards or more ways to recognize people. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Oh, I see. You mean have a kind
of pretend hierarchy where you give everyone
a pat on the back? AUDIENCE: Or maybe
we should have even more levels of hierarchy. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Oh, I see. Well, so the classic study--
let's see if I get this right. The classic study
in this regard, which I talk about in the
book, is this famous study that was done. The largest psychological
study ever in the United States was done during the second
World War of American soldiers. And one of the most
interesting insights was a comparison of
commissioned officers in the Air Force, the Air Corps, the
precursor to the Air Force, and commissioned officers
in the military police. And the question was
who was more satisfied with their promotion
prospects, the openness of their institution
to rewarding talent? And the answer was that the
people in the military police were way more
satisfied with that than people in the Air Force. This was very puzzling because
almost no one got promoted in the military police,
and everyone got promotions in the Air Force. So why would people
be more satisfied in the military police? Well, the answer is that so many
people got promoted in the Air Force, that getting promoted
was meaningless, right? The median condition
in the military police was not getting promoted. So if you didn't get promoted
in the military police, you were like, well, no one is. That's fine. If you didn't get
promoted in the Air Force, oh, man, you're devastated
because everyone's getting promoted. And if you did get promoted,
it's like, who cares? Everyone's getting promoted. So it's like this
totally inverted thing. You think that you're
making life better by promoting everyone. But you're not. You're simply altering the
set of existing expectations. So, yeah, I don't know whether
you could-- messing around with hierarchies is a
very, very, very, very tricky business. And it's probably better just to
try to avoid them when you can. PRASAD SETTY: Go ahead. AUDIENCE: Thanks for coming in. My question is a little
bit around, I guess, your media diet. Obviously, as someone who writes
a lot about social science, you have to go through a
lot of academic journals. But what I was actually
really interested to see was that you had a really
cogent and fluent conversation with Bill Simmons on
his blog about sports and different topics. So I was wondering a little bit
about your media diet outside of the academic journal
sphere, and, like, how you kind of keep
your mind and horizons broad across different topics. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well,
I'm a huge sports fan. So there's an enormous
amount of consumption of sports related stuff. And particularly these days I
spend enormous amounts of time watching obscure
European track and field meets on sort of live streams
of 2:00 in the morning. So there's that. But I think, you know, my
strategy has always-- you have to very consciously
differentiate yourself from where you think
your professional peer group is going. So to the extent
that people migrate to things that are
accessible online, I feel I should
migrate to things that are inaccessible online. Or to the extent that
people stop reading books, I feel I need to
read more books. So what I've been
trying to do is to kind of-- it's why
I spend a lot of time in actual physical libraries
reading things in hard copy because there's a
kind of serendipity that you get when you--
and this is not in anyway meant as a criticism, by
the way, of search engines, for example, which
are incredibly useful. But they also have limitations. They reward a certain
kind of serendipity, and they punish another
kind of serendipity. And if you you're interested
in serendipitous learning, as I am-- much of what I uncover
is uncovered serendipitously-- you have to be a student of
all of the different mechanisms of chance encounters with the
unusual and the insightful. And so that means that not
only do I spend a lot of time screwing around
online on databases, but I also very,
very consciously make sure that I go to
physical libraries and walk through the stacks. And even something as simple as
you're interested in one book and then you go
and you just look at all of the books
that surround it. And the connections
are not always-- there are connections
between them. But it's a different
kind of connection than they would be
connected online. It's not a keyword connection. It's a thematic connection. So there's all
these sorts of-- you have to be a student of the
different ways in which ideas cluster. And I've thought a lot
about that in recent years as a way of distinguishing
myself from other journalists. AUDIENCE: Hi. Have a quick question. In your last book, "Outliers,"
you spoke about the advantages of, whether it's being
born in a certain year or having access to the earliest
computers and stuff like that. And in this book you
have a whole new section called the disadvantages
of being advantageous. I was wondering if you
see a contradiction, or how do you reconcile the two? MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well,
I have several answers to that question. So there's clearly a
difference between-- the notion that I play with in this book
is called desirable difficulty. And desirable
difficulty is a class of difficulties that have
paradoxical outcomes that force you to do things that
end up being advantageous. So there's a whole
school of research around these people at
UCLA called the bjorks who try to uncover specific examples
of desirable difficulties. A good one would be, for
example, a simple one would be studying strategies. To the extent that you can
make your studying process more difficult, you will
retain more information. So the bjorks have
this beautiful data that says if you're learning
something very complex, the best thing to do is to
learn it in small chunks. So say I have three tasks
that require mastery. I have two choices. I can master the first, master
the second, master the third. Or I can break up all the
learning into 10 minute chunks and do 10 minutes, 10
minutes, 10 minutes. They say do the latter
even though it's harder, even though you have to
start over every time. You go ten minutes,
ten minutes, then you come back to
the first thing. You're like, oh, what
was I doing again? It's this reentry problem. The reentry problem
is not a problem. It's why you will remember
and master it way better. It's forcing your brain to kind
of go into a different mode. So the idea is
that, yeah, there's a set of things-- getting
access to-- if learning programming requires
10,000 hours of mastery and you're in a condition
where access to computers is constrained, early
access to computers will be an unalloyed
advantage, right? But that doesn't mean that
there aren't other situations that we could find where what
looks like access to something preferentially may look
advantageous and not be advantageous at all. So my discussion of
dyslexia in the book is all about conditions under
which not knowing how to read can be advantageous. Why? Because the strategies that
you might follow to work around your reading problem
can end up being more helpful to
you then reading. So I have this long
thing about David Boies. He's the lawyer who
basically can't read and as a result developed an
incredible capacity to listen and an incredible memory. If you're a trial
lawyer, believe or not, it's more important to
have an amazing memory and be an incredible listener
than it is to know how to read. Not if you're a litigator
or a corporate lawyer. But if you're a
trial lawyer, yeah. Not if you're, sorry,
a corporate lawyer, but if you're a trial lawyer. We can clearly say, look, there
are desirable difficulties and there are
undesirable difficulties. That said, on a
broader, macro level is there a possible
contradiction? Yeah. [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL: But so what? We're all adults. I don't know why people are
so terrified of contradiction. I think contradiction is fine. I mean, I can identify
hundreds of contradictions in my own life. All of you can. In fact, this next
project I'm working on is all about the
centrality of contradiction in human behavior. And the idea has always been
that as human beings, what we seek to do is to locate
and extinguish contradictions. I think that's nonsense. And there's a lot of very
interesting social science research which suggests
to the contrary. What we do is we exploit,
we aggressively exploit, our contradictions. They enable us to do all kinds
of-- not always good things. So I'm very interested in--
I was talking about this at lunch-- very interested in
this notion that we sometimes behave generously
or pro-socially towards an outsider
group in order to justify turning on them
in some future situation. And the incredible
example of this is Adolph Eichmann,
the architect of The Final Solution, who
spends the 1930s pretending, not pretending, convincing
himself that he's a Zionist. He reads books on Zionism. He goes to Jerusalem. He hangs out with
the rabbis of Vienna. He teaches himself Hebrew. And he does this. And what that means is that
when it comes time to-- and he's responsible in the '30s
for deporting thousands of Jews from Vienna to Palestine. What does that do? It enables him, when he
turns to exterminating Jews, to be able to say to himself,
in his grotesque way, I don't hate Jews. I was deporting them. I was saving them. I was reading Hebrew
and going to Jerusalem. And at one of the death
camps that he sets up, he builds a library. And he imports Judaica from
a prominent Jewish library in Prague. And he would go and visit
this place, this grotesque concentration camp,
and sit in the library and read ancient
Hebrew manuscripts. At his core, this man had
a massive contradiction. And he was driven to resolve it. He used it to
justify everything he did over the course of the war. Now that's a horrible,
extreme, grotesque example. But my point is that we all have
within us these contradictions. And I think that's part of
what it means to be human. And just as you can
use contributions for terrible ends,
like Eichmann did, they are also, at the same
time, the ways in which we explore new ideas and expose
ourself to risky things and do all kinds of things
that are ultimately positive. And if you're not willing
to tolerate contradiction in your own life, I think
you're limiting yourself in a certain sense. You're also running huge risks. The Eichmann route is
the risky route, right? But at the same
time, someone who insists that everything be
absolutely consistent is leading an impoverished
life, I think. So, yeah, I [INAUDIBLE]. AUDIENCE: Thank you. PRASAD SETTY: Why don't
we take one more question? AUDIENCE: In the
context of Google and "The Innovator's
Dilemma" that you mentioned earlier,
when you are a giant, how do you stay a giant and
kind of, towards the book, not be slayed by a David? [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL: Oh, wow. Well, you know you will
be eventually, right? [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL:
I mean, give me an example of-- in
your space there's kind of IBM, which does this
thing which in retrospect seems unbelievable, that
they've managed to kind of resuscitate themselves
and transform themselves. But they might be a sui generis. Maybe they were just in
such an unusual position and were so deeply rooted in
so many parts of the world and had such a deep bench
that that was possible. But the rule is you
don't get to-- it's not going to last longer
than a generation or so. Maybe part of the answer
is, that's fine, as long as you don't think about Google,
as long as you think about you, right? So years ago, I
remember doing this-- it was the first time
this hit home for me. I went to Rochester. And in Rochester, it used
to be a high technology hub, Kodak, Xerox,
Bausch and Lomb. But one of the biggest
employers in Rochester, high tech employers in the
1960s, was General Dynamics, I think General Dynamics, one
of the big defense contractors. They employed vast
numbers of engineers. And basically their
business model implodes after the Vietnam War. And they shut down their
operations in Rochester and moved away. And everyone said, oh, my God. It's over. One of the biggest employers
in town has folded. And what happened, if you
went back 10 years later, was you discovered that the
talent that was kicked out of General Dynamics
went on to start so many start-ups in
Rochester that they sparked a whole second wave that
ended up actually being, in terms of employment and
income brought into the city, greater than the benefits
General Dynamics had risen. In other words, Google may
fall one day, probably will. But you won't. You guys will all,
hopefully, many of you, will go on and do other
incredibly cool things because of what you learned
while you were here. So you can look at it two ways. There's a pessimist view. But there's also a view
that says, no, it's part of the natural cycle. You probably don't
want to be working at Google-- is this
horrible to say? [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL:
--25 years from now. And nor does society want you
to be if this company doesn't evolve in dramatic--
maybe it will. I mean, I'm just using
Google as a stand in for-- let's use
another company. [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL: Let's say-- AUDIENCE: Microsoft. MALCOLM GLADWELL: Microsoft. I mean, at this point would
the world be better off if Microsoft
disappeared tomorrow? Yeah. [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL: How many
unbelievably talented people are trapped working on the
umpteenth version of Word, right? [LAUGHTER] MALCOLM GLADWELL:
Like, that's not a good use of 150 IQ points. So I'd be more kind of
sanguine about this problem than you might be at the moment. PRASAD SETTY: Thank you. I can't think of a
better note to end on. [APPLAUSE]
