Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Adam grant organizational psychologist here at wharton delighted interview malcolm gladwell my favorite author malcolm welcome thank you hi welcome to yeah so let's let's start talking about your latest blockbuster david and goliath give us the the core message an idea for you well it's just an examination of of the idea of advantage and particularly looking at when we when we see asymmetrical conflicts but conflicts between one very large and one not so large party how do we account for the unusual numbers of successes that underdogs have in those situations and that sort of the books of takes off from there to try and figure out where there are assumptions about what makes for an advantage are accurate could we just be wrong about who there has the advantage in the first place so we've labeled somebody an underdog in fact they're not or is it more complicated than that well I mean I the opening story chapter in the book is about the actual retelling of the biblical story of David and Goliath and there it's very clear David is not in any sense the underdog properly understood once he has decided to change the rules of the conflict the sling in his hand is of is such a devastating weapon that no contemporary observer of that battle would have thought David was a longshot they would have once they realized he was winding up with his sling they would have realized it that he was he had yet all of the cards so there was some of that that we're mislead by the narrowness of our assumptions about what constitutes an advantage in a given situation and that that plays out in a wide range of circumstances in the book so talk to us a little bit about desirable difficulties yeah so I there's this that's a notion taken straight from the psychological literature from the work of the Bjork's at UCLA and they were interested at in the context of learning theory about it is not always the case that if I make the task of learning something easier for you that you're performance will improve there are sometimes cases where your performance will improve if I make the task of learning more difficult for you not always but there you pick what they do is they draw a line between difficulties that are ultimately desirable and those that are not and so I sort of play with that idea in a number of contexts and sort of figure out are there cases when having dyslexia is a desirable difficulty that's to say where you end up being better off than you were before and the answer is there is a small number of cases where it's plainly the case that or at least according to those who have dyslexia and who have achieved enormous success particularly entrepreneurs or those that's the group that's most interesting here we see so many entrepreneurs who have dyslexia and when you talk to them they will tell you they succeeded not in spite of their disability but because of it and so for them they view their disability is desirable ultimately and that's interesting and that is a very that suggests that there are profoundly there's a distribution of responses to an obstacle our but profoundly bimodal and I think we spend we pretend they're not similarly I look at the this weird association between very successful people and having lost a parent the fact of having lost a parent in childhood not as desirable difficulty I for some for some small number of people parental loss appears to be ultimately there's RL difficulty again not a large number but it's sort of a that there does seem to be a class of a class of obstacles that for some people for whatever reason have a have an advantageous outcome where do you draw the line so what is it that differentiates people who end up on one side of the distribution versus those for obstacle is just insurmountable uh I think it's in you can't draw a bright line it's not really a perfect I mean we can speculate for example if you look at the class of dyslexics who end up as successful entrepreneurs they obviously have certain things in common they are they tend to be highly intelligent in the I interviewed maybe a dozen of them in every case almost every case the successful dyslexic had one family member who always believed in them so if you may be it when way of saying is okay so if if you are if one of the oh if your only obstacle is dyslexia then it could be desirable but if we'd say so a child who grows up in a low-income neighborhood who has a average IQ who has a troubled family life and has dyslexia it's not going to be desirable you've got too many obstacles to deal with but if we start limiting the number of obstacles then maybe it's different so that's one idea that perhaps it's the just a kind of sheer another has to do with attitude I mean for whatever reason some people choose to interpret their circumstances differently there was a when I was in one of the chapters I would interview this cell about a famous oncologist named Emil freireich who has a Dickensian childhood and then goes on to achieve enormous things as an oncologist and it was a moment in my conversation with him when he describes this just horrendous childhood and so he says he says so there I am I'm 16 years old and I'm wildly optimistic and you realize it was a complete and sequitur but not for him so he was just someone who for whatever reason you know he was orphaned he was grew up in poverty on the streets he was the whole thing it's just but he was just like he just thought that was an occasion to look on the bright side so you where does that come from I have no idea well and I think one of the ways that you bring that to light is to invoke this personality trait of disagreeableness here's something with which I struggle and I know you have commented is not your forte as well yeah how does that figure into the story well it's the it's this idea it's a wonderful psychologist at U of T who had a University of Toronto called Jordan Peterson who I had a long conversation with about this who sort of says if you look at the big five personality traits he thinks that entrepreneurs are characterized by openness which is obvious creativity conscientiousness again obvious diligence but he thinks that that that they are disagreeable that is to say they are not people who require the social approval of their peers in order to and I think he makes it very compelling like when and I I serve I agree with that topology ironically theoretical yeah that there is something uh if you're going to do something truly innovative you have to be someone who doesn't value social approval you can't need social approval to go forward otherwise how would you ever do the thing you're doing right and I'm you know I was I give the story example my book of ink of our comp rod the founder of IKEA one of the great entrepreneurs the 20th century who does you know he at a crucial point in building IKEA in the middle of the Cold War he starts outsourcing to Poland which is just like an unthinkable Act in 1961 it's like building up it would be like outsourcing to North Korea today you would have to have you know so much audacity to do that and you could imagine imagine if the head of Walmart said were we're gonna start sourcing from North Korea it would just be a you know well that's what you you have to be calm prod who by the way is dyslexic is just one of the people who'd like it just isn't bother him I mean he wasn't someone to love or if he lost sleep about it he was more concerned about the health of his company than he was about his public reputation and that to be able to do that is not easy at all and I think I see that trade though time and time again in in innovators mm-hmm so we've talked a little bit then about some of the advantages of disadvantages let's flip this to the other side so a couple years ago Barry Schwartz and I sort of noticed as we looked across lots of different studies that in almost every domain we could find there was too much of a good thing you know that everything that we thought might be valuable whether it's practice or generosity or you know pretty much any virtue sort of if you got too much of it turn negative how does that figure into the story of David and Goliath well that you know that paper you guys wrote was I hugely I gave you a little shout out in the book it's huge little shout out thank you know it's hugely essential my thinking I read that paper and I was like it's such a kind of it's one of those is that it's the best kind of insight it is the most obviously it's the thing your mom told you right which is there is such a thing with too much of a good thing right but it's also the thing that we cannot wrap our minds around it's just there seems to be we can only understand linear relationships we understand diminishing marginal returns we cannot understand the idea of the inverted you that the same thing that's positive at one level can turn negative at the other with hugely deleterious consequences I think and I think that's the mistake that people in positions of privilege make its what dooms the favorite is the favorite assumes that they can extend their advantages indefinitely that if what makes me better than you at the beginning is that I have more resources that if I keep spending resources I'll always be ahead of you and it's just not true you know General Motors is not a better company a more nimble innovative company when it's the biggest when it's you know at the height of its of its size and dominance in the 1970s it's backed in profound decline Microsoft is not more innovative today than it was when it was a fraction of its size there are numerous that American health care system is not better than other health care systems in the world by virtue of the fact that we spend 50% more per patient in fact it's I think you can almost very clearly make the argument our health care system is as bad as it is because we spend so much money so there's that I don't know it's a sort of I once I gave a talk once at Columbia psychology department when I was writing my book in which I presented the problem and I asked the audience since they were all psychologists to give me reasons why we struggle with the inverted you but it's great that what gave me like so people just emailed them in I got any of them but it's a really you know is it because on some evolutionary level for most of our history there was because we never could get too much of a good thing we never got to that part of the curve if you're living on the savanna and there's a drought every three months there's no such thing as too much food right so maybe that's just so baked into our system that maximizing surplus is the only way to get through life that when you're in a world where all of a sudden surplus is not just attainable but surplus in the Western world surplus is a condition of our life that we're just willfully unequipped on some level for dealing with that it's interesting though because we're in the observer position we have a different reaction so we don't want to be the underdog necessarily but we love to root for the underdog yeah why well I think this is paradoxical for the following reason I understand on one level why and that is because it is a way in which it's a version of the of the just world hypothesis it is that the world seems more just to us if material advantage does not automatically translate to dominance right so we need the belief that those without obvious resources can win in order for the world to seem fair for the rest for those of us who are most of us since most anonymous ition power for those of us who are not a position of power to feel we have a chance right so there's that but the paradox is of course this is slightly tongue-in-cheek it's why I don't cheer for the underdog and that is that I eat a contest between a favor and an underdog the if the underdog loses the underdog feels very little de-stress because they expected to lose if the favorite loses he feels a great deal of distress because every expectations that he was supposed to win the empathetic position then as an observer is to cheer for the favorite right because if you're if your job isn't as a empathic human being is to want to minimize human suffering the suffering comes when the favorite wit loses right so I I remember as a kid watching sports she you know I was one of the Olympic Games that I was cheering for a big truck person for an athlete he was one of my favorites who was favored to win and he lost and I realized in that moment the pain he felt was so much greater than the pain that you know that those who never thought they were going to win would have felt had they lost that there was no from then on I I felt I have no choice as a human being but to root for the for the favorite there's something to that actually it is weird because rooting for the underdog requires that we be indifferent to the emotional distress of the person who expected to win potentially or is it that we expect the joy to the underdog and those rooting to outweigh the distress your favorite well yes so this is interesting this gives you an insight into my psychology I'm far more de-stress avoidant than I am joy seeking so bad is really stronger than good for you as it so often is in psychology yeah I I'm a the fact that the underdog is happy means very little to me next to the distress of the other favor okay but you're right you're right you could have a completely actually it's so weird I had never even framed it that way that's how distressed distress oriented I am well let's build on that distress then and say you know one of the things that was striking to me about David and Goliath is the courage it took to in some ways challenge one of the core messages of outliers where you know I walked away from outliers with this deep distress is a good word for it around how these early advantages that just could come even from a birthday just build on themselves and cumulate and create this massively unfair set of circumstances yeah and then here you come in with David and Goliath and say wait a minute what you thought was an advantage that's actually disadvantage in vice-versa how do you think about the reconciliation of those - well I don't worry too much about there is some sense in which uh David watt is an addendum to outliers it simply says let's let's complicate our understanding of advantage there is some sense in which David and Goliath is a rebuke a mild rebuke to some of the more sweeping conclusions of outliers I'm fine with that I sort of think um you know no book is the last word on any subject and then and I you know you should as a writer at least partially contradict yourself on a routine basis if you're gonna remain interesting you know you've gotta like I mean you think there's a great moment in um you know when dick Nesbitt he makes a turn in his career as psychologist where he goes from remember he thinks the fundamental attribution error in the beginning is fundamental and then he realizes actually no it's cultural and he does any puts out it doesn't refute the fundamental attribution error it deepens our understanding of it to say oh actually it has roots in Western culture but you see a very different and actually then he writes that book about east west which is incredibly fascinating so he gets two great books out of going back and going over and correcting his earlier position that to me is the model for how you ought to behave in the intellectual world which is I think should always double back and say when I want to it this is more complicated here we can kind of do that and it contradiction is too strong a word it's but you should you should be constantly revising your conclusions I think I think that's that's a mark of an intellectual right to constantly be asking the questions as opposed to just fixing on an answer it's interesting though because as a social scientist and as a writer very much inspired by your work I've been waiting for somebody to go around and do the the story of how Malcolm Gladwell generates his ideas and I'm curious if someone were to follow you from the inception to you know sort of picking a story or identifying a study to the full book what happens along the way well I don't know I mean sometimes I start uh you know there are about five or six times a year I go to them NYU library and I spent a couple days just browsing is too mild a term but wandering around going through millions of journals in the most of serendipitous way I can just to kind of see what's out there and see if I can stumble on something without a clear goal or direction no Louis or no-go whatever so there's that I do as a regular basis and then I I do a fair amount of speaking and I always try and have conversations with people well outside my world so today I gave a talk spawning and in Philadelphia and I was talking to a guy one of the guys there was runs a medical devices company very small one and so I started talking to him about because I've always had this idea in my head that it'd be really fun to write to compare the way dogs are treated with the way humans are treated in it because they're not that dissimilar as problems for medical science but if the yet but the the the systems that surround doggy healthcare and human health care are profoundly different right so you know I the same devices are used in various you know hip implants or not the same but analogous devices only you do a complex knee surgery on your dog it's seven thousand dollars and you do it on a human being it's one hundred now is human really fifteen times more complex than a dog when it comes to know so there's something but I mean this I had this vague thought then I met this guy so I started asking about this and he sort of started riffing on it gave me his card now that's sort of how it works you mean like you take advantage of a little thought you had in your head and when you meet someone by accident who happens to have specialized knowledge you make sure you get his card so that's sort of the it's it's fascinating to think about it being so nonlinear refugees different from although I suspect a lot of academic work is I think it uh that that it's not the non-linearity and the serendipity of it is what makes it fun and it if it's too organized it can fall flat on the page I mean my books to feel like there is a random element in my books I mean there's supposed to be kind of like these kind of accidental wanderings through the world it's not supposed to be a grand plan if there did I think it would feel a little less they would lose some of the books would lose some of their life so I guess to spin off of that then one of the other things that's that's always interesting is you know you've done five books now what has changed about the way that you think about the world and particularly since this is a wharton conversation about the world of work and leadership in organizations i guess i have more respect for the diversity of i realize now that an effective leader or a manager can come in at a virtually infinite number of forms i have way more respect for the kind of heterogeneity of excellence and that's what took a long time because it's so tempting to try and paint a very specific picture of what you think effective say leadership is or what an effective organization looks like and now I you know I've sort of the older I get and the more I sort of see I realize now they come in they have some high performers of one sort or another have certain things in common but they're almost more distinguished by what they don't have in common than what they do and it's understanding fit to me is a much more important issue than defining then defining the characteristics of excellence understanding the combination of individual and organization and what and why at different points in your life cycle you might want a very very different kind of person it's funny how the in the purest example this is in sport where the notion of fit between the athletes that you have and the coach that you hire is only occasionally considers in you know I know you'll always read that they they'll say you know they brought in such a coach who's plotting style is ill-suited to the athletes that he has and then you wonder so then why did I bring in a coach right why are you by why am i do applauding style if known your team wants to play the plotting style so there is is kind of it's interesting how hard that notion is maybe it's because it's just it renders the task of defining what you want a lot more complicated and we would rather not deal with that I suppose I think that's one of the fundamental contributions that you've made to the world is to take people who have very simple ideas and get them to complicate them and question them and turn them upside down yeah I close on this one what idea have you put out in the world that you think has been most misunderstood that you would like to set the record straight on well there's quite a lot I get misunderstood a fair amount um uh that's an interesting thought I am sometimes accused theory that the thing that uh that is said about my work that irritates me the most is that I cherry-pick I don't think I do at all um or at least I don't think I think I do what everyone does when they construct an argument which is we require those who construct arguments to do a reasonable survey of the literature and choose those choose that evidence that is most relevant to their argument now that doesn't mean that is an agreement with their argument but rather that's relevant to their argument you have to sift and I think I sift like anyone else sips but for some reason that's become a kind of it's become a kind of cliche about my work that I did I kind of simply zero in on things that accord with my my preconceptions and but I don't think I do at all I think I try to be pretty good about so there's that and then there's people have simplified the 10,000 hours thing ridiculously I've never said that 10,000 hours was was sufficient to achieve mastery and that's been people have caricatured that claim over and over again to my distress yeah I think certainly for me it's it's an interesting example that challenges us to think differently about expertise and I think part of what's so exciting about David and Goliath is it shows just how clearly you are willing to say look you know there's one side of our argument but wait there is another side of an argument so I think that's a that's a great case for saying look the world is a lot messier than we think it is yeah so thank you for joining us today thank you you

Channel: KnowledgeAtWharton

Views: 49,890

Rating: 4.7857141 out of 5

Keywords: Malcolm Gladwell (Author), Adam Grant, David and Goliath, Knowledge at Wharton, Wharton, Wharton School Of The University Of Pennsylvania (Organization), Social Psychology

Id: 4rKMVMV5QQE

Length: 25min 10sec (1510 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2013