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]