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]
