Malcolm
Gladwell is famous for his books explaining how the long tail works in
e-retailing and that you need to spend
10,000 hours to become an expert in anything. His new book, David and
Goliath, is about how we misunderstand the true meaning of advantage and
disadvantage. His thesis goes to the heart of a major dilemma facing
wholesalers, how to leverage their scale to
help independent foodservice and retail businesses beat the multiples.
My review:
“David
came running toward Goliath, powered by courage and faith. Goliath was
blind to his approach – and then he was
down, too big and slow and blurry-eyed to comprehend the way the tables
had been turned. All these years, we’ve been telling these kinds of
stories wrong. David and Goliath is about getting them right.”
This is how Malcolm Gladwell ends his short, pacey and myth-busting introduction in his latest book. Gladwell is famous
for his ability to capture ideas and tell compelling stories that illustrate them in a way that millions of people take note.
His
latest book is a great addition to his previous efforts and is likely
to ignite lots of debates about the ability
of small businesses to beat large ones. While Coca-Cola may not
tremble, for wholesale strategists there is much useful ammunition.
From
the start Gladwell juxtaposes interesting stories in ways that
challenge how you understand the world. He tells
how a dad with no sporting experience turned his 12 year old daughter’s
basketball team into an almost unbeatable combination. At the same time
he explains how TS Lawrence beat the Turks.
Analysis of all the wars in the past 200 years show that a 10 times bigger country beats the smaller country 71.5% of
the time. But if the weaker side uses unconventional tactics its winning percentage climbs from 28.5% to 63.6%.
If the US was to go to war with Canada, “history suggests you ought to put your money on Canada”.
As
local pubs take on Wetherspoons, and local cafes take on Costa, and
local shops take on Tesco, how should the wholesaler
help them be successful? Working hand in glove with the major
manufacturers, do you end up reproducing the strategies that work on a
national scale? Is it possible to have local advantage?
If
One-Stop and WHSmith are successful in harnessing the energy of local
entrepreneurs within the framework of a national
franchise, how does the symbol group operater compete? Does increasing
the margins of members through over-riders linked to giving prime
position to national top sellers that are available everywhere really
build a long term competitive advantage?
Gladwell does not tackle such questions directly. His three collections of stories are organised into sections on:
·
The advantages of disadvantages (and the disadvantages of advantages)
·
The theory of desirable difficulty
·
The limits of power.
The sort of story in the first section is the US v Canada stand-off.
The
second section includes one of the most harrowing stories I have ever
read about how Emil Freireich helped find
a cure to childhood leukaemia. Apart from crying in public, it taught
me about what drives successful people and what to look for in business
partners and in people to hold up as examples of success.
The
section also provides a glimpse of Martin Luther King as a man prepared
to do things that his radical rival Malcolm
X was not, the latter saying “real men don’t put their children on the
firing line.” But showing at the same time how PR can twist the truth to
win a cause.
The
third section includes a view of how the British Army was responsible
for creating the 30 years of Troubles in northern
Ireland. And how a remote French village managed to simply refuse to
send Jews to extermination despite the attention of the Nazis.
David
and Goliath is a great read. Sometime Gladwell’s theories may be right.
Sometime they may not. But that misses
the point. The big benefit of the book is to encourage you to think for
yourself and not just blindly accept the orthodox view as fact.For more: see www.betterretailing.com or www.betterwholesaling.com.
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