Tuesday, March 4, 2014

David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, several good points

Great points?


The core topic STRATEGY! Recommending how to visualize a field and make decisions based on your strengths and weaknesses as well as the ecosystem.

Ok, what are the great points?

  • What is the definition of opportunity: a lot of good? a lot of bad? What I want to read from the book is that you make your context an opportunity!
  • Weakness or Strength: They are not real! They are just opinions based on the norm, based on comparison with your CURRENT context.
  • The comparison  is not meaningless, but It is a piece of data to strategize and NOT A CAST HIERARCHY.
  • Rules are stablished to bring order, avoiding chaos, they support predictable good, supporting the 'strong' and put a side the 'weak'.
  • The strategy of the 'weak' is very hard, you need to be desperate to engaged and make it happen


Rules do bring order, but they also hide opportunities, since only chaos could lead to the impossible!


Quotes

They are out of context but they helped me to remind some great fragments that emphasize the points above developed.
"To play by David’s rules you have to be desperate. You have to be so bad that you have no choice. Their teams are just good enough that they know it could never work. Their players could never be convinced to play that hard. They were not desperate enough. But Ranadivé? Oh, he was desperate. You would think, looking at his girls, that their complete inability to pass and dribble and shoot was their greatest disadvantage. But it wasn’t, was it? It was what made their winning strategy possible." 
"He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of."
"Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions. They also need to be conscientious. An innovator who has brilliant ideas but lacks the discipline and persistence to carry them out is merely a dreamer. That, too, is obvious. But crucially, innovators need to be disagreeable. By disagreeable, I don’t mean obnoxious or unpleasant. I mean that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, “agreeableness,” they tend to be on the far end of the continuum. They are people willing to take social risks— to do things that others might disapprove of." 
"Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all." 

Fragments I hated 

"is not just how smart you are. It’s how smart you feel relative to the other people in your classroom."

Why?

Matching the market is real but you make it real.  You reason of success should be long term not short term to beat someone but long term to create the maximum possible wealth.  Even so It was interesting to see these stamens and help bring clearness on the idea!

About the book form

Its very historical, I personally think it goes in too much detail sometimes, the examples are great I would prefer to have more examples and less deep details on each of them, It's just my personal preference.

References

book in Amazon
great article, seems It is the basis of the book

Great book references from Malcolm Gladwell

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