Description
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Purpose:
The goal of the strategy term project is to give you practical experience with the elements of strategic management. The strategy term project comprises 25 questions—1 to 3 per chapter. Each chapter (question set) requires some data collection about (and analysis of) the firm you select for this study, and relating that research to the concepts discussed in each chapter. By the end of the final module of this project, you will have gained practice in using key strategic management concepts and processes, increased your understanding of the material, and developed real experience in conducting a complete strategic management analysis of a company.
Procedures:
Company is PepsiCo,
Answer each of the 25 questions in orderly fashion (For the same company you picked in item 1).
Follow this specific format (Check the attached Example):
State chapter number (e.g., Chapter 1…).
State answer number (e.g., Q1, Q2…Q25).
Provide ONLY answer (at least 100-150 words answer per each question) to that question explicitly including how it relates to the information from that chapter while including the page number from the textbook in parenthesis. (Do not copy and paste the questions, just provide answers. Question statements not included in word count).
Reference your sources (APA style) for each chapter. (References not included in word count)
3. To retrieve the necessary information, you may use the company’s website and any of these sites:
https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html
https://finance.yahoo.com/
https://www.bloomberg.com/markets
4. Formatting Stylistics: APA format (Check ‘Writing Resources’ tab for APA format guideline), Microsoft Word, Double-spaced; 1-inch margins; 12-point Times New Roman font; Word count (at least 100-150 words answers per each question). It takes 2500-3750 words to complete the report, excluding Question statement, Title page and References.
Deliverable: 25 answers as specified in the procedures submitted in MS Word file.
Deadline: 11:59 PM Friday, Week 8
Evaluation Criteria: Up to 120 points, Answer quality (70 points, Thoroughness and Clarity, whether there is enough textbook content and originality; Word counts per each question), Evidence/Sources (20 points: Whether submission offered compelling and accurate evidence; sources are highly relevant, accurate, and reliable), Format (15 points, Whether the submission followed the APA 7th edition format guideline; MS Word, Double-space, etc.), and Readability/Grammar (15 points, Whether the submission is readable and free of grammatical and punctuational errors and typos).
Example of a project : Example of MGT 499 Term Paper.pdf
Questions 0 Term Project Guideline and Questions 2024 SP1 25Q.pdf
Book for reference is below
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Malcolm Gladwell
da vid a nd golia th
Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants
Contents
INTRODUCTION
Goliath
“Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?”
PART ONE: THE ADVANTAGES OF DISADVANTAGES (AND THE DISADVANTAGES OF ADVANTAGES)
ONE
Vivek Ranadivé
“It was really random. I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”
TWO
Teresa DeBrito
“My largest class was twenty-nine kids. Oh, it was fun.”
THREE
Caroline Sacks
“If I’d gone to the University of Maryland, I’d still be in science.”
PART TWO: THE THEORY OF DESIRABLE DIFFICULTY
FOUR
David Boies
You wouldn’t wish dyslexia on your child. Or would you?
FIVE
Emil “Jay” Freireich
“How Jay did it, I don’t know.”
SIX
Wyatt Walker
“De rabbit is de slickest o’ all de animals de Lawd ever made.”
PART THREE: THE LIMITS OF POWER
SEVEN
Rosemary Lawlor
“I wasn’t born that way. This was forced upon me.”
EIGHT
Wilma Derksen
“We have all done something dreadful in our lives, or have felt the urge to.”
NINE
André Trocmé
“We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews.”
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Follow Penguin
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
What the Dog Saw
Outliers
Blink
The Tipping Point
For A.L. and for S.F., a real underdog
But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature,
because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the
outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
1 Samuel 16:7
Introduction
Goliath
“AM I A DOG THAT YOU SHOULD COME TO ME WITH STICKS?”
1.
At the heart of ancient Palestine is the region known as the Shephelah, a series of ridges and valleys
connecting the Judaean Mountains to the east with the wide, flat expanse of the Mediterranean plain. It
is an area of breathtaking beauty, home to vineyards and wheat fields and forests of sycamore and
terebinth. It is also of great strategic importance.
Over the centuries, numerous battles have been fought for control of the region because the valleys
rising from the Mediterranean plain offer those on the coast a clear path to the cities of Hebron,
Bethlehem, and Jerusalem in the Judaean highlands. The most important valley is Aijalon, in the
north. But the most storied is the Elah. The Elah was where Saladin faced off against the Knights of
the Crusades in the twelfth century. It played a central role in the Maccabean wars with Syria more
than a thousand years before that, and, most famously, during the days of the Old Testament, it was
where the fledgling Kingdom of Israel squared off against the armies of the Philistines.
The Philistines were from Crete. They were a seafaring people who had moved to Palestine and
settled along the coast. The Israelites were clustered in the mountains, under the leadership of King
Saul. In the second half of the eleventh century BCE, the Philistines began moving east, winding their
way upstream along the floor of the Elah Valley. Their goal was to capture the mountain ridge near
Bethlehem and split Saul’s kingdom in two. The Philistines were battle-tested and dangerous, and the
sworn enemies of the Israelites. Alarmed, Saul gathered his men and hastened down from the
mountains to confront them.
The Philistines set up camp along the southern ridge of the Elah. The Israelites pitched their tents
on the other side, along the northern ridge, which left the two armies looking across the ravine at each
other. Neither dared to move. To attack meant descending down the hill and then making a suicidal
climb up the enemy’s ridge on the other side. Finally, the Philistines had enough. They sent their
greatest warrior down into the valley to resolve the deadlock one on one.
He was a giant, six foot nine at least, wearing a bronze helmet and full body armor. He carried a
javelin, a spear, and a sword. An attendant preceded him, carrying a large shield. The giant faced the
Israelites and shouted out: “Choose you a man and let him come down to me! If he prevail in battle
against me and strike me down, we shall be slaves to you. But if I prevail and strike him down, you
will be slaves to us and serve us.”
In the Israelite camp, no one moved. Who could win against such a terrifying opponent? Then, a
shepherd boy who had come down from Bethlehem to bring food to his brothers stepped forward and
volunteered. Saul objected: “You cannot go against this Philistine to do battle with him, for you are a
lad and he is a man of war from his youth.” But the shepherd was adamant. He had faced more
ferocious opponents than this, he argued. “When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a
sheep from the herd,” he told Saul, “I would go after him and strike him down and rescue it from his
clutches.” Saul had no other options. He relented, and the shepherd boy ran down the hill toward the
giant standing in the valley. “Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the
beasts of the field,” the giant cried out when he saw his opponent approach. Thus began one of
history’s most famous battles. The giant’s name was Goliath. The shepherd boy’s name was David.
2.
David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants. By “giants,”
I mean powerful opponents of all kinds—from armies and mighty warriors to disability, misfortune,
and oppression. Each chapter tells the story of a different person—famous or unknown, ordinary or
brilliant—who has faced an outsize challenge and been forced to respond. Should I play by the rules
or follow my own instincts? Shall I persevere or give up? Should I strike back or forgive?
Through these stories, I want to explore two ideas. The first is that much of what we consider
valuable in our world arises out of these kinds of lopsided conflicts, because the act of facing
overwhelming odds produces greatness and beauty. And second, that we consistently get these kinds
of conflicts wrong. We misread them. We misinterpret them. Giants are not what we think they are.
The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness. And the
fact of being an underdog can change people in ways that we often fail to appreciate: it can open
doors and create opportunities and educate and enlighten and make possible what might otherwise
have seemed unthinkable. We need a better guide to facing giants—and there is no better place to start
that journey than with the epic confrontation between David and Goliath three thousand years ago in
the Valley of Elah.
When Goliath shouted out to the Israelites, he was asking for what was known as “single combat.”
This was a common practice in the ancient world. Two sides in a conflict would seek to avoid the
heavy bloodshed of open battle by choosing one warrior to represent each in a duel. For example, the
first-century BCE Roman historian Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius tells of an epic battle in which a
Gaul warrior began mocking his Roman opponents. “This immediately aroused the great indignation
of one Titus Manlius, a youth of the highest birth,” Quadrigarius writes. Titus challenged the Gaul to a
duel:
He stepped forward, and would not suffer Roman valour to be shamefully tarnished by a Gaul. Armed with a legionary’s
shield and a Spanish sword, he confronted the Gaul. Their fight took place on the very bridge [over the Anio River] in the
presence of both armies, amid great apprehension. Thus they confronted each other: the Gaul, according to his method of
fighting, with shield advanced and awaiting an attack; Manlius, relying on courage rather than skill, struck shield against shield
and threw the Gaul off balance. While the Gaul was trying to regain the same position, Manlius again struck shield against
shield and again forced the man to change his ground. In this fashion he slipped under the Gaul’s sword and stabbed him in
the chest with his Spanish blade.…After he had slain him, Manlius cut off the Gaul’s head, tore off his tongue and put it,
covered as it was with blood, around his own neck.
This is what Goliath was expecting—a warrior like himself to come forward for hand-to-hand
combat. It never occurred to him that the battle would be fought on anything other than those terms,
and he prepared accordingly. To protect himself against blows to the body, he wore an elaborate
tunic made up of hundreds of overlapping bronze fishlike scales. It covered his arms and reached to
his knees and probably weighed more than a hundred pounds. He had bronze shin guards protecting
his legs, with attached bronze plates covering his feet. He wore a heavy metal helmet. He had three
separate weapons, all optimized for close combat. He held a thrusting javelin made entirely of
bronze, which was capable of penetrating a shield or even armor. He had a sword on his hip. And as
his primary option, he carried a special kind of short-range spear with a metal shaft as “thick as a
weaver’s beam.” It had a cord attached to it and an elaborate set of weights that allowed it to be
released with extraordinary force and accuracy. As the historian Moshe Garsiel writes, “To the
Israelites, this extraordinary spear, with its heavy shaft plus long and heavy iron blade, when hurled
by Goliath’s strong arm, seemed capable of piercing any bronze shield and bronze armor together.”
Can you see why no Israelite would come forward to fight Goliath?
Then David appears. Saul tries to give him his own sword and armor so at least he’ll have a
fighting chance. David refuses. “I cannot walk in these,” he says, “for I am unused to it.” Instead he
reaches down and picks up five smooth stones, and puts them in his shoulder bag. Then he descends
into the valley, carrying his shepherd’s staff. Goliath looks at the boy coming toward him and is
insulted. He was expecting to do battle with a seasoned warrior. Instead he sees a shepherd—a boy
from one of the lowliest of all professions—who seems to want to use his shepherd’s staff as a
cudgel against Goliath’s sword. “Am I a dog,” Goliath says, gesturing at the staff, “that you should
come to me with sticks?”
What happens next is a matter of legend. David puts one of his stones into the leather pouch of a
sling, and he fires at Goliath’s exposed forehead. Goliath falls, stunned. David runs toward him,
seizes the giant’s sword, and cuts off his head. “The Philistines saw that their warrior was dead,” the
biblical account reads, “and they fled.”
The battle is won miraculously by an underdog who, by all expectations, should not have won at
all. This is the way we have told one another the story over the many centuries since. It is how the
phrase “David and Goliath” has come to be embedded in our language—as a metaphor for
improbable victory. And the problem with that version of the events is that almost everything about it
is wrong.
3.
Ancient armies had three kinds of warriors. The first was cavalry—armed men on horseback or in
chariots. The second was infantry—foot soldiers wearing armor and carrying swords and shields.
The third were projectile warriors, or what today would be called artillery: archers and, most
important, slingers. Slingers had a leather pouch attached on two sides by a long strand of rope. They
would put a rock or a lead ball into the pouch, swing it around in increasingly wider and faster
circles, and then release one end of the rope, hurling the rock forward.
Slinging took an extraordinary amount of skill and practice. But in experienced hands, the sling was
a devastating weapon. Paintings from medieval times show slingers hitting birds in midflight. Irish
slingers were said to be able to hit a coin from as far away as they could see it, and in the Old
Testament Book of Judges, slingers are described as being accurate within a “hair’s breadth.” An
experienced slinger could kill or seriously injure a target at a distance of up to two hundred yards.*
The Romans even had a special set of tongs made just to remove stones that had been embedded in
some poor soldier’s body by a sling. Imagine standing in front of a Major League Baseball pitcher as
he aims a baseball at your head. That’s what facing a slinger was like—only what was being thrown
was not a ball of cork and leather but a solid rock.
The historian Baruch Halpern argues that the sling was of such importance in ancient warfare that
the three kinds of warriors balanced one another, like each gesture in the game of rock, paper,
scissors. With their long pikes and armor, infantry could stand up to cavalry. Cavalry could, in turn,
defeat projectile warriors, because the horses moved too quickly for artillery to take proper aim. And
projectile warriors were deadly against infantry, because a big lumbering soldier, weighed down
with armor, was a sitting duck for a slinger who was launching projectiles from a hundred yards
away. “This is why the Athenian expedition to Sicily failed in the Peloponnesian War,” Halpern
writes. “Thucydides describes at length how Athens’s heavy infantry was decimated in the mountains
by local light infantry, principally using the sling.”
Goliath is heavy infantry. He thinks that he is going to be engaged in a duel with another heavyinfantryman, in the same manner as Titus Manlius’s fight with the Gaul. When he says, “Come to me,
that I may give your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field,” the key phrase is
“come to me.” He means come right up to me so that we can fight at close quarters. When Saul tries to
dress David in armor and give him a sword, he is operating under the same assumption. He assumes
David is going to fight Goliath hand to hand.
David, however, has no intention of honoring the rituals of single combat. When he tells Saul that
he has killed bears and lions as a shepherd, he does so not just as testimony to his courage but to
make another point as well: that he intends to fight Goliath the same way he has learned to fight wild
animals—as a projectile warrior.
He runs toward Goliath, because without armor he has speed and maneuverability. He puts a rock
into his sling, and whips it around and around, faster and faster at six or seven revolutions per
second, aiming his projectile at Goliath’s forehead—the giant’s only point of vulnerability. Eitan
Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defense Forces, recently did a series of calculations
showing that a typical-size stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of thirty-five meters would
have hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of thirty-four meters per second—more than enough to
penetrate his skull and render him unconscious or dead. In terms of stopping power, that is equivalent
to a fair-size modern handgun. “We find,” Hirsch writes, “that David could have slung and hit Goliath
in little more than one second—a time so brief that Goliath would not have been able to protect
himself and during which he would be stationary for all practical purposes.”
What could Goliath do? He was carrying over a hundred pounds of armor. He was prepared for a
battle at close range, where he could stand, immobile, warding off blows with his armor and
delivering a mighty thrust of his spear. He watched David approach, first with scorn, then with
surprise, and then with what can only have been horror—as it dawned on him that the battle he was
expecting had suddenly changed shape.
“You come against me with sword and spear and javelin,” David said to Goliath, “but I come
against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.
This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head.…
All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is
the Lord, and he will give all of you into our hands.”
Twice David mentions Goliath’s sword and spear, as if to emphasize how profoundly different his
intentions are. Then he reaches into his shepherd’s bag for a stone, and at that point no one watching
from the ridges on either side of the valley would have considered David’s victory improbable.
David was a slinger, and slingers beat infantry, hands down.
“Goliath had as much chance against David,” the historian Robert Dohrenwend writes, “as any
Bronze Age warrior with a sword would have had against an [opponent] armed with a .45 automatic
pistol.”*
4.
Why has there been so much misunderstanding around that day in the Valley of Elah? On one level,
the duel reveals the folly of our assumptions about power. The reason King Saul is skeptical of
David’s chances is that David is small and Goliath is large. Saul thinks of power in terms of physical
might. He doesn’t appreciate that power can come in other forms as well—in breaking rules, in
substituting speed and surprise for strength. Saul is not alone in making this mistake. In the pages that
follow, I’m going to argue that we continue to make that error today, in ways that have consequences
for everything from how we educate our children to how we fight crime and disorder.
But there’s a second, deeper issue here. Saul and the Israelites think they know who Goliath is.
They size him up and jump to conclusions about what they think he is capable of. But they do not
really see him. The truth is that Goliath’s behavior is puzzling. He is supposed to be a mighty warrior.
But he’s not acting like one. He comes down to the valley floor accompanied by an attendant—a
servant walking before him, carrying a shield. Shield bearers in ancient times often accompanied
archers into battle because a soldier using a bow and arrow had no free hand to carry any kind of
protection on his own. But why does Goliath, a man calling for sword-on-sword single combat, need
to be assisted by a third party carrying an archer’s shield?
What’s more, why does he say to David, “Come to me”? Why can’t Goliath go to David? The
biblical account emphasizes how slowly Goliath moves, which is an odd thing to say about someone
who is alleged to be a battle hero of infinite strength. In any case, why doesn’t Goliath respond much
sooner to the sight of David coming down the hillside without any sword or shield or armor? When
he first sees David, his first reaction is to be insulted, when he should be terrified. He seems
oblivious of what’s happening around him. There is even that strange comment after he finally spots
David with his shepherd’s staff: “Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?” Sticks plural?
David is holding only one stick.
What many medical experts now believe, in fact, is that Goliath had a serious medical condition.
He looks and sounds like someone suffering from what is called acromegaly—a disease caused by a
benign tumor of the pituitary gland. The tumor causes an overproduction of human growth hormone,
which would explain Goliath’s extraordinary size. (The tallest person in history, Robert Wadlow,
suffered from acromegaly. At his death, he was eight foot eleven inches, and apparently still
growing.)
And furthermore, one of the common side effects of acromegaly is vision problems. Pituitary
tumors can grow to the point where they compress the nerves leading to the eyes, with the result that
people with acromegaly often suffer from severely restricted sight and diplopia, or double vision.
Why was Goliath led onto the valley floor by an attendant? Because the attendant was his visual
guide. Why does he move so slowly? Because the world around him is a blur. Why does it take him
so long to understand that David has changed the rules? Because he doesn’t see David until David is
up close. “Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the
field,” he shouts out, and in that request there is a hint of his vulnerability. I need you to come to me
because I cannot locate you otherwise. And then there is the otherwise inexplicable “Am I a dog that
you come to me with sticks?” David had only one stick. Goliath saw two.
What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant. In reality, the very thing
that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson
in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.
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.
Part One
the a dva nta ges of disa dva nta ges ( a nd the
disa dva nta ges of a dva nta ges )
Some pretend to be rich, yet have nothing; others pretend to be poor, yet have great wealth.
Proverbs 13:7
Chapter One
Vivek Ranadivé
“IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE.”
1.
When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two
principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—
the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-yearolds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the
basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would
speak calmly and softly, and he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals
to reason and common sense.
The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans play
basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first
time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then
immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and
dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse
itself.
A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only
about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court
press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it
for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world
about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of
widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were
tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in
their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do
the very things that they were so good at?
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky,
Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They
weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not
the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in
the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond
girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science
projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists.
Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball
up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball
was a passion. Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his
pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would
play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national
championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played
basketball before.”
2.
Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very
large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population
and armed might than the other. How often do you think the bigger side wins? Most of us, I think,
would put that number at close to 100 percent. A tenfold difference is a lot. But the actual answer
may surprise you. When the political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft did the calculation a few years ago,
what he came up with was 71.5 percent. Just under a third of the time, the weaker country wins.
Arreguín-Toft then asked the question slightly differently. What happens in wars between the strong
and the weak when the weak side does as David did and refuses to fight the way the bigger side
wants to fight, using unconventional or guerrilla tactics? The answer: in those cases, the weaker
party’s winning percentage climbs from 28.5 percent to 63.6 percent. To put that in perspective, the
United States’ population is ten times the size of Canada’s. If the two countries went to war and
Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on
Canada.
We think of underdog victories as improbable events: that’s why the story of David and Goliath
has resonated so strongly all these years. But Arreguín-Toft’s point is that they aren’t at all.
Underdogs win all the time. Why, then, are we so shocked every time a David beats a Goliath? Why
do we automatically assume that someone who is smaller or poorer or less skilled is necessarily at a
disadvantage?
One of the winning underdogs on Arreguín-Toft’s list, for example, was T. E. Lawrence (or, as he
is better known, Lawrence of Arabia), who led the Arab revolt against the Turkish army occupying
Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and
their goal was to destroy the long railroad the Turks had built running from Damascus deep into the
Hejaz Desert.
It was a daunting task. The Turks had a formidable modern army. Lawrence, by contrast,
commanded an unruly band of Bedouin. They were not skilled troops. They were nomads. Sir
Reginald Wingate, one of the British commanders in the region, called them “an untrained rabble,
most of whom have never fired a rifle.” But they were tough and they were mobile. The typical
Bedouin soldier carried no more than a rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, and forty-five pounds
of flour, which meant that he could travel as much as 110 miles a day across the desert, even in
summer. They carried no more than a pint of drinking water, since they were so good at finding water
in the desert. “Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power,” Lawrence wrote. “Our largest
available resources were the tribesmen, men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were
movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, courage.” The eighteenthcentury general Maurice de Saxe famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and
Lawrence’s troops were all legs. In one typical stretch in the spring of 1917, his men dynamited sixty
rails and cut a telegraph line at Buair on March 24, sabotaged a train and twenty-five rails at Abu alNaam on March 25, dynamited fifteen rails and cut a telegraph line at Istabl Antar on March 27,
raided a Turkish garrison and derailed a train on March 29, returned to Buair and sabotaged the
railway line again on March 31, dynamited eleven rails at Hedia on April 3, raided the train line in
the area of Wadi Daiji on April 4 and 5, and attacked twice on April 6.
Lawrence’s masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack
from British ships patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Lawrence decided to attack
from the east instead, coming at the city from the unprotected desert, and to do that, he led his men on
an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop—up from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian desert, and then back
down toward Aqaba. This was in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle
East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus in order to mislead the Turks
about his intentions. “This year the valley seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adders,
cobras and black snakes,” Lawrence writes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom about one stage in the
journey:
We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their
brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four
recovered after great fear and pain, and a swelling of the poisoned limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with
snake-skin plaster, and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died.
When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence’s band of several hundred warriors killed or captured
twelve hundred Turks and lost only two men. The Turks simply had not thought that their opponent
would be crazy enough to come at them from the desert.
Sir Reginald Wingate called Lawrence’s men an “untrained rabble.” He saw the Turks as the
overwhelming favorites. But can you see how strange that was? Having lots of soldiers and weapons
and resources—as the Turks did—is an advantage. But it makes you immobile and puts you on the
defensive. Meanwhile, movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, and
courage—which Lawrence’s men had in abundance—allowed them to do the impossible, namely,
attack Aqaba from the east, a strategy so audacious that the Turks never saw it coming. There is a set
of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the
absence of material resources—and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is
sometimes every bit the equal of the former.
For some reason, this is a very difficult lesson for us to learn. We have, I think, a very rigid and
limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think
of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser. Part One of David and Goliath
is an attempt to explore the consequences of that error. When we see the giant, why do we
automatically assume the battle is his for the winning? And what does it take to be that person who
doesn’t accept the conventional order of things as a given—like David, or Lawrence of Arabia, or,
for that matter, Vivek Ranadivé and his band of nerdy Silicon Valley girls?
3.
Vivek Ranadivé’s basketball team played in the National Junior Basketball seventh-and-eighth-grade
division representing Redwood City. The girls practiced at Paye’s Place, a gym in nearby San
Carlos. Because Ranadivé had never played basketball, he recruited a couple of experts to help him.
The first was Roger Craig, a former professional athlete who worked for Ranadivé’s software
company.* After Craig signed on, he recruited his daughter Rometra, who had played basketball in
college. Rometra was the kind of person you assigned to guard your opponent’s best player in order
to render her useless. The girls on the team loved Rometra. “She has always been like my big sister,”
Anjali Ranadivé said. “It was so awesome to have her along.”
Redwood City’s strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in
order to advance the ball. The first is the time allotted for the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a
player from the other team takes the ball out-of-bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate
on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually that’s not an issue,
because teams don’t hang around to defend against the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end.
Redwood City did not do that. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some
teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding in order to impede
her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played a more aggressive, highrisk strategy. They positioned themselves in front of their opponents to prevent them from catching the
inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t have anyone guard the player throwing the ball in.
Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater who could serve as a second defender
against the other team’s best player.
“Think about football,” Ranadivé said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole
field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficul
