Friday, October 11, 2013

“And there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span.” — 1 Samuel 17:4

From: Canadian Business

"A new Malcolm Gladwell book [David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants] isn’t a publication, it’s an event. Since The Tipping Point was published 13 years ago, the New Yorker staff writer has made himself comfortable at the top of bestseller lists, built a lucrative second career on the corporate speaking circuit, inspired a mini-boom of counterintuitive quasi-academic books, and helped define this TED-talk era of public intellectualism. More than an author, Gladwell is an industry.
     […] we should have considered David the favourite the moment he entered the Valley of Elah with his sling. In those days, projectile warriors like David, armed with mere stones, regularly defeated heavy infantry, clumsier fighters weighed down by armor. Goliath was expecting hand-to-hand combat with a fellow warrior. David changed the rules on him.
     This is the problem with giants, Gladwell argues: 'The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.' Moreover, being an underdog can lead a person to change the way he or she operates. Underdogs take risks and chart strange new paths that the conventionally powerful rarely attempt."
— Nicholas Hune-Brown, Canadian Business
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"What if we lived in a world where the weak were really strong, and all of our disadvantages could easily become advantages? In his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, bestselling writer Malcolm Gladwell tells us we're already living in that kind of world. Even something as debilitating as dyslexia can be an ambitious man's ticket to success.
     'The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed,' says Gary Cohn, a man of humble origins whose bold decisions take him to the top of the U.S. financial industry. 'I wouldn't be where I am today without my dyslexia.'
     Gladwell, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has sold a ton of books explaining seemingly counterintuitive and complex arguments about psychology and the social sciences to a mass audience. In David and Goliath his mission is to show us how our thinking about power, influence and success is often misguided and wrong."
— Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times
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How tall was Goliath? Go here...

Buy all of Malcolm Gladwell's books here...
(which is only 25 km or 15 miles away from his home town of Elmira, Ontario).

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