Malcolm Gladwell loves the story of David and Goliath. That means a lot to us because as we’ve been working our way across Canada for this year’s GuidePost issue, Gladwell is someone we’ve been thinking a lot about.
Gladwell is author of business best-sellers including The Tipping Point and Outliers: The Story of Success, and as agriculture faces such rapid evolution he is a valuable guide.
Gladwell is fascinated by the David and Goliath story, he says, precisely because it isn’t a story of overcoming the odds. It’s the story of everyday life, and in farming, we think he is right.
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You can check out his reasoning by Googling Gladwell’s New Yorker article, How David Beats Goliath. It’s worth reading. Gladwell brings together examples from sports, politics and business. Some you will know. Some you won’t. For instance, he points to political scientist Ivan Arreguin-Toft, who looked at the history of warfare over the past 200 years and found that bigger armies beat smaller armies 71.5 per cent of the time.
That means, of course, that the underdog won 30 per cent of the wars. Even when the Goliaths were 10 times bigger, the Davids still beat them a third of the time.
But here’s the fascinating point. Gladwell points out that in the 1st Samuel story, Saul gives David his armour, but when he puts it on, David decides that he can’t fight with so much weight pressing him down. Instead, he reverts to the tactics that he honed while protecting his father’s sheep from lions and bears. He strips to his simple shepherd’s clothing, and picks up the five smooth stones and his slingshot.
When Arreguin-Toft recalculated his results based on whether the Davids used unconventional strategies instead of fighting their Goliaths sword on sword, the Davids won an incredible 63.6 per cent of the time.
The message isn’t that all our Goliaths are doomed to fail. Nor do all underdogs have natural advantages.
Instead, what matters is strategy. The farmers we talked to in this issue are a diverse group, big and small, independent or in partnerships, young and not so young.
What’s consistent among all of them, though, is that they are pursuing innovative business strategies that are the best fit for their particular circumstances. Davids must be nimble, sharp and aggressive, not passive, and Goliaths must be very good at what they do too. Gladwell says you can’t excel at anything if you haven’t put 10,000 hours into learning and practice. We’d say that goes for farming too. Being born on a large farm doesn’t mean you’re going to be a successful farmer. Not by a long shot.
What’s also consistent about the farmers and others we talked to is their passion. Armed with their strategy, they’re tireless in acting on it.
This is the light in which we hope you’ll read your way through this issue. Are we getting it right? You can reach me at [email protected],or call me at 519-674-1449. Let me know what you think.
