Steve Jobs (by Walter Isaacson) - 15 minutes long summary

This post is about the book “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson.

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. 

In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. He was not a model boss or human being tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

First story is: Abandoned. Chosen. Special.

Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted. “My parents were very open with me about that,” he recalled. He had a vivid memory of sitting on the lawn of his house, when he was about six years old, telling the girl who lived across the street. “So does that mean your real parents didn’t want you?” the girl asked. Lightning bolts went off in Jobs’ head. He ran into the house, crying. And his parents said, ‘No, you have to understand.’ They were very serious and looked him straight in the eye. They said, ‘We specifically picked you out.’

Both of his parents said that and repeated it slowly for him. And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.

Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded himself.

…

If you can’t keep ‘em interested, it is your fault.

In his elementary school, Jobs countered his boredom by playing pranks. He had a good friend named Rick Ferrentino, and they’d get into all sorts of trouble. Like they made little posters announcing ‘Bring Your Pet to School Day.’ It was crazy, with dogs chasing cats all over, and the 25 teachers were beside themselves. Another time they convinced some kids to tell them the combination numbers for their bike locks. Then they went outside and switched all of the locks, and nobody could get their bikes. It took them until late that night to straighten things out. When he was in third grade, the pranks became a bit more dangerous. One time they set off an explosive under the chair of their teacher. They gave her a nervous twitch. Not surprisingly, he was sent home two or three times before he finished third grade. By then, however, his father had begun to treat him as special, and in his calm but firm manner he made it clear that he expected the school to do the same. “Look, it’s not his fault,” Paul Jobs told the teachers. “If you can’t keep him interested, it’s your fault.”

…

Secrets of the Little Blue Box

A blue box was a tool to make long distance calls for free by replicating the tones that routed signals on the AT&T network.

At first the Blue Box was used for fun and pranks. But then Jobs came up with the idea that the Blue Box could be more than merely a hobby; they could build and sell them. It was an important milestone in Jobs and Woz’s life, one that would establish a pattern in their partnerships. “I got together the rest of the components, like the casing and power supply and keypads, and figured out how we could price it,” Jobs said, foreshadowing roles he would play when they founded Apple. The finished product was about the size of two decks of playing cards. The parts cost about $40, and Jobs decided they should sell it for $150. 

The partnership paved the way for what would be a bigger adventure together. They had created a device with a little circuit board that could control billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure.

The Blue Box adventure established a template for a partnership that would soon be born. 

…

Reed College

Jobs quickly became bored with college right on. Jobs refused to go to the classes he was assigned and instead went to the ones he wanted, such as a dance class where he could enjoy both the creativity and the chance to meet girls.

Jobs also began to feel guilty, he later said, about spending so much of his parents’ money on an education that did not seem worthwhile. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out,” Jobs recounted.

He didn’t actually want to leave Reed; he just wanted to quit paying tuition and taking classes that didn’t interest him. The college dean allowed him to do that, provided that he would audit the classes. Among those classes was a calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that were beautifully drawn where Jobs learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, and about what makes great typography great.

…

Apple Marketing Philosophy

Now, Mike Markkula was the angel investor of Apple Computers. Markkula taught Jobs things such as that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”

Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.”

The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.”

The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.” 

…

Good artists copy, great artists steal!

This is the story of the Apple’s raid on Xerox PARC that is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists in the chronicles of industry.

In December 1979, Jobs had convinced Xerox venture capital division to show him and his chosen colleagues what Xerox was working on in terms of technology, research and development.

At first, Jobs was only demonstrated superficial details and publicly known technologies like word processors but then Jobs had his way through the investors at Xerox who bought what Jobs told them.

The project managers heading the teams and engineering were angry and infuriated but they had no options ahead of orders decreed to them by their bosses.

Jobs and his team were shown everything. Apple folks were astonished. At the demo, Xerox finally showed them what was truly under the hood. Jobs bounced around and waved his arms excitedly.

He was the exclamation point for every step showed and he kept asking questions. Jobs kept saying that he couldn’t believe that Xerox had not commercialized the technology. “You’re sitting on a gold mine,” he shouted. “I can’t believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this.”

The Smalltalk demonstration showed the graphical interface that was made possible by a bitmapped screen. “It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes,” Jobs recalled. “I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”

And recalling this incident, he once said, “Picasso had a saying— ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

…

The Reality Distortion Field

According to the Macintosh team, Steve had a reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules. It was dangerous to get caught in Steve’s distortion field, but it was what led him to actually be able to change reality.

The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.

There was little that could shield you from the force. Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it.

He would assert something—be it a fact about world history or a recounting of who suggested an idea at a meeting —without even considering the truth. It came from willfully defying reality, not only to others but to himself. It allowed him to con people into believing his vision, because he has personally embraced and internalized it. A lot of people distort reality, of course. When Jobs did so, it was often a tactic for accomplishing something.

…

Birth of rounded corner rectangles in computer graphics

Jobs obsessed with equal intensity about the look of what would appear on the screen.

He wanted his team to make the rectangles in Lisa and Mac to have rounded corners but the team was reluctant due to the implementation complexities.

To argue this Jobs said, “Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere!” jumping up and getting more intense. “Just look around this room!” He pointed out the whiteboard and the tabletop and other objects that were rectangular with rounded corners. “And look outside, there’s even more, practically everywhere you look!” He dragged the engineer out for a walk, pointing out car windows and billboards and street signs. “Within three blocks, we found seventeen examples,” said Jobs. “I started pointing them out everywhere until he was completely convinced.”

The dialogue boxes and windows on the Lisa and the Mac, and almost every other subsequent computer, ended up being rendered with rounded corners.

…

Obsession with design and detail

From his father Jobs had learned that a hallmark of passionate craftsmanship is making sure that even the aspects that will remain hidden are done beautifully. Jobs argued for clean looking circuit boards saying that “it should be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.”

From Mike Markkula he had learned the importance of packaging and presentation. People do judge a book by its cover, so for the box of the Macintosh, Jobs chose a full-color design and kept trying to make it look better. He got the guys to redo it fifty times. It was going to be thrown in the trash as soon as the consumer opened it, but he was obsessed by how it looked. To Rossmann, this showed a lack of balance; money was being spent on expensive packaging while they were trying to save money on the memory chips. But for Jobs, each detail was essential to making the Macintosh amazing.

…

Mac Celebration

The retreat of September 1982. Here, Jobs’ speech comprised of multiple parts. 

The first was “Don’t compromise.” It was an injunction that would, over time, be both helpful and harmful. Most technology teams made trade-offs. The Mac, on the other hand, would end up being as “insanely great” as Jobs and his acolytes could possibly make it—but it would not ship for another sixteen months, way behind schedule. After mentioning a scheduled completion date, he told them, “It would be better to miss than to turn out the wrong thing.”

Another chart contained a koōan-like phrase that was his favorite maxim: “The journey is the reward.” The Mac team, he liked to emphasize, was a special corps with an exalted mission. Someday they would all look back on their journey together and, forgetting or laughing off the painful moments, would regard it as a magical high point in their lives. At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”

It had been a grueling ride for Mac team, and many egos had been bruised by Jobs’s obnoxious and rough management style. But neither Raskin nor Wozniak nor Sculley nor anyone else at the company could have pulled off the creation of the Macintosh. Nor would it likely have emerged from focus groups and committees.

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”

…

Sculley and Jobs Face-off

In 1983, Jobs had got John Sculley (the then CEO of Pepsi) to take the job at Apple using his famous line “You want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”.

But honeymoon period of the two was over by the second half of 1984 when Macintosh’s sales began to taper off because of several technical issues.

There were many reasons for the rift between Jobs and Sculley in the spring of 1985. For Jobs, the problem was that Sculley never became a product person. He didn’t make the effort, or show the capacity, to understand the fine points of what they were making.

For Sculley, the problem was that Jobs, when he was no longer in courtship or manipulative mode, was frequently obnoxious, rude, selfish, and nasty to other people. He found Jobs’s boorish behavior as despicable as Jobs found Sculley’s lack of passion for product details.

In May 1985, Sculley decided to reorganize Apple, and proposed a plan to the board that would remove Jobs from the Macintosh group and put him in charge of "New Product Development". This move would effectively render Jobs powerless within Apple. In response, Jobs then developed a plan to get rid of Sculley and take over Apple. However, Jobs was confronted after the plan was leaked, and he said that he would leave Apple. The Board declined his resignation and asked him to reconsider. Sculley also told Jobs that he had all of the votes needed to go ahead with the reorganization. A few months later, on September 17, 1985, Jobs submitted a letter of resignation to the Apple Board. Five additional senior Apple employees also resigned and joined Jobs in his new venture, NeXT.

…

iCEO

In 1996, Apple announced that it would buy  NeXT for $427 million. The deal brought Jobs back to the company he had cofounded. In March 1998, to concentrate Apple's efforts on returning to profitability, Jobs terminated a number of projects, such as Newton and Cyberdog. In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering Jobs while riding in the elevator, "afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Jobs's summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims was enough to terrorize a whole company."

…

iMac

The first great design triumph to come from the Jobs-Ive (the chief design officer of Apple, joined Apple in 1992) collaboration was the iMac. Jobs had certain specifications. It should be an all-in-one product, with keyboard and monitor and computer ready to use right out of the box. It should have a distinctive design that made a brand statement. And it should sell for $1,200 or so. (Apple had no computer selling for less than $2,000 at the time.)

Design Changes:

It was the first computer to not have a floppy disk drive. Jobs reasoned it by quoting the hockey star Wayne Gretzky’s maxim, “Skate where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.”

The plastic casing that Ive and Coster proposed was sea-green blue and it was translucent so that you could see through to the inside of the machine.

Even the simplicity of the plastic shell itself involved great complexity. The cost of each case was more than $60 per unit, three times that of a regular computer case. Other companies would probably have demanded presentations and studies to show whether the translucent case would increase sales enough to justify the extra cost. Jobs asked for no such analysis.

…

The iPhone Design

On many of his major projects, such as the first Toy Story and the Apple store, Jobs pressed “pause” as they neared completion and decided to make major revisions. That happened with the design of the iPhone as well.

The problem was that the iPhone should have been all about the display, but in their current design the case competed with the display instead of getting out of the way. “Guys, you’ve killed yourselves over this design for the last nine months, but we’re going to change it,” Jobs told Ive’s team. “We’re all going to have to work nights and weekends, and if you want we can hand out some guns so you can kill us now.” Instead of balking, the team agreed. “It was one of my proudest moments at Apple,” Jobs recalled. The new design ended up with just a thin stainless steel bezel that allowed the gorilla glass display to go right to the edge. Every part of the device seemed to defer to the screen. The new look was austere, yet also friendly. You could fondle it. It meant they had to redo the circuit boards, antenna, and processor placement inside, but Jobs ordered the change. “Other companies may have shipped,” said Fadell, “but we pressed the reset button and started over.”

Thoughts on Death

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

...

In his last meetings with Isaacson, Jobs shifted the conversation to his thoughts regarding religion and death.
"I remember sitting in the back garden on a sunny day [on a day when] he was feeling bad, and he talked about whether or not he believed in an afterlife," Isaacson tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "He said, 'Sometimes I'm 50-50 on whether there's a God. It's the great mystery we never quite know. But I like to believe there's an afterlife. I like to believe the accumulated wisdom doesn't just disappear when you die, but somehow it endures."
Jobs paused for a second, remembers Isaacson.
"And then he says, 'But maybe it's just like an on/off switch and click — and you're gone.' And then he paused for another second and he smiled and said, 'Maybe that's why I didn't like putting on/off switches on Apple devices.'"

The Virgin Way (by Richard Branson) - 15 minutes long summary

This post is about the book “The Virgin Way” by billionaire Richard Branson. In this book, Richard talks about values and beliefs he holds dear in regards to leadership.

The book is filled with amazing witty quotes, and the one it starts with is: “Life’s too short. Don’t enjoy it? Don’t do it!”

Richard explains the last quote using another one that “Life is not a dress rehearsal!”. So you should not waste any of your limited time on this earth doing stuff that doesn’t lighten your face.

The book is divided into four parts: Listen, Learn, Laugh and Lead.

Reading from “Preface”, Richard had dropped out of high-school at the age of 16 to start off a magazine called “Student”, simply because he wasn’t enjoying his school as he had difficulties learning due to dyslexia. But he adds he does not mean to start some kind of ‘burn your books’ movement!         

He writes “Having ‘Fun’ is at the core of the ‘Virgin Way’. Being passionately engaged and enjoying every minute of what you do is an attitudinal thing – a spark – It’s something that’s either in a person’s DNA or not, and as such has to come from within.”

As any of Richard’s colleagues at Virgin will attest, in his vocabulary the phrase ‘seemingly impossible’ is defined as ‘something that should be a lot of fun disproving’.

Now, “Not every author is as candid as Richard!”

Richard mentions he didn’t read any of the 93,000 books he found on Amazon for the search string “Leadership books” nor does he have any idea of what these authors have to say but he doubts that few if any of them have had a fraction of the fun that Richard has had in the forty-plus years leading the charge with the Virgin group of companies.

So here is a search string he then tried instead:

‘Having a great time while building a highly diversified global business with an extended family of simply wonderful people’

Guess what? There is not a single match to this day!

This presentation will take you through some of the best stories told in the book.

This first story is about the “Power of forgiveness and giving people a second chance”.

On an odd occasion Richard had been guilty of helping himself to a few pennies that his dad used to keep in his bedroom wardrobe. And in his mind, he was only borrowing with no terms or structure for repayment established. Richard was using these ill-gotten gains for buying chocolates from a sweet shop just around the corner from his house.

One day, though, he’d taken a much bigger ‘loan’ than usual from his dad’s wardrobe bank and promptly done his part to boost Cadbury’s shareholder value. The old lady in the sweet shop smelled the rat, she did not say anything to Richard but next time when he was there with his father, she blurted out “Now I don’t want to get him into any trouble, Mr. Branson, but I don’t know where young Richard’s getting all his money from. I hope he isn’t stealing it.”

But then, just as Richard was thinking, ‘Oops, I’m really in for it now!’ his dad staggered him by putting his nose right up to hers, looking her straight in the eyes and loudly declaring, ‘Madam, how dare you accuse my son of stealing?’ Richard was even more surprised when, after they’d marched out of the shop, his dad never said another word about it. Sometimes, though, the power of the unspoken word can be a frighteningly powerful thing and his father’s studied silence with him for the rest of that day spoke volumes. In addition, the fact that he’d immediately jumped in and vehemently defended his light-fingered son’s integrity made Richard feel more guilt-ridden and miserable than if he had berated him in front of her. Dad’s handling of the situation taught Richard a hugely effective lesson. Not only did he never pinch another penny from his parents, but it also taught him a life-lesson on the power of forgiveness and giving people a second chance.

***

Richard attributes his success a whole lot on his listening skills, about which he writes that he learned in school that “Listen” and “Silent” were anagrams and to make a list out of it, he added the word “Enlist”. Now using these words in a sentence he quotes “if more of us could ‘enlist’ the art of remaining ‘silent’ in order to ‘listen’ we would dramatically improve our ability to learn”.

Next, lesson is titled “Mirror-mirror” that tells you the importance of taking customer feedback.

The saying that he starts with is ‘If it walks like a duck – it usually is a duck”, which means that if the customers are getting a perception of what you are doing to resemble a duck and then it usually is a duck. You should make it a habit seeing your actions from the eyes of the people at the receiving end of it.

To this Richard adds “Now I am not suggesting that soliciting the input of foreign dictators is necessarily the way to go, but when you have family and friends who are also consumers, it is downright foolish not to take full advantage and listen to their outside-in points of view.”

***

Trusting the consumer instincts is a tried and true belief so much so that people make their investment decisions based on it. If you like a product and all your neighbors like it too then the chances are that this product is going to last and hence is a good investment.

The ultimate example of such consumer behavior is the tale of American Entrepreneur Victor Kiam and his company Remington Products. As the story goes, his wife bought him a Remington electric razor and, as he famously said in their advertising campaigns, ‘I liked the product so much, I bought the company.’

Next few slides are about public speaking skills.

The key to making a good speech is that you “keep it simple, stupid!” Yeah, that is the full form of KISS here.

Simplicity wins every time. Short and snappy lines sell.

As the saying goes “A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.”

***

Now don’t worry about nervousness and stage-fright, even the best of the best speakers get nervous.

To make you feel better, here is what Mark Twain has to say:

‘There are only two types of speakers in the world: The nervous and The Liars.’

The strange fact is that nervousness is good. The best and most experienced public speakers still get nervous, so don’t fret about it. A touch of the jitters sharpens the mind, gets the adrenalin flowing and helps you to focus. The best way to mitigate it is quite simple, practice, practice, practice and practice some more. Go through it until you are saying it in your dreams and it will be a lot easier on the day!

***

On “Navigating the Next”:

This was in 1975. Kodak had developed a digital camera that was one of its kind. But the product was soon dropped for the fear that it would threaten their existing photographic film business. Instead of embracing the opportunities that the new technology presented and exploiting their resources to lead the charge, Kodak’s senior management instead seemed to bury their heads in the sand as if by ignoring the digital, they would magically make it go away.

Eventually, seeing the error, Kodak went on to create something called ‘Photo CD’ that fell somewhere between their traditional analogue offerings and digital technology, but compromises seldom work.

While Kodak tried desperately to hang on to the past and the huge 70 per cent profit margins they enjoyed, newcomers to the camera game like Sony came and ‘ate their lunch’. Kodak’s share price dropped by 80 per cent in 2011 and they filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012.

The fact that other major analogue-era imaging companies like Canon and Nikon all successfully navigated the transition to digital would seem to indicate that the only plausible reason for Kodak’s rapid decline was a catastrophic failure in leadership. And as is almost always the case, leaders who spend too much time looking in the rear-view mirror are seldom positioned to navigate the road ahead.

***

Next story is about “Luck”.

The first part of the story is about Google. When Antonio and Sergey (one of the Google’s founders) were refused a ticket at a theater due to houseful, the two went for coffee and Sergey told Antonio about the search engine that he was working on. Antonio did not understand the technicalities of the project but he liked the idea of organizing vast amount of information on the web. In short, it struck him as an idea that had a lot of market potential. When Antonio met up with his new friend the next day, therefore, he asked how he could get involved. He was told they were in the early stages of raising capital to launch their business, that it was valued at a million dollars and they’d love to have him as an investor. In what was to become the watershed moment of his life, Antonio responded by saying, ‘Well, I have $10,000 that was earmarked for a second-hand car but I might consider putting it into your company instead. What would that get me?’ He was told it would give him a one per cent ownership stake and so they agreed that they had a deal.

***

A counterpoint to Antonio’s story is that of Ronald Wayne. Wayne had worked alongside Steve Jobs at Atari and became one of the co-founders of Apple with Jobs and Wozniak. At forty years of age, Wayne was almost twice as old as his young co-founders and so he agreed to essentially act as the venture’s ‘adult supervisor’ in return for which he was given a ten per cent stake in the nascent company. Among other things Wayne drew up the partnership agreement between the three, drafted the first company logo and wrote the Apple 1 manual. For a variety of reasons, however, Wayne just didn’t feel that things were going to work out, and also didn’t particularly enjoy working with Jobs, so after only a couple of months Wayne called it quit and relinquished his stock in the company for a one-time pay-out of $800. Had he toughed it out and hung in there, that stock would today have been worth close to fifty billion dollars! So was it bad luck or bad judgement? Maybe a bit of both. But Antonio was no Ronald Wayne and had been astute enough never to sell a single Google share. He never got the used car but that $10,000 is now worth billions of dollars. In terms of making the luck work for him, Antonio had to have the smarts to recognize an opportunity when it came along and greater still the guts to risk his $10,000.

***

On dog fights between small and big companies, Richard quotes “What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

Virgin has always reveled in being the little guy chasing much larger.

He explains how a David might actually win against a Goliath.

David has to know that to fight Goliath, he has to know what his strengths are and what the strengths of Goliath are. David cannot win the game Goliath is playing so he has to redefine the rules and play it as it fits him.

What routinely fools a Goliath is when, instead of going after their market share, someone instead goes out to create a whole new niche market. They are well practiced in defending their turf against unimaginative intruders. This is usually achieved with such no-brainers as deep discounting, leveraging their distribution clout or what can best be described as simple bully tactics.

But when someone arrives on the scene with a hybrid product that they cannot pigeonhole – as was the case with the biblical David’s slingshot – it can cause massive confusion in the enemy’s ranks. When all else is equal then the big guys will usually find a way to outmuscle any pesky upstart, so that is why the newcomer has got to make sure that the playing field is anything but level. You always know it’s working when they cry foul!

All it takes for the status quo of mediocrity to be shaken up is for one little outsider to step into the ring and start punching above their weight.

***

Next few slides are about Innovation.

“INNOVATION IS NOTHING NEW. Ask any passing bumblebee.”

And this is quite interesting to know that according to all the laws of aerodynamics, the humble bumblebee should not be capable of flight.

The story I am going to tell is about the greatest innovator who has ever lived – Leonardo da Vinci. This dates back to the 1500s. Da Vinci was called in from Italy to Constantinople to work on building a bridge that was going to be an unprecedented feat of engineering, a single-span 240-metre-long bridge.

Excited by the challenge, da Vinci set to work and the dramatic result was an incredibly futuristic bridge design that with the use of unheard geometric concepts produced a soaring single-span bridge that was truly a work of art.

The engineering and architectural experts of the day were appalled and condemned it as an abomination and a work of fantasy that could never possibly work.

As everyone knows, obtaining planning approvals in a city can be a long and frustrating task, but in da Vinci’s case 500 years is pushing the envelope! Setting new standards in ‘better late than never’, Leonardo’s sixteenth-century bridge design (with a few updates based on twenty-first-century building materials) was finally given the go-ahead in 2012 by the city of Istanbul. But history is littered with da Vinci-like tales of how the greatest innovators of their times have had to struggle to get their ideas past the power of incumbents who can only accept those things that fit into their existing pigeonholes, and the established theory.

***

Next, we tell the story of Sara Blakely. Sara had been wearing tights with the legs cut off but always had problems with them riding up her leg. So she started looking into how she could make a shaper that worked. The birth of Spanx was a classic entrepreneurial case study where if you can’t find something you want, then go out and create it.

On naming the company “Spanx”, she writes it was a branding decision. Sara had heard somewhere that names with a K in them sold well, so she came up with the name Spanks, a name that a lot of people in the Bible belt found too offensive. So she put the garments in a red box and changed the spelling to Spanx with an X – people were still offended, but she thought it was more fun.

Started in 1998, company’s sales were pushing $700 million by 2012 and Sara owned a brand name that, rather like Google is to search engines, has become generic to the market segment she created.

***

On hiring and keeping people, Richard writes about Chris Rossi and Xiki Baloyi.

Chris Rossi who is now Virgin Atlantic’s senior vice-president in the USA started out working behind the check-in counter when the company first began flying to Boston in 1991.

At Virgin Active in South Africa, Xiki Baloyi began her career in 2003 as a receptionist – she had trained in sports management but couldn’t find a position in that field. But as in 2013, she was named the assistant general manager of Virgin’s new Alice Lane Health Club.

Passion is the key to working at Virgin. It is innate to person, you cannot infuse it, either it is there or it is not.

On keeping good talent, we have some points brought out by the study ‘Project Oxygen’ at Google.

It says the three top reasons people quit are:

1 à They didn’t feel enough of a connection to the company’s mission, or their individual contribution was not considered important.

2 à They didn’t get along with or respect their co-workers.

3 à They thought they had a terrible boss.

***

Next slide talks about the challenges that our female folks face in the corporate world.

The numbers from EU say that the percentage of female board members stands somewhere between 20 to 25 per cent for the various countries in the EU region.

And, according to the 2013 Fortune 1000 list of CEOs, only 4.6 per cent (that is, 46) are women and that number has been virtually stagnant for a decade.

***

Richard is a person with “get-go” attitude.

To explain how leadership works, how decisions are made, he has devised three categories into which a business manager falls.

First and foremost, there is the serial procrastinator. This is the one with a perennial approach of ‘Why make any decision today when I can put it off until tomorrow?’ The type: ‘SCREW IT – DO I REALLY HAVE TO DECIDE?’

The second personality type is the one into which Richard is most likely to fall. ‘SCREW IT – WE’LL DO IT – TODAY’

The third ‘SCREW IT – LET’S THINK SOME MORE ABOUT IT’, probably the smartest all-round approach is what I like to call ‘the art of orchestrated procrastination’. This is an acquired discipline whereby the first thing to be addressed as part of the decision-making function is timing. Is it a ‘carpe diem’ situation or not? If you don’t seize the day, might the window of opportunity close or might it be filled by a start-up or existing competitor?

That’s all for the day, thank you, have fun!

Rise of Nifty50

Even though Nifty has climbed from 1000 points (as of 1-Jan-1994) to 11,724.75 points as of 2-May-2019 in 26 years, but if we look at the growth that the index has seen in each month since its inception we have the following figures:

In 136 months, the market had downfall, it was bearish.
In 168 months, the market saw a rise, it was bullish.
Bulls to bears ratio is: 1.23 and bears to bulls ratio is: 0.81
If you want to survive on earnings from Nifty 50 Index, your earnings from a profitable month should cover your expenses for about 1.81 months.

If we look at the quarterly data, then we have the following results:
In 43 quarters, the market had downfall, it was bearish.
In 59 quarters, the market saw a rise, it was bullish.
Bulls to bears ratio is: 1.37 and bears to bulls ratio is: 0.76

If we look at the half years (i.e., Jan-Jun and Jul-Dec), then we have the following results:
In 20 half-years, we had a bearish market.
In 31 half-years, we had a bullish market.
Bulls to bears ratio is: 1.55 and bears to bulls ratio is: 0.64

If we look at the yearly figures (i.e., 1-Jan to 31-Dec), then we have the following results:
In 8 years, we had a bearish market.
In 18 years, we had a bullish market.
Bulls to bears ratio is: 2.25 and bears to bulls ratio is: 0.44

If we look at the bi-yearly figures, then we have the following results:
In 4 bi-yearly periods, we had a bearish market.
In 9 bi-yearly periods, we had a bullish market.
Bulls to bears ratio is: 2.25 and bears to bulls ratio is: 0.44

If we look at the tri-yearly figures, then we have the following results:
In 2 tri-yearly periods, we had a bearish market.
In 7 tri-yearly periods, we had a bullish market.
Bulls to bears ratio is: 3.5 and bears to bulls ratio is: 0.28

If we look at the four-yearly figures, then we have the following results:
In 1 four-yearly periods, we had a bearish market.
In 6 four-yearly periods, we had a bullish market.
Bulls to bears ratio is: 6 and bears to bulls ratio is: 0.16

4-Years	Open	Close	Change
1994	1000.00	1079.40	79.40
1998	1078.95	1059.05	-19.90
2002	1058.85	2836.55	1777.70
2006	2836.80	5201.05	2364.25
2010	5200.90	6304.00	1103.10
2014	6323.80	10530.70	4206.90
2018	10531.70	11748.15	1216.45

If we look at the five-yearly figures, then we have the following results:
In 1 five-yearly periods, we had a bearish market.
In 5 five-yearly periods, we had a bullish market.
Bulls to bears ratio is: 5 and bears to bulls ratio is: 0.2

5-Years	Open	Close	Change
1994	1000.00	884.25	-115.75
1999	886.75	1879.75	993.00
2004	1880.35	2959.15	1078.80
2009	2963.30	6304.00	3340.70
2014	6323.80	10862.55	4538.75
2019	10881.70	11748.15	866.45

Difference between meeting 1 jerk and meeting 10 jerks

There's a saying I heard once that I keep in mind most days:
If one day you meet a jerk, then you met a jerk. If one day you meet ten jerks, then YOU'RE the jerk.
As you think on that for a moment, let's consider the exact opposite. There's no better way I know to do that than to use the poem "Purple" by Alexis Rotella, which I'll put here. Please take a minute to read it. I promise you won't regret it.

In first grade
Mrs. Lohr said
my purple teepee
wasn’t realistic enough
that purple was no color
s for a tent,
that purple was a color
for people who died,
that my drawing
wasn’t good enough to hang
with the others.
I walked back to my seat
counting the swish swish swishes
of my baggy corduroy trousers.
With a black crayon
nightfall came to my purple tent
in the middle of an afternoon.
In second grade
Mr. Barta said draw anything,
he didn’t care what.
I left my paper blank
and when he came around
to my desk
my heart beat like a tom tom.
He touched my head
with his big hand
and in a soft voice said
the snowfall
how clean
and white
and beautiful.

A poem about a child and a teacher can be particularly evocative, because of the imagery of the subject. But what about those you encounter that aren't cute little kids, such as the grumpy service staff, the judgemental coworker, or the random person on the bus who causes an unconscious shudder from you? It is said that you can tell the character of a person by how they treat those who can do nothing for them.
Each of us, no matter how isolated or public, no matter our corner of the earth leaves a trail as we move through this life. What trail will you leave?

Think beyond tools and tactics!

Most Stanford students fail this challenge. Here's what we can learn from their mistakes.

You’re a student in a Stanford class on entrepreneurship.

Your professor walks into the room, breaks the class into different teams, and gives each team five dollars in funding. Your goal is to make as much money as possible within two hours and then give a three-minute presentation to the class about what you achieved. 

If you’re a student in the class, what would you do? 

Typical answers range from using the five dollars to buy start-up materials for a makeshift car wash or lemonade stand, to buying a lottery ticket or putting the five dollars on red at the roulette table. 

But the teams that follow these typical paths tend to bring up the rear in the class. 

The teams that make the most money don’t use the five dollars at all. They realize the five dollars is a distracting, and essentially worthless, resource. 

So they ignore it. Instead, they go back to first principles and start from scratch. They reframe the problem more broadly as “What can we do to make money if we start with absolutely nothing?” One particularly successful team ended up making reservations at popular local restaurants and then selling the reservation times to those who wanted to skip the wait. These students generated an impressive few hundred dollars in just two hours. 

But the team that made the most money approached the problem differently. They realized that both the $5 funding and the 2-hour period weren’t the most valuable assets at their disposal. Rather, the most valuable resource was the three-minute presentation time they had in front of a captivated Stanford class. They sold their three-minute slot to a company interested in recruiting Stanford students and walked away with $650. 

The five-dollar challenge illustrates the difference between tactics and strategy. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they refer to different concepts. A strategy is a plan for achieving an objective. Tactics, in contrast, are the actions you undertake to implement the strategy. 

The Stanford students who bombed the $5 challenge fixated on a tactic—how to use the five dollars—and lost sight of the strategy. If we focus too closely on the tactic, we become dependent on it. “Tactics without strategy,” as Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War, “are the noise before defeat.” 

Just because a $5 bill is sitting in front of you doesn’t mean it’s the right tool for the job. Tools, as Neil Gaiman reminds us, “can be the subtlest of traps.” When we’re blinded by tools, we stop seeing other possibilities in the peripheries. It’s only when you zoom out and determine the broader strategy that you can walk away from a flawed tactic. 

What is the $5 tactic in your own life? How can you ignore it and find the 2-hour window? Or even better, how do you find the most valuable three minutes in your arsenal? 

Once you move from the “what” to the “why”—once you frame the problem broadly in terms of what you’re trying to do instead of your favored solution—you’ll discover other possibilities lurking in plain sight.

Evolution and Revolution As Organizations Grow

Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow

Larry E. Greiner of the Harvard Business School wrote a noteworthy article with this title in the Harvard Business Review in July 1972, describing the growing pains that organizations go through.

Greiner proposed that organizations exhibit five predictable stages of growth called evolutions and five periods of crises called revolutions. His theory is readily applicable to many organizations.

The growth pattern consists of tightening and loosening of management reins in response to changes within the organization and the environment.

The evolution/revolution pattern, as shown by Apple Computer, is an excellent way to put a company’s history into MBA perspective. Apple Computer sprang forth from the creativity of Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak. Beginning in 1976, these two entrepreneurs were on a freight train of rapid growth until the company became so unwieldy that is almost jumped the tracks in 1983. Apple was faced with the leadership crisis of a growth company that didn’t have anyone who could efficiently run its day-to-day operations. Jobs was a lofty visionary making speeches, while Wozniak was the magic technician.

The company started to run out of gas as its creative fuel ran low. Apple II sales slumped and the new Lisa computer failed. John Sculley (Wharton MBA ’63) was brought in from Pepsi-Cola to give the company direction. Sculley reorganized Apple and cut costs in its bloated headquarters. Steve Jobs and his followers demanded more autonomy to develop a new breakthrough product and Sculley gave it to them. The delegation resulted in the creation of the Macintosh.

The Mac created another explosive growth period. However, Jobs could not work in a growing corporate bureaucracy, and he started a new company called NeXT. In 1989 the aging Mac faced fierce competition, and as profits declined in 1990, a new Apple crisis of control was brewing. Michael Spindler was appointed as chief operating officer to assist Sculley as chairman to take control and return the company to increasing profitability. By 1992 they had succeeded, but fell into crisis in 1995. Steve Jobs returned and led yet another recovery in 1998 with the iMac and G3 computers.

Source: Ten Day MBA (Steven Silbiger)

Three Steps To Success On The Job

“The first step to success on the job is to understand bosses and their context, including:

• Their stated and unstated goals and objectives
• The pressures on them
• Their strengths, weaknesses, blind spots
• Their preferred work styles

“The second step is to be introspective and assess yourself and your needs, including:

• Your own strengths and weaknesses
• Your personal style
• Your predisposition toward dependence on or resistance to authority figures

“The third step is to incorporate the first two steps and develop and maintain a relationship that:

• Fits both your needs and styles
• Is characterized by mutual expectations
• Keeps your boss informed—bosses hate surprises!
• Is based on dependability and honesty
• Selectively uses your boss’s time and resources”

Source: Ten Day MBA (Steven Silbiger)

Appreciate, appreciate and appreciate

I once read a poignant Reader’s Digest article about a little girl who often misbehaved. Her mother had to continually reprimand her. However, one day, the little girl had been especially good and hadn’t done a single thing that called for a reprimand. The mother said, “That night after I tucked her in bed and started downstairs, I heard a muffled noise. Running back up, I found her head buried in the pillow. She was sobbing. Between the sobs she asked, ‘Mommy, haven’t I been a pretty good girl today?’”

The question, the mother said, went through her like a knife.

“I had been quick to correct her,” she said, “when she was wrong. But when she tried to behave, I hadn’t noticed it and I put her to bed without one word of appreciation.” Adults are all grown-up little girls and little boys. We may not go to bed sobbing if the people in our lives don’t notice when we are good. Nevertheless, a trace of those tears lingers.

Source: How to talk to anyone (Leil Lowndes)

What the dog sees in you ('What the dog saw' by Malcolm Gladwell)

The anthropologist Brian Hare has done experiments with dogs, for example, where he puts a piece of food under one of two cups, placed several feet apart. The dog knows that there is food to be had, but has no idea which of the cups holds the prize. Then Hare points at the right cup, taps on it, looks directly at it. What happens? The dog goes to the right cup virtually every time. Yet when Hare did the same experiment with chimpanzees — an animal that shares 98.6 percent of our genes — the chimps couldn’t get it right. A dog will look at you for help, and a chimp won’t. “Primates are very good at using the cues of the same species,” Hare explained. “So if we were able to do a similar game, and it was a chimp or another primate giving a social cue, they might do better. But they are not good at using human cues when you are trying to cooperate with them. They don’t get it: ‘Why would you ever tell me where the food is?’

The key specialization of dogs, though, is that dogs pay attention to humans, when humans are doing something very human, which is sharing information about something that someone else might actually want.” Dogs aren’t smarter than chimps; they just have a different attitude toward people. “Dogs are really interested in humans,” Hare went on. “ Interested to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis ball.”

A dog cares, deeply, which way your body is leaning. Forward or backward? Forward can be seen as aggressive; backward — even a quarter of an inch — means nonthreatening. It means you’ve relinquished what ethologists call an intention movement to proceed forward. Cock your head, even slightly, to the side, and a dog is disarmed. Look at him straight on and he’ll read it like a red flag. Standing straight, with your shoulders squared, rather than slumped, can mean the difference between whether your dog obeys a command or ignores it.

Breathing even and deeply — rather than holding your breath — can mean the difference between defusing a tense situation and igniting it. “I think they are looking at our eyes and where our eyes are looking, and what our eyes look like,” the ethologist Patricia McConnell, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says. “A rounded eye with a dilated pupil is a sign of high arousal and aggression in a dog. I believe they pay a tremendous amount of attention to how relaxed our face is and how relaxed our facial muscles are, because that’s a big cue for them with each other. Is the jaw relaxed? Is the mouth slightly open? And then the arms. They pay a tremendous amount of attention to where our arms go.”

In the book The Other End of the Leash, McConnell decodes one of the most common of all human-dog interactions — the meeting between two leashed animals on a walk. To us, it’s about one dog sizing up another. To her, it’s about two dogs sizing up each other after first sizing up their respective owners. The owners “are often anxious about how well the dogs will get along,” she writes, “and if you watch them instead of the dogs, you’ll often notice that the humans will hold their breath and round their eyes and mouths in an ‘on alert’ expression. Since these behaviors are expressions of offensive aggression in canine culture, I suspect that the humans are unwittingly signaling tension. If you exaggerate this by tightening the leash, as many owners do, you can actually cause the dogs to attack each other. Think of it: the dogs are in a tense social encounter, surrounded by support from their own pack, with the humans forming a tense, staring, breathless circle around them. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen dogs shift their eyes toward their owner’s frozen faces, and then launch growling at the other dog.”

David and Goliath (by Malcolm Gladwell)

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.

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.

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.”

Excerpt taken from book: "David and Goliath" by Malcolm Gladwell