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Nuggets of wisdom to make you think
01 November 2009 Reviewed by Declan Burke
What The Dog Saw
By Malcolm Gladwell
Allen Lane, €15.99
A staff writer with the New Yorker since 1996,MalcolmGladwell is best known on this side of the Atlantic for his influential books, The Tipping Point (2000) and Blink (2005).
A compilation of essays and features taken from the New Yorker, What The Dog Saw showcases Gladwell’s ability to look at an issue - breast cancer, the Challenger disaster, the collapse of Enron - with an unusually sharp pair of fresh eyes, offering insights and conclusions that might appear at first counter-intuitive or simply perverse, but which then force the reader to reassess what he or she already knows, or thinks he or she knows.
That’s a rare talent, and one that would, in itself, have made What The Dog Saw an interesting collection of writings.
What Gladwell’s essays also offer, however, is the potential to change the way the reader thinks. Each piece is not only an exercise in seeing further or deeper into whatever topic happens to be under discussion, but an exercise in ways of seeing.
If there is one underlying theme to each essay, it’s that conventional wisdom is neither wise nor - when explored fully - conventional.
In Most Likely to Succeed, for example, Gladwell flips the concept of expectations based on previous experience. A college football quarterback is on course to win the Heisman Trophy for Best College Football Player, and yet everyone, including the talent scout Gladwell interviews, is aware that the likelihood of the quarterback succeeding in the professional leagues is utterly unknowable.
Not only do professional teams play with different systems than high school and college football teams, they also play faster and tougher, which requires talent scouts to make a call on unquantifiables such as the player’s character and courage. The topic under discussion is value-added analysis, except no one - not even the player himself - is in a position to give a true sense of his worth until he finds himself in the heat of battle.
Typically, Gladwell takes this example and extrapolates it to examine the systems of appointing teachers in US schools.
The traditional method of appointing teachers is to take the best and brightest graduates, and presume they’ll make the best and brightest teachers. Except, as Gladwell points out, and as any teacher will confirm, the difference between theory and practice is unquantifiable, and no one - not even the teachers themselves - knows how they will perform until they’re standing in front of a classroom of kids.
Gladwell’s solution? Well, in this case, he doesn’t have one - he’s simply pointing out that perceived wisdom is not all it’s cracked up to be. He does, however, mention that the current system of appointing teachers is costing the US economy billions of dollars every year.
If you’re not after tangential thinking or different modes of seeing, Gladwell still has plenty to offer. John Rock’s Error, for example, about the inventor of the birth control pill, throws up the fascinating nugget that, while modern woman will have roughly 400 periods during their lives, her pre-modern ancestor had roughly 100.Why should that be so? Gladwell’s answer incorporates theology, anthropology and breast cancer.
Another essay, The Picture Problem, also analyses breast cancer, but here Gladwell brings into play the US Airforce’s experience of bombing targets during the first Gulf War, arguing that enhanced modes of recording reality (such as increasingly sophisticated cameras and optics) do not necessarily give us a better chance of ‘‘hitting our target’’, particularly if we don’t know where our target is.
He quotes the Nazi production chief, Albert Speer, on the failure of Allied bombing raids to interrupt the Nazis’ production of ball bearings, despite knowing exactly where the ball-bearing factories were and bombing said factories to smithereens. ‘‘Seeing a problem and understanding it," writes Gladwell, ‘‘are two different things."
That, in a nutshell, is this book’s cri de coeur. The problem with the Enron collapse, Gladwell claims, was not that Enron tried to cover up faulty accounting practices - in fact, Enron made all of its financial information available to the public, and even provided journalists investigating the crisis with straightforward, honest answers about their convoluted accounting.
The real problem, according to Gladwell, is the nature of big business in the modern world: there was simply so much information available about Enron’s bewildering number of activities, across so many different streams of information, that it was impossible for any one person to digest and parse.
On these and all the other topics he addresses - dog whisperers, ketchup, genius, psychological profiling, hair dye, the myth of smart people, and much more - Gladwell is informative, concise and always entertaining. He is, in short, a born storyteller - although no doubt he has a theory tucked up his sleeve about how storytellers are not born, but shaped by their ability to see through the cant at the heart of conventional wisdom.
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