Gumball Capital

There is a new Malcom Gladwell article that is making the rounds called “How David Beats Golaith” and it’s all about the characteristics of underdogs. It’s filled with typical Gladwellian fare: a handful of cute, impressive stories that you’ve never heard of, all driving home a few simple points.

One story is about an immigrant father coaching his daughter’s high school basketball team. The girls are more academically than athletically inclined and rather short. But Dad makes them play high-intensity full-court press – making it very difficult for other team to move the ball to the half-way line in the allotted 10 seconds. And this rag-tag team with their less than respectable strategy go all the way to the state championships.

The point Gladwell seeks to make is this: the situations where David beats Golaith generally share two characteristics:
1) The underdogs win through sheer effort rather than skill or technique
2) The underdogs win by breaking some kind of social convention

“David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court … their other advantage is that they will do what is ’socially horrifying’—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought.”

I think we can all agree that social entrepreneurs looking to make lasting change are facing some very long odds and every success story of positive social change is truly a David beats Golaith situation. Do changemakers follow Gladwell’s rules? I think so:

Wendy Kopp – Teach for America
Wendy is a Princeton girl who took her senior thesis, raised $2.5M in seed funding, built a tiny staff and recruited 500 college graduates to start working in low-income schools in just one year. Now 20,000 teachers have passed through the system. Do you think that was a result of extensive planning, superb execution towards an innovative strategy, or maybe just the result of sweat, blood and tears?

It’s easy to say that TFA is a great idea now, but who would have believed that Kopp could have built an organization that outrecruits the biggest financial and consulting firms at most college campuses across the nation? Teaching kids over big bucks? And that many of those college grads might actually outperform* teachers with years of experience? Unheard of.

Kopp had a great idea that challenged conventional thinking about college students: their interest in, and impact on education in low-income communities – and worked her tail off to build an organization that was able to achieve that mission.

Mahatma Gandhi – The Liberation of India
He may not your first image of a social entrepreneur but very much a man who employed sheer force of will. It takes a lot of effort to get 80 people to march 248 miles to protest a salt tax by the British, or to embark on a 21-day fast during a negotiation.

Gandhi got thousands of people to face armed men without bowing down or running away. He got women involved in the social movement. If you had told India’s citizens a decade prior to Gandhi’s arrival about their chances of freedom from British rule, you’d be laughed at for certain. But through his model of civil obedience, and an unwavering commitment to his people, Gandhi got it done.

Kjerstin Erikson – FORGE
Perhaps not all of you have heard of Kjerstin, the brilliant founder and Executive Director for FORGE, an nonprofit that works with refugees in Africa to break the cycle of war and poverty. You will. As 20 year old white woman, she earned the respect and trust of war-torn refugees in Zambia and Botswaina and started FORGE with no money and no business plan.

FORGE’s theory of change emphasizes involving the community itself. It is the refugees themselves, not the supposed experts at big aid organizations, that develop community projects that FORGE vets and funds. Few people would have predicted that this model where the refugees make all the decisions would eventually help 60,000 refugees build better lives.

So yes – A brief look at some well known, and less well known changemakers suggests that socially-minded Davids, focusing less on making all the right moves, more on injecting massive amounts of time and energy into getting something done, even if it’s not the polite or accepted way of doing it – will have a much better chance of defeating the Golaith-sized challenges of the world.

*See the working paper – “Making a Difference?: The Effects of Teach for America in High School“