In his recent piece in the New Yorker, How David Beats Goliath: How Underdogs Break the Rules, astronomically best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, whose books The Tipping Point and Blink provided fine examples for The Rules of Victory, uses the example of a grade-school girls’ basketball team strategy to demonstrate how stepping outside the boundaries of accepted approaches can upset the power balance and lead to victory.

In this case, a team of geeky girls with lots of heart but almost no basketball ability were trained to harass their opponents in a relentless full-court press. They became champions. Why, Gladwell asks, doesn’t the full-court press become the norm?

In this case, we find that our hero has not gone far enough in his investigation. For one thing, he is delving into the vast world of asymmetric warfare but doesn’t even mention the idea or any of the discussion or literature around it, which might have caused him to stumble onto the Sun Tzu, which many regard as the guidebook for asymmetric conflicts.

Also, he might have run into the Sun Tzu idea of the orthodox and the extraordinary. The Sun Tzu counsels using the orthodox (the accepted, the inside the box, coloring within the lines) to engage, and the extraordinary (breaking the rules) to attain victory. But critically, the Sun Tzu points out, the extraordinary is never permanently extraordinary.

In other words, if everyone uses the full court press, it will become the norm and the skills will be developed to counteract it, or the rules of the game will be changed to prevent it from becoming a boring contest dominated by defense (cf. hockey’s now-outlawed neutral zone trap or the spitball in baseball or the freeze in basketball, which the 24-second clock eliminated).

The methods of earlier underdogs may not be successfully repeated in the original form. Adversaries will have adapted. The rulemakers will have changed the dimensions of the box one was thinking outside of. The extraordinary has to be discovered anew, otherwise everyone would be doing it. 

Barry Boyce