Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?

The story goes on to explore the classic David and Goliath story, as well as T.E. Lawrence’s strategies in Arabia, Rick Pitino’s coaching strategies, as well as a war games participant who frustrates his opponents by making his theoretical fleet out of thousands of little PT boats instead of battleships.

Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker.

I enjoy reading people like Gladwell because I enjoy how they challenge conventional thinking.  I regularly see people trying to solve problems by trying to pound square pegs into round holes because pounding square pegs is all they are experienced at doing.  I always try to take a step back from my situations and employ a more global approach to my work, even when the best solution involves admitting I was doing the wrong thing before.