I really enjoy Malcolm Gladwell’s writing, since even when I disagree with the conclusions he presents, his writing is interesting and thought-provoking, and he is unafraid to challenge conventional wisdom by looking at the underlying data. His most recent book is a compilation called What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, bringing together nineteen essays from Gladwell’s tenure at the New Yorker, uneven as compilations typically go, but anchored by several very strong essays that, again, challenge some pretty basic assumptions of our society and daily lives.

The most relevant essay to my day job was “Most Likely to Succeed – How Do We Hire When We Can’t Tell Who’s Right for the Job?” which is available, like all essays in this book, for free on Gladwell’s site. The essay deals with the difficulty in hiring for certain positions where the qualities required for success are either poorly understood or difficult to measure in candidates, with a focus on teachers and on NFL quarterbacks. (That intertwining of two seemingly unrelated stories is a Gladwell conceit, and, from a narrative perspective, a highly effective one.) NFL scouts have a hard time evaluating amateur quarterbacks because the college game is so different from the professional game, and that difference is most pronounced in areas that directly affect the quarterback, notably the style and quality of opposing defenses. Gladwell mentions the Year of the Quarterback draft in 1999, where just one of five first-round QBs (Donovan McNabb) had a first-round career, and cites a study by two economists (David Berri and Rob Simmons) that showed neither Wonderlic scores nor draft position had any correlation to NFL success for quarterbacks. (For more on this, there’s an excellent blog post by Jason Lisk at pro-football-reference.com.) And he carries the analogy back over to the teaching world, where hiring criteria like master’s degrees have done nothing to improve teacher performance.

There is, of course, an obvious parallel in baseball to what Gladwell calls “the quarterback problem:” The fact that most high school and college baseball programs use composite metal bats, making the amateur game (exclusive of top summer leagues and showcase events like ESPN’s Area Code Games) substantially different from the professional game. Scouts from MLB clubs (and non-scout evaluators like me) are always grappling with the question of whether a particular hitter’s swing will translate to pro ball, or which pitchers will take advantage of the ability to pitch to the inner half when the sweet spots on hitters’ bats are reduced by more than half with the switch to wood. Amateur catchers almost never get to call their own games, as pitches are called from the bench, while ignorant college and high school coaches employ brain-dead small-ball strategies completely unsuited to the high-scoring environments of metal-bat baseball. And, as the guys at CollegeSplits have shown us, there are often large differences between the pitcher a hitter faces on Tuesday night and the one he faces on Friday night. It’s not the same game, and those differences are part of what makes the MLB draft seem, at times, like a “crapshoot.”

There’s another sports-related essay on the difference between choking and panicking, starting with the story of Jana Navotna’s epic collapse in the 1993 Wimbledon women’s singles final and ending with Greg Norman’s final ten holes at the 1996 Masters. (He mentions another collapse by Novotna in the 1995 French Open, but omits her 1998 Wimbledon title, and doesn’t mention Norman’s two British Open championships, which both raise the question of how deep the psychology of “choking” runs in any individual.) More interesting within this essay, to me at least, was the issue raised of “stereotype threat,” where an individual’s performance on a task or test may be negatively affected by stereotypes of his or her ethnic/racial/gender group:

Garcia gathered together a group of white, athletic students and had a white instructor lead them through a series of physical tests: to jump as high as they could, to do a standing broad jump, and to see how many pushups they could do in twenty seconds. The instructor then asked them to do the tests a second time, and, as you’d expect, Garcia found that the students did a little better on each of the tasks the second time around. Then Garcia ran a second group of students through the tests, this time replacing the instructor between the first and second trials with an African-American. Now the white students ceased to improve on their vertical leaps. He did the experiment again, only this time he replaced the white instructor with a black instructor who was much taller and heavier than the previous black instructor. In this trial, the white students actually jumped less high than they had the first time around. Their performance on the pushups, though, was unchanged in each of the conditions. There is no stereotype, after all, that suggests that whites can’t do as many pushups as blacks. The task that was affected was the vertical leap, because of what our culture says: white men can’t jump.

Gladwell goes on to explore some of the psychological reasons why we see these significant correlations – and no, it’s not because women are naturally bad at math or white men really can’t jump. In baseball, scouts often have players run the 60-yard dash and perform other athletic tests, often in groups at showcases … but what if the “stereotype threat” is in effect? Are we getting bad reads on white or black players because of this psychological issue?

The second essay in the collection explores, of all things, the markets for condiments, asking why we have many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup. The answer to that specific question isn’t all that interesting – in a nutshell, Heinz has struck a nearly perfect balance across various dimensions of flavor that appeals to a mass market because it doesn’t stand out in any one dimension – but the discussion of the science and statistics of taste was. Gladwell veers off into a conversation with Howard Moskowitz, a researcher in the realm of psychophysics, who uses taste tests and user feedback to identify clusters of taste that might be targets for new variations on existing products, such as the “extra-chunky” tomato sauce category he uncovered through research for Campbell’s to fix its flagging Prego brand in the 1980s.

Other essays of note include one on Nassim Taleb, an investor now known as the author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness; puncturing the myth that genius burns bright when young but fades early; and calling the entire field of criminal profiling into question. The essay on the hair dye industry covered a couple of very interesting characters, but the essay on Cesar Millan managed to make him – and the subject – boring. (Disclaimer: I’m not a dog person.) Gladwell gets personal with one section on a case of plagiarism that involved the use of material from one of his articles in the Broadway play Frozen, but I couldn’t quite come around to his ultimate conclusion that we are too protective of authors’ intellectual property rights.

I listened to the audio version of What the Dog Saw, read by Gladwell, who has a fantastic voice for reading audiobooks and, of course, can always use the perfect tone for what are, after all, his own words.