David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

that on that fifth dimension of the Big Five personality inventory, “agreeableness,” they tend to be on the far end of the continuum. They are people willing to take social risks—to do things that others might disapprove of.
    That is not easy. Society frowns on disagreeableness. As human beings we are hardwired to seek the approval of those around us. Yet a radical and transformative thought goes nowhere without the willingness to challenge convention. “If you have a new idea, and it’s disruptive and you’re agreeable, then what are you going to do with that?” says Peterson. “If you worry about hurting people’s feelings and disturbing the social structure, you’re not going to put your ideas forward.” As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
    A good example of Peterson’s argument is the story of how the Swedish furniture retailer IKEA got its start. The company was founded by Ingvar Kamprad. His great innovation was to realize that much of the cost of furniture was tied up in its assembly: putting the legs on the table not only costs money but also makes shipping the table really expensive. So he sold furniture that hadn’t yet been assembled, shipped it cheaply in flat boxes, and undersold all his competitors.
    In the mid-1950s, however, Kamprad ran into trouble. Swedish furniture manufacturers launched a boycott of IKEA. They were angry at his low prices, and they stopped filling his orders. IKEA faced ruin. Desperate for a solution, Kamprad looked south and realized just across the Baltic Sea from Sweden was Poland, a country with much cheaper labor and plenty of wood. That’s Kamprad’s openness: few companies were outsourcing like that in the early 1960s. Then Kamprad focused his attention on making the Polish connection work. It wasn’t easy. Poland in the 1960s was a mess. It was a Communist country. It had none of the infrastructure or machinery or trained workforce or legal protections of a Western country. But Kamprad pulled it off. “He is a micromanager,” says Anders Åslund, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “That’s why he succeeded where others failed. He went out to these unpleasant places, and made sure things worked. He’s this extremely stubborn character.” That’s conscientiousness.
    But what is the most striking fact about Kamprad’s decision? It’s the year he went to Poland: 1961. The Berlin Wall was going up. The Cold War was at its peak. Within a year, East and West would come to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The equivalent today would be Walmart setting up shop in North Korea. Most people wouldn’t even think of doing business in the land of the enemy for fear of being branded a traitor. Not Kamprad. He didn’t care a whit for what others thought of him. That’s disagreeableness.
    Only a very small number of people have the creativity to think of shipping furniture flat and outsourcing in the face of a boycott. An even smaller number have not only those kinds of insights but also the discipline to build a first-class manufacturing operation in an economic backwater. But to be creative and conscientious and have the strength of mind to defy the Cold War? That’s rare.
    Dyslexia doesn’t necessarily make people more open. Nor does it make them more conscientious (although it certainly might). But the most tantalizing possibility raised by the disorder is that it might make it a little bit easier to be disagreeable.

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    When Jay Freireich was very young, his father died suddenly. The Freireichs were Hungarian immigrants who were running a restaurant in Chicago. It was just after the stock market crash in 1929. They lost everything. “They found him in the bathroom,” Freireich said. “I think it was suicide, because he felt all alone. He had come to Chicago because he had a brother there. When the crash occurred, the brother left town. He had a wife, two small children, no money, a restaurant gone. He must have been pretty desperate.”
    Freireich’s mother went to work in a sweatshop, sewing brims on hats. She made two cents a hat. She didn’t speak much English. “She had to work eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, to make enough money to have an apartment for us to rent,” Freireich went on.