3. Level the Playing Field:

Make Them Smaller and Weaker

Even things up by focusing on your giant’s vulnerabilities.

The Goliath many of us learned about in Sunday school was minuscule compared to the giants we’ve grown accustomed to over the past 25 years.

As young David stared up at Goliath, at best he was looking at someone twice his size. Today, if we translate the size of our biggest modern-day Goliaths into height differences, the vast majority of us are staring up at a huge foot, the top of which rises well above the clouds. As for our giant’s face, we’ll need a powerful telescope to see it, because it’s at least 100 miles high, somewhere in outer space.

When you view our size divide this way, it becomes that much clearer why we have to work so hard away from the negotiation table to level the playing field, before we get too close to our giants or pursue any serious talks. In the next chapter, we’ll look at how we can even things up by making ourselves bigger and stronger. But right now, we’re going to level the playing field by making our giants smaller and weaker.

Out on the playing field, the Size Wizards use four approaches to deflate size and clout, bringing their giants back down to earth:

• They find a rulebook to undermine extreme positions.
• They change how the game is played so size and clout don’t matter as much.
• They put on their giant’s jersey to influence change as an insider.
• They make it difficult for their giant to play without them.

In applying these approaches, we’ll exploit giant vulnerabilities―every giant has them. A Goliath’s physical structures are not to be ignored as targets, including parking lots as we’ll soon learn. But our main focus should be on the non-physical assets that underlie a giant’s influence, enabling everything else that our eyes can see.

This Hidden Infrastructure, introduced earlier, encompasses the invisible political webs that giants weave; the decision-making structures they control behind the scenes; the wide-ranging rules they quietly create or change; the veiled connections that grant them access to key decision-makers and the media; the multi-pronged information, sales and marketing networks that stealthily access our priorities and pocketbooks; the concealed army of high-priced lawyers that lies in wait; and the secret moats around their castles that keep out the unwanted. Any or all parts of this Hidden Infrastructure can support a giant’s need to grow, and protect them from anyone who threatens their growth as giant individuals, groups or organizations.

We’ll watch as our Size Wizards often surface, upset or co-opt parts of a giant’s Hidden Infrastructure to meet their interests as smaller players, drawing on assistance from one or more helpers.

The approaches we’re discussing here are different than any collaborative efforts we might pursue in other circumstances and are only to be used when our giants aren’t cooperating or clearly won’t in the future. We need to tread carefully now, using what we’ve just learned from our first size and strength strategy, Defend Yourself from the Start, as we become more aggressive away from the negotiation table.

As we delve into how we can throw our giants off balance to get what we want, we’ll travel around the world and through time, encountering an ancient king, models with eating disorders, a peeved arm-wrestler, parents concerned about their kids’ schooling, a gutsy whistleblower, and an entrepreneur who doubles as a detective.