Book 39 - The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell

Book 39 - The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell

The Tipping Point is Malcolm Gladwell's Bestselling book that explores what it takes for an idea to take hold. Published in 2000, prior to the crushing success of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, the book puts forth the argument that there is a tipping point, a point at which an idea takes off and takes on a life of its own, and that this tipping point can be influenced by the smallest things.

There's "The Law of the Few," the notion that very few influential people exert most of the influence over whether the idea takes off. These people can be broken into 3 categories: Mavens, Connectors, and Persuaders. Mavens are knowledge experts, and this expertise makes them influential. Connectors are people who bridge the gap between disparate groups of people. They know everybody, and therefore are effective at spreading a message among different groups. Persuaders, are the salesmen. These are the people who can make you feel like you really want a product or care about an idea.

The second factor Gladwell explores is "Stickiness," which is the ability for an idea to take hold and maintain that hold. A multi-million dollar ad campaign is useless if your message doesn't stick. If you can't remember the message and associate it with the product, the money is wasted. Gladwell discusses the effort that went into making the show "Sesame Street" capable of holding a preschooler's attention, and how the makers of "Blues Clues," took what was learned from "Sesame Street" and created an even "Stickier" format.

Finally there is "The Power of Context," the notion that you can tweak the way that the information is presented in small ways, with very powerful results. One way he explores this is in the turnaround in the New York City crime rate in the early nineties. During the eighties, violent crime on the subways was very bad. The problem was that the subways were dirty, graffiti covered places that looked like no one cared about them. New York launched a campaign to clean up the subways, remove the graffiti, and stop the panhandling and turnstile jumping. The effect was dramatic: Crime plummeted.

This is a well-written and thought-provoking book, but as I mentioned before, it was written prior to the social networking explosion, so it is a little dated in that respect. He hardly even mentions the internet in the book. In the edition I read, which was published two years after the first and contains a new afterward by the author, he notes this oversight and talks about email, but at that point MySpace and Facebook were still at least a year away. It's not that the advent of social networking negates anything he says, but it becomes an important medium for implementing some of the ideas he puts forth, and it would be interesting to see what Gladwell has to say about these technologies.