The tipping point
MONTHLY BOOK FEATURE:
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The ways in which some ideas spark and achieve exponential popularity while others quickly fade out has long been thought to be mysterious. Throughout history, organizations of all kinds have worked to tap into the elusive power of “word-of-mouth” advertising. Some companies sponsor athletes and splash logos all over their attire in hopes of sparking a trend, other organizations send out mass email campaigns, some go door-to-door spreading their message – all in the hopes of spreading a message they hope will take hold in popular culture. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell introduces the revolutionary concept that ideas spread in the same way that viruses do, and that small changes in behavior or positioning can cause an idea to spread rapidly through a community.
As a reporter covering the AIDS epidemic, Malcolm Gladwell interviewed numerous epidemiologists, who pointed out that AIDS, a disease that had been limited to a small portion of the population, quickly became a global health crisis. Instead of moving slowly through the population, a small number of people with specific behaviors had actually created an epidemic. He learned that all epidemics followed this same pattern, and that the people who studied them looked for the little thing that made a big difference. Impressed with the viewpoint that they brought to the table, Gladwell began to wonder if human and market behavior could be explained in the same way that epidemics have been explained – that is, do ideas or products spread from a small group of individuals and slowly filter into the general population, or do they reach a certain point and then explode?
Through examples of varied phenomenon such as the rise of the Hush Puppy suede shoe, the dramatic fall of crime in New York City, the effectiveness of a cancer awareness campaign or the success of children’s television programming, Gladwell illustrates that ideas do behave similar to viruses, and that by tapping into specific factors every idea has the potential to tip. He divides the book by three key factors, The Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor and The Power of Context that determine whether or not an idea will reach wide-scale popularity.
Reading The Tipping Point will do an amazing thing – it will change the way that you see the world and interpret the events around you. It will generate new ideas for your personal life, and most importantly for the lives of the people in your family, business and community.
