The Tipping Point: Book Review

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Malcolm Gladwell ISBN: 0316346624 Pub. Date: January 2002 Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Malcolm Gladwell demystifies an important biological and social phenomenon – the underneath forces to make things “tip over,” or the way a very large number of people get influenced, either socially or biologically. This is a competence every politician, marketeer, or terrorist would die to master.
I do not imagine myself to ever try to start or organize an epidemic. The best use of this knowledge, beside as a wonderful personal enrichment (a.k.a. conversational topic), is the ability to spot the making of an epidemic and remain as an independent thinker.

The rest of this blog entry is the reader's digest version, with some personal opinions injected. It may ruin the book for you.

There are 3 rules of epidemics: the power of few, the stickiness factor, and the power of context.

• The Power of the Few is the most interesting concept. For an epidemic to “tip,” it requires 3 kinds of people to work together: the connectors, the mavens, and the salesmen. The connector has the ability to spread messages to a wide number of people. The maven can produce the best information. And the salesman will make the perfect pitch. They can be as few as 1 person each. Sometime, the same person can play more than 1 roles. It is highly unlikely for a single person to be all three.

  What roles do I play? Who can play the other roles? When I encounter one of those rare connectors, mavens, or salesmen, how do I recognize them and make sure they are on my team?

• Even those best few people may not be able to make the message “stick” – that it becomes memorable. Stickiness is not intuitive and often requires just a little modification to the original message. The key learning point is to be scientific – test until the message sticks. The obvious ways experts design frequently do not work.
• Context stresses the subtleness of how people make decision, or the unconscious factors that we all are influenced. No one discards thrashes on a spotless street. No one vandalizes the walls of a 5-star hotel. How a message arrives is as important as the message itself.