Executive Summary

The tipping point, as defined by the author Malcolm Gladwell, is “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point…” “The magic moment when idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips and spreads like wildfire.” Gladwell insists that we can discover the scientific principles that govern social phenomena, epidemics and fads.

            Gladwell’s first principle is known as the law of the few. Gladwell states that “the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” This principle suggests that an idea or behavior can spread because of the unusual qualities of a select group of individuals. These people are classified as connectors, mavens, or salesmen. The connectors are people who know an incredible amount of people and who have a knack for making acquaintances. These people typically have a social network of over a hundred people. Gladwell uses Paul Revere as an example of a connector. Mavens are people who acquire detailed knowledge on a day to day basis. They not only store knowledge, but they share their knowledge with others and collect more knowledge and information from those they share with. The salesmen are people who persuade us to buy what we buy.  They have tremendous enthusiasm about a product and have outstanding negotiation skills

            The second principle that Gladwell illustrates in his book is called the stickiness factor. Gladwell defines the stickiness factor as “the specific content of a message that renders its impact as memorable.” He examines why some products become a craze and why others don’t through his analysis of the stickiness factor.

            The third principle that Gladwell examines in his book is the power of context. By simply altering the context of something you could alter the results. Gladwell states, “…the lesson of the power of context is that we are more than just sensitive to the changes in context. We’re exquisitely sensitive to them. And the kinds of contextual changes that are capable of tipping an epidemic are very different than we might ordinarily suspect.”

            TheTipping Point gives us information on why some ideas become successful and others do not. Gladwell explores the phenomenon of the social epidemic and analyzes how and why they work they way they do.

The Ten Things Managers Need to Know fromThe Tipping Point

1.            Ideas, products, messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.

2.            The best way to understand trends is to think of them as epidemics.

3.            Little changes can make a big difference.

4.            Epidemics can rise and fall in one dramatic moment- the tipping point.

5.            Social epidemics are driven by the efforts of a handful of exceptional people.

6.            Connectors are people with a special gift of bringing the world together.

7.            The word Maven comes from the Yiddish and means one who accumulates       knowledge.

8.            Salesmen have the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced.

9.            The stickiness factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable.

10.            Character is a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.

Full Summary of The Tipping Point

Introduction

Gladwell explains in his book “the tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate.” He asks us “why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others don’t? And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?” Gladwell’s has three principles: the law of the few, the stickiness factor, and the power of context, which examine the world of social epidemics.

The Law of the Few

                        Gladwell’s concept of the Law of the Few encompasses that the reason an idea or behavior spread is because the unique qualities of certain individuals. These individuals are classified as Connectors, Mavens, or Salesmen.

            Connectors are the kind of people that know everyone. Connectors have a special gift for bringing the world together. One of the connectors that Gladwell examines in his book is a man by the name of Roger Horchow. Robert Horchow is a successful businessman from Dallas who founded the Horchow Collection, a high-end mail order merchandise company. Gladwell explains that Horchow “has an instinctive and natural gift for making social connections. He’s not aggressive about it. He’s not one of those overly social; backslapping types for whom the process of acquiring acquaintances is obvious and self-serving. He’s more of an observer, with the dry, knowing manner of someone who likes to remain a little bit on the outside. He simply likes people, in a genuine and powerful way, and he finds the patterns of acquaintanceship and interaction in which people arrange themselves to be endlessly fascinating.” Horchow became successful because of the amount of people he knew. “Horchow collects people the same way others collect stamps.” Details are critical to Horchow. Connectors are important for more than the number of people they know, they are important because of the kinds of people they know as well.

            Gladwell also examines the famous ride of Paul Revere. Paul Revere’s midnight ride started a word of mouth epidemic, but William Dawes’s ride did not. “Paul Revere was the Roger Horchow of his day. He was a connector…. He was a fisherman and a hunter, a card player and a theater-lover, a frequenter of pubs and a successful businessman…He had an uncanny genius for being at the center of events.” When the British army began to plan its attack on ammunition and arms stores, Revere overheard, and set out to Lexington that night, all the while spreading the news that the British are coming. People knew Revere and respected him. Dawes made a similar ride, trying to inform as many people as possible, but it didn’t even compare to what Revere had accomplished. According to Gladwell, “word-of-mouth epidemics are the work of Connectors. William Dawes was just an ordinary man.

            The next group Gladwell writes about is the Mavens. “The word Maven comes from the Yiddish and means one who accumulates knowledge. In recent years, economists have spent a great deal of time studying Mavens, for the obvious reason that if marketplaces depend on information, the people with the most information must be most important.” Market Mavens are people who are aware of what prices should be and why and if they aren’t a certain way, alert management of a discrepancy. Gladwell writes about a Maven that he knows by the name of Mark Alpert. He describes him by stating, “ He talks quickly and precisely and with absolute authority. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t say that it was hot yesterday. He would say that we had a high of 87 degrees yesterday. He doesn’t walk up stairs. He runs up them, like a small boy. He gives the sense that he is interested in and curious about everything, that, even at his age, if you gave him a children’s chemistry set he would happily sit down right then and there and create some strange new concoction.” Alpert knew about certain hotels, car deals, and television sets. He knew basically everything you needed to know about anything in the Market place. “Obviously they know things that the rest of us don’t. They read more magazines than the rest of us; more newspapers, and they may be the only people who read junk mail…Mavens have the knowledge and the social skills to start word-of-mouth epidemics. What set Mavens apart, though, is not so much what they know but how they pass it along. The fact that Mavens want to help, for no other reason than because they like to help, turns out to be an awfully effective way of getting someone’s attention…. Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know. For a social epidemic to start, though, some people are actually going to have to be persuaded to do something.” That’s where the next group of people come in, the salesmen.

            Gladwell explains, “Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people-Salesmen- with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.” Gladwell writes about a financial planned by the name of Tom Gau. Gau’s firm is the biggest in southern California, and one of the top financial planning firms in the country. “ Gau’s pitch is that his firm offers clients a level of service and expertise they’ll have difficulty getting anywhere else.” “..What was interesting about Gau is the extent to which seemed to be persuasive in a way quite different from the content of his words. He seems to have some kind of indefinable trait, something powerful and contagious and irresistible that goes beyond what comes out of his mouth, that makes people who meet him want to agree with him. It’s energy. It’s enthusiasm. It’s charm. It’s likeability. It’s all those things and yet something more.”

The Stickiness Factor

            Gladwell describes the Stickiness Factor as “the specific content of a message that renders its impact as memorable.” He tries to make us think about why do we buy certain things over another. What is the reason for watching one show over another? Gladwell writes about the stickiness factor of the famous children’s television show known as Sesame Street. Joan Cooney was a television producer in the late 60’s who wanted to come up with a show targeted at toddlers. “Her agent of infection was television, and the “virus” she wanted to spread was literacy,” Gladwell explains. Sesame Street has been proved to increase the reading and learning skills of its audience. Gladwell states, “The creators of Sesame Street accomplished something extraordinary, and the story of how they did that is a marvelous illustration of the second of the rules of the Tipping Point, the Stickiness Factor.” Producers learned that they could make small adjustments in how ideas were presented to the youth. These small adjustments overcame television’s problems as a teaching tool and made what the show had to say stick. “Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky,” according to Gladwell.

The Power of Context

            The Power of Context relates to how human behavior is sensitive to its environment. Gladwell states, “ Epidemics are sensitive to conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.” Gladwell goes into great detail about this when he talks about the crime rate in New York City in the 80’s. Gladwell’s reasoning for the decrease in crime in New York is known as the Broken Windows theory. He points out that if there are many broken windows in a neighborhood, soon more windows will be broken and more crimes will begin to take place. It seems like criminals see broken windows and conclude that people don’t care about this certain part of town, therefore, if I commit a crime, I should be able to get away with it. If it appears as if people don’t care about the conditions of a certain area, chances are, they don’t. New York had an epidemic of crime. Gladwells states that, “crime is contagious just as fashion is contagious.” A man by the name of Kelling was hired by the New York transit authority as a consultant. Kelling was a firm believer in the Broken Windows theory and insisted that they worked on this aspect of crime. A new subway director by the name of David Gunn was brought in as well. Gunn was told not to worry about graffiti and other petty problems. Gunn insisted that they should start paying attention to the petty problems such as graffiti.  All of the subway cars were wiped clean of graffiti and cleaned well. If someone would happen to graffiti one of the cars, the car was painted over before the next day. Because of this practice, crimes on subways decreased tremendously. A man by the name of William Bratton was hired as head of the transit police. He was a firm believer in the Broken Windows theory as well. Bratton didn’t decide to try to crack down on the robberies or other crimes that happen on a subway, instead, his first act of business was to crack down on fare-beating. Previously, transit police never gave fare-bating the time of day because it was only a dollar or so at stake. Bratton started having transit police dressed in regular clothes wait for fare-beaters. One by one fare-beaters were arrested and handcuffed and held to the side while the police continued their work. The idea was let criminals know that the police weren’t messing around anymore. It was to make criminals think if they are cracking down on fare-beating so hard, what will happen to me if they catch me robbing someone? It worked. Misdemeanor crimes were no longer going on unnoticed. Bratton was then appointed as chief of police under Mayor Giuliani and applied the same concepts to the city as a whole. Bratton started cracking down on jaywalkers, on public drunkenness and arrested for people peeing in the street. Crime fell quickly in the city. Murders, rapes, muggings, etc. were happening less and less due to making simple small changes. Gladwell says, “ Bratton and Giuliani pointed to the same cause. Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime.” Gladwell also uses the concept of the power of context to describe the decrease in the AIDS epidemic in Baltimore. Baltimore had a lot of drug addicts. The city would send out a van with people to hand out thousands of clean syringes to certain corners in the city at certain times of the week. Gladwell states, “The idea was that for every dirty, used needle that addicts hand over, they can get a free clean needle in return.” What the city failed to think of is that addicts are not very responsible. They are not good at being at a certain place at a certain time. Sometimes the van would come on a Monday and they were in the need for a clean syringe the next day, knowing that the van wouldn’t return until the following Monday. After a while a group of men were coming to the van with backpacks filled with 300 or more dirty syringes. They were getting clean syringes in return and selling them to other addicts for . At first, the coordinators of the needle program weren’t happy, but after the AIDS rate went down, they had second thoughts. The rate went down because these men selling the syringes were there when the van wasn’t. An addict didn’t have to use a dirty needle because he couldn’t wait until the van came on Monday. Instead, he could find one of the guys selling the needles at anytime. They were like a 24-hour store and didn’t cost anything additional to the city of Baltimore. These backpack sellers knew where to find the addicts and knew when to be there. The AIDS rate dropped significantly due to the small change from a van giving free needles to addicts to a group of addicts selling clean needles to other addicts.

            Gladwell explains over and over again throughout his book that the smallest things can make the biggest difference and he illustrates this theory beautifully through the examples he gives. The view he has on how social epidemics work and the way he explains them is exciting and addictive.

The Video Lounge

Twitter’s Tipping Point

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6415637n

This video is an interview with Katie Couric and Twitter’s co founder Biz Stone. He explains that Twitter’s first tipping point occurred in Austin, Texas. There was a technology conference in 2007 where twitter founders were being able to see their product being used in the wild for the first time. After the conference, a man tweeted that he was leaving a bar because it was too loud and crowded and that he would be going to another bar. By the time the man walked 10 minutes to the other bar, a large amount of people had gotten his tweet and gone to the bar as well.

Personal Insights

Why I think:

With business conditions today, what the author wrote is true because companies spend millions and millions of dollars on advertising for their product and often end up with undesirable results. If advertising alone made companies successful, then every company would be in good standing. Companies should look beyond advertising and try to examine what they can do to make their product stick. As Gladwell pointed out in his book with the sesame street dilemma, by changing one simple aspect, your product can become sticky. Companies should also focus on finding the connectors, mavens, and salesmen. These are the people that make a product successful. Also, by altering the context of the situation, you can also alter the results. There is no proven way to make a product become a trend or epidemic, but by looking at Gladwell’s theories, we can know to look further than the typical means of advertising and promotion. If we know certain ideas, behaviors and products start certain epidemics, there is a possibility that we can start and control an epidemic of our own.

Then,

If I were the author of the book, I would have done these three things differently:

1.            Gladwell illustrates through his writing how enthusiastic he is about the people he has met and interviewed, however, when Gladwell begins writing about technology and processes, he loses the enthusiasm and loses the reader’s attention. If I were Gladwell I would have stuck to talking about the people who are connectors, mavens, and salesmen.

2.            Around page 115 Gladwell begins to lose my attention. He spends too long trying to explain certain things, such as the stickiness of a kid’s television show. The amount of time that he put into this section caused me to have an information overload. I would have cut this section down to fewer pages.

3.            I think that Gladwell takes his theory a little too far when he begins to talk about suicides in Micronesia as being contagious. I find it hard to believe that people taking their own lives can be contagious and if I were he I would have left this part out as well.

Reading this book made me think differently about the topic in these ways:

1.            Reading this book made me think about how trends work. By just altering one small thing, you can make something go from being nothing to being the next hot thing on the market.

2.            Not everyone can be good at selling a product. There are certain people with an enthusiasm about selling and have a knack for persuading the undecided.

3.            All kinds of fads exist around us, but only certain ones take because of their stickiness factor.

I’ll apply what I’ve learned in this book in my career by:

1.            Thinking differently about the way products become fads.

2.      Analyzing why some behaviors or products start epidemics and why others do not.

3.      Examining what I can do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of my own.

Here is a sampling of what others have said about the book and its author:

…An imaginative… treatise that’s likely…to generate some buzz… its hard not to be persuaded by Gladwell’s thesis. Not only does he assemble a fascinating mix of facts in support of his theory… but he also manages to weave everything into a cohesive explanation of human behavior. What’s more, we appreciate the optimism of a theory that supports, as another pundit once called it, the power of one…there’s little doubt that the material will keep you awake…

                                                                        -Business Week

            The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, is a lively, timely and engaging study of fads… Gladwell, who made his career in journalism as a science writer, has a knack for explaining psychological experiments clearly; The Tipping Point is worth reading just for what it tells us about how we try to make sense of the world.

-The New York Times Book Review- Alan Wolfe

           When it was first published in 2000, Malcolm Gladwell’s book about social epidemics “tipped.” It made the bestseller lists both here and abroad. It became a popular phenomenon. This is what The Tipping Point is all about. Gladwell’s concept, the topic of sociologists since the 1970s, is that trends and ideas take off reach the tipping point for some reason, usually because of the influence of a small group or even one individual. He offers as his first example the resurgence in popularity among the cool people of Hush Puppies, they brushed-suede shoes that were down to sales of a mere 30,000 pairs a year. Suddenly in 1995 they became a hot property and they sold 430,000 pairs a year. The same phenomenon occurs with crimes, children’s television (Sesame Street and Blues Clues), smoking among the young, direct mail, and Paul Revere’s famous ride. Gladwell says that the best way to think of these trends is to see them as epidemics; they spread like viruses do. And in that spread some people are more influenced than others. He posits three rules: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. His explanations are persuasive. His ideas on smoking among youngsters and how to slow it should be required reading by government officials at all levels. In his new afterward, Gladwell touches the AIDS epidemic, improving public schools in tough neighborhoods, the massacre at Columbine High School, and finding Mavens, those influential people who make things happen. Highly recommended for its clear exposition of important issues.

                                                                        – Janet Julian- KLIATT

Most scholarly reviews seem to have a positive outlook on Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. Every review points out the way Gladwell examines the social epidemic. Janet Julian with KLIATT takes it a step further by saying that Gladwell was able to successfully create a product to reach a tipping point- his own book.

Bibliography

Brady, Diane. “What Turns an Idea into a Trend.” Rev. of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Business Week, 20 Mar. 2000. Web. 29 Oct. 2010. .  

Julian, Janet. “Glawell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference-Book Review.” Rev. of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. KLIATT, May 2002. Web. 29 Oct. 2010. .

Wolfe, Alan. “The Next Big Thing: Malcolm Gladwell Examines What Makes Fads, Well, Faddish.” Rev. of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The New York Times Book Review, 5 Mar. 200. Web. 29 Oct. 2010.          .

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Contact Info: To contact the author of this summary and review of The Tipping Point, pleaseemail kristyn.massey@selu.edu.

Biography

David C. Wyld (dwyld.kwu@gmail.com) is the Robert Maurin Professor of Management at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. He is a management consultant, researcher/writer, and executive educator. His blog, Wyld About Business, can be viewed at http://wyld-business.blogspot.com/. He also serves as the Director of the Reverse Auction Research Center (http://reverseauctionresearch.blogspot.com/), a hub of research and news in the expanding world of competitive bidding. Dr. Wyld also maintains compilations of works he has helped his students to turn into editorially-reviewed publications at the following sites:

Management Concepts (http://toptenmanagement.blogspot.com/)

Book Reviews (http://wyld-about-books.blogspot.com/) and

Travel and International Foods (http://wyld-about-food.blogspot.com/).                

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++