Book Review: The Tipping Point

When starting the Tipping Point I kind of dreaded having to read one more thing for school.  What started out as what I thought was a waste of time, turned out to be rather helpful.  Actually, it was a good tipping point.   What is a tipping point you might ask?  Simply stated, it is a little thing that can make a big difference.  Kind of just like my attitude when starting the book.  My adjustment of my own attitude led to positive effects of how useful the book turned out for me personally.

Overall, this book talked a lot about change.  Change is something that is unpredictable, a process that many people dislike, and is one of the few inevitable things that will always happen in life.  In an interview with Gladwell he brought up several questions that would make the reader think. Questions such as why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does?  For example, why did crime drop so dramatically in New York City in the mid-1990's? How does a novel written by an unknown author end up as national bestseller? Why do teens smoke in greater and greater numbers, when every single person in the country knows that cigarettes kill? Why is word-of-mouth so powerful? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read?  Gladwell said that the answers to all of these questions are all the same:  ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics.  And that is where the Tipping Point comes into play.  It is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us. 

I thought the comparison of change and an epidemic were genius.  Why?  Because if you think about what an epidemic is in a social situation, it potentially could have a lot of power.  Epidemics blow up, and die out quickly.  Epidemics can start very quickly, powered by the smallest, tiniest change.  We as humans think that change should happen slowly over a long period of time.  Change happening at a rate so slow we should barely recognize it.  When it doesn't happen that way we act surprised and wonder why.  Gladwell explains that change can be and most often is an epidemic and we shouldn't be surprised when it happens quickly. 

In the business world, we can use epidemics to our advantage.  When we need people to get on the same page we are on and move in the same direction that we want to go.  The question then becomes 'how do you create a tipping point?'  Gladwell teaches that in an epidemic the thing introduced must be widely disseminated. It has to be sticky enough to be retained by each new person.  Finally, it has to be operating in a context that nurtures it.  Those are the things that are obvious.  Some tipping points are not so obvious.  For example, an epidemic does not spread through random people interacting.  They happen through just a few people who are playing vital roles.  Qualities of those people playing vital roles include knowing a lot of people, having the ability to takes the new thing being introduced, sifts through its real-world complexity, organize and translate it down to the simple relevant new bit.  The final quality is having the ability to be a salesperson and making people desire to have the product that you offer or the change that you want to implement. Some examples listed in the book had to do with the production of Sesame Street and Blues Clues. In making the show child's psychology was considered. What sounds like a small thing, made all of the difference.  The Tipping Point is a book that challenges you to think differently.  If you can think differently, you can act differently and when those two things are combined you can see big results.