| Malcolm Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point to explain why small things often cause an idea, product, tv show, book, etc. to suddenly become somewhat popular. Gladwell tells us that epidemics are caused or changed by seemingly small or unrelated things; by epidemics he usually means fads, but sometimes means cultural changes or true epidemics. He says that they are affected by a relatively few number of people (social butterflies, experts and salesmen), the "stickiness factor" (how interesting or contagious the actual thing being transmitted is) and the power of context (external factors). The best part of the book is Gladwell's writing style. He writes this serious non-fiction book in a very light, conversational, almost stream of consciousness style. While writing about a general topic to explain his points, Gladwell interrupts himself to give anecdotes to support all his points. These anecdotes are always interesting--there is not a single fad or epidemic that he discusses that did not hold my attention--even if they do not always support the larger point he is making. Therefore, no matter what you think of his arguments, after you read this book, you will be intellectually stimulated and have a lot of information about subjects as random as suicide rates in the South Pacific and Hush Puppies. The weak point is that Gladwell is obviously overselling the idea that he has come up with something novel. Hard sciences and, in mathematics, chaos theory long ago figured out that little things can make a surprisingly big difference in almost unrelated events. We instinctively know all these things about human society as well. We all know that some people know everyone and transmit their views to everyone they know. We all know that some people are great salesmen or are experts in arcane things and that these people have great influence. We all know in our lives that small almost random tweaks can make the difference between an idea or product succeeding and failing. We've all seen that adding color or changing a pie chart to a bar chart, etc. can make the difference in a presentation for work or that adding or subtracting a character on TV can make the difference (look at what a difference an actress cutting her hair made on the TV show "Felicity"). Nevertheless, Gladwell does a great job of assigning words to all these things that we know by instinct. And we can ignore the fact that he is a classic "salesman" and is trying to make us believe that he has come up with new ideas rather than a new vocabulary and interesting anecdotes. |
