After reading Malcolm’s “Outliers”, I couldn’t wait to read more of his stuff. (That may be why finishing The Samurai’s Tale felt like a chore.) The Tipping Point was another one of his books that my friend Chris recommend; so I borrowed it from a friend, finished it, and recommend it as well. Peep the abridged excerpt below, and consider buying it on Amazon.
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow or crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.
The rise of Hush Puppies and the fall of New York’s crime rate are textbook examples of epidemics in action. Although they may sound as if they don’t have very much in common, they share a basic, underlying patten. First of all, they are clear examples of contagious behavior. Those kids simply wore the shoes when they went to clubs and cafes or walked the streets of downtown New York, and in so doing exposed other people to their fashion sense. They infected them with the Hush Puppies “virus.”
The crime decline in New York surely happened the same way. Somehow a large number of people in New York got “infected” with an anti-crime virus in a short time.
The second distinguishing characteristic of these two examples is that in both cases little changes had big effects. All of the possible reasons for why New York’s crime rate dropped are changes that happened at the margin; they were incremental changes. Yet the effect was dramatic.
Finally, both changes happened in a hurry. They didn’t build steadily and slowly. It is instructive to look at a chart of the crime rate in New York City from, say, the mid-1960s to the late 1990s. It looks like a giant arch. Crime did not taper off. It didn’t gently decelerate. It hit a certain point and jammed on the brakes.
These three characteristics — one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment — are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter. Of the three, the third trait — the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment — is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does. The name given to that dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.
I enjoyed The Tipping Point just as much as Outliers. But, I feel like The Tipping Point can be more useful because it fosters more forward thinking ideas – on how you can be successful, where as Outliers is more reflective – and can help to realize why you were successful. Knawmtawmbout?
Have you read The Tipping Point? What’d you think about it?
