The Tipping Point

Managed to read Malcolm Gladwell's much-acclaimed best-seller The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference recently. Since there has been so much hype around this book, I approached it cautiously, and prepared myself for a bit of disappointment. The book started off unremarkably, with Malcolm droning on about various people he has met with remarkable qualities - of mavens, enablers and connectors. I found the writing a bit haphazard at first.

But as I delved deeper into the book, things started getting clearer. I understood why he was describing these different people, and how their qualities make them unique in the market place. He equates a big wave, revolution or trend in the marketplace to an epidemic. And how most of them get started on a very small scale by a certain type of people, and how they are spread initially by another kind of people. And how the rest of us adopt them later on a much wider scale. An epidemic kind of behavior. These things sometimes seem unpredictable and counter-intuitive, but Gladwell discovers a common trait in a lot of edpidemic-like phenomenons. The moral of the story is concerned with how we could use this information productively. You don't really have to think big to make big changes. You just need to recognize the pressure points (the right people at the right place) and push the right buttons.

How do a bunch of yuppies in New York start a major Hush Puppies fashion on a global scale. How does cleaning up graffiti in the NY subway system reduce crime drastically? Or how does one popular guy's suicide trigger more such incidents in an island community? All interesting and varied questions, and the answers sometimes are expected, and sometimes very surprising.

The book is of particular interest to marketers, but a lot of other sections of the populace can benefit from it as well - law makers/politicians, the fashion industry, new technology poineers etc. Towards the end, he even comes up with some interesting take on why teenage smoking is so difficult to contain and why our approach to it thus far might be completely wrong. I didn't always agree with what he has to say. Statistics are very malleable. You can use them to support or oppose anything you want by looking at them from different angles. For this reason, I found Gladwell over-simplifying issues and solutions a lot. I guess that's kind of necessary to make a splash with his book. After all, no one is going to buy a book that says "this could be one reason why this happens, but I'm not really sure".

Bottomline: This is a good read. Especially if you are in the business of having to influence mass opinion. Also, there doesn't seem to be a lot of thinking outside the box these days. So I found the new approach to old issues refreshing. I would highly recommend this.