I’ve been churning through a few books lately, largely due in part to either having to fill in time whilst waiting for my turn on “late shift” to feed the baby, or unable to get back to sleep after being woken by aforementioned baby. The Tipping Point wasn’t quite what I expected when I first heard about the book, but I quite enjoyed it. Here’s the overview from a Wikipedia article on it:
Tipping points are “the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.” Gladwell defines a tipping point as a sociological term, “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.” The book seeks to explain and describe enormous and “mysterious” sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.” The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the dramatic drop in the New York City crime rate in the late 1990s.
I had heard of the requirement for a combination of “Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen” for an idea or product to take off, but hadn’t understood how it all tied together, or in fact grasped all the concepts involved until reading the book. He gives some good examples – the success of Paul Revere’s ride in comparison with that of William Dawes intrigued me – and discusses some fascinating projects such as the “zero tolerance” approach taken by the New York City Police to fight crime on the New York subway and the impact that had on crime throughout the rest of the city. The Wikipedia article gives a good overview of the book and details some of the criticisms of Gladwell’s theories.
