The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell, (New York: Back Bay Books / Little, Brown & Company;  2000),  301 pages.

Gladwell best summarizes this book in the introduction.

"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 of 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 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.”

Gladwell uses examples to convince us of the validity of his theory. Key to his argument is his 3-part explanation of how viruses or epidemics spread: the Law of the Few; the Stickiness Factor; and the Power of Context. The Law of the Few is that epidemics/viruses are driven by a handful of exceptional people who find about the “new thing/trend” and through energy, enthusiasm, and personality spread the word. They are like apostles or missionaries who have heard The Good News and enthusiastically win converts.

The Stickiness Factor is what makes a message memorable – think a slogan, jingle or image. The Power of Context says that people are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem. These 3 laws apparently explain how various  changes occurred: how Hush Puppies became cool, and the fall in New York crime rates.

The Tipping Point presents a fairly convincing argument for Gladwell’s theories. He supports his theories with appropriate facts and does his best to convince his reader. While entertaining, for a while, I wonder whether Gladwell is trying to apply theoretical and scientific methods to things best explained through commonsense. Do we need laws and rules to explain how things spread? Do we need to give pseudo-scientific names to commonsense and ordinary things? This giving complex names to simple things is all pervasive: what used to be called soap is now a “cleaning system,” a simple fence is now called a “fencing system.” Gladwell’s explanation of how things changed is very enjoyable; it’s compulsive reading. But we all know that ideas spread, fashions change and people evangelize others to new ideas using clever marketing techniques. Do we really need a pseudo-scientific theory and explanation for something as commonsensical as that?