The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

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Summary: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Differen
Review: Have you ever wondered what makes something or someone a success? Gladwell's explanation is fascinating to hear and also to think about. I read this book while on the beach in Costa Rica, the only business book I took on vacation. While an easy read, it is chock full of so many thought provoking ideas, that I'd read for awhile and then have to put it down to ponder the details of what I'd just read. (The swaying of the beach hammock helped the process!) With delight, I realized that I am a "Connector" a person who knows many and who shares thoughts, knowledge and ideas freely. To find out about the two other personalities that need to come together in order for a trend to turn into an epidemic success, you NEED to read and savior this book.

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Summary: Love is the Killer App
Review: This book cements my opinion about networking, that it is nothing more than paying attention to others and finding out all you can about them, so that you can share your knowledge and your contacts with them. In the end your good intentions come back full circle in ways you've never imagined. Tim Sanders does a superb job of explaining this concept in easy to understand yet business-like words. Reading this book will help the success of anyone in the business world, but it will be especially attractive to those just beginning their career.

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Summary: This is the Way the World Works
Review: Gladwell's book may or may not be science. But, if it isn't science it's art. Not art in the sense of a literary masterpiece, but art in the sense that Gladwell nails down the way we make decisions, explains it in readable terms and creates a map we can follow to replicate the process.

As someone who has made a living in marketing communications, I've found this the best, most accessible explanation of what we attempt to do in marketing a product or service. Gladwell also makes it clear why our efforts are successful or not as the case might be.

Much of this is old news, but no less useful for being made accessible.

"The Tipping Point" will make you a more effective marketer or a more savvy consumer. In either case it will increase your ability to understand what is happening and why. What more can one ask of a book?

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Summary: Tipping Trends...
Review: So you want to know what causes a trend? It's people. Yeah I know that answer is too simple but here's the thing, people can be divided into several general categories that help you understand how a trend can be started or how they progress. It's all explained in detail.
PS - If you get stuck in the middle of the book and find your attention wandering because of too much talk about Blues Clues and Sesame Street, skip to the next chapter. The most mind boggling information occurs in chapters 1&2 and starting again on page 206 through the end if you're trying to save time.

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Summary: Easy Reading About Trends
Review: If you want to read a bit about how word-of-mouth trends get started and grow, you'll like "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference" by Malcolm Gladwell.

Gladwell says that things spread in popularity due to three factors.

Gladwell says that not all people are equally important in launching a new tread. Rather, there are a few key people called 'connectors' who tend to be very social and outgoing. These connectors have diverse social networks and a significant ability to spread information, trends, and products. Trends and epidemics spread when they are adopted by connectors.

Mavens are another type of people involved in spreading a trend. Mavens are people who like helping people and who take a particular interest in evaluating the quality of products or ideas. Because they are so well-informed about things, mavens are often the first to promote quality products. Mavens might also be the early adopters of trends. Often, Gladwell writes, some maven or connector must modify something to make it more acceptable to the larger population.

With connectors and mavens in place, the next ingredient for a trend to take off is for the message to be memorable or 'sticky.' Some messages don't stick in the minds of those who hear them while other messages do.

The best way to create a 'sticky' message is to test the message. Gladwell discusses children's TV--Sesame Street and a show called Blue's Clues, which were designed from the start to be 'sticky.'

For example, educators tested two skits designed to help children read. Both involved having children read (or see read) the word 'hug.' Each letter was uncovered and the sound it represented made.

Oscar the Grouch wasn't too effective in teaching kids the word. As Oscar read the word, Oscar was waving his hands around and making all sorts of fuss that distracted the children from the task at hand. They weren't concentrating on the word, they were concentrating on Oscar.

Another skit where a more subdued puppet slowly uncovered each letter as he read it proved to be much more effective.

How did Sesame Street producers know whether kids were paying attention to the word? Eye movement photography. The producers strapped little kids into chairs and photographed what part of the television screen they were watching. Gladwell tells us that they were watching Oscar, not the letters. But, with the subdued puppet, the children focused upon the letters.

Gladwell explains that we can only focus upon one thing at a time: "the receptors that process what we see--are clustered in a small region in the very middle of the retina called the fovea."

Gladwell says that eye movement photography is quite important in advertising. He writes: "If you can track where someone's fovea is moving and what they are fixating on... you can tell with extraordinary precision what they are actually looking at and what kind of information they are actually receiving. The people who make television commercials, not surprisingly, are obsessed with eye tracking. If you make a beer commercial with a beautiful model, it would be really important to know whether the average twenty-two-year old male in your target audience fixates only on the model or eventually moves to your can of beer."

So, in case you're wondering why Britney Spears is holding her Pepsi can in some particular location in her Super Bowl ad, now you know! It's based upon the location of the fovea! (How do they direct this stuff? "Hey Britney, move the can a bit lower. It's not quite aligned properly with the fovea." SLAP! Britney slaps the director.)

Do we really want people tracking the movement of our foveas? Remember, this was happening thirty years ago for the nefarious purpose of teaching kids to read. What about today?

We learn some other disturbing things. For example, Cookie Monster was a pitch man for Frito-Lay. If you can't trust the Cookie Monster, who can you trust?

This is what I found deeply disturbing about the attempt to try to create trends and 'social' epidemics. In particular, Gladwell discusses the failure of anti-smoking campaigns targeted to teenagers. Having adults tell teenagers not to smoke in TV commercials didn't work. Go figure!

But, by studying the nature of the mavens and connectors who unintentionally tend to encourage teenagers to smoke, Gladwell suggests that we can aim to prevent smoking from a more powerful position. I don't really like this social engineering. Whose business is it, anyway? Why should taxpayers' money be spent to promote social policies that a small group decides is correct for us? I find this too politically correct and too meddlesome of individual freedoms.

Gladwell's third factor is context. Gladwell argues that the specific context of a situation will have a powerful impact upon whether or not a trend will spread.

It seems Gladwell draws heavily upon the work of Robert Cialdini and his book, "Influence." Many of the same studies are quoted. If you like this book, you'll like that book also.

Overall, I enjoyed reading "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make A Big Difference." But, I'm hesitant to recommend buying the book! How do we know what other little trend-setting tricks Gladwell knows or can bring to bear upon us? "The Tipping Point" is a bestseller...

Peter Hupalo, Author of "Thinking Like An Entrepreneur"

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Summary: A good start
Review: To take it to the next level--one that begins with the chaos science mentioned in the last reveiw--I recommend reading Seven Life Lessons of Chaos by Briggs and Peat. It shows how organic, nonlinear patterns, including "viral growth," affect all human systems: social, economic, philosophical, and even spiritual.

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Summary: Great Relevance
Review: I really enjoyed this book...written in a format that is easy to digest quickly, and contains interesting data that's relevant to so many fields. If you are someone who would like to start an epidemic...of people buying your product, choosing not to smoke, eating healthy, adopting children, recycling...basically any cause you care about...this book will help you understand human behavior on a mass scale better. I've already recommended it to 5 friends/colleagues.

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Summary: What Made This Book Go?
Review: Out of some 100,000 titles (books) published each year, only a few dozen make the bestseller charts. While some books are better than others, only a few go past the Tipping Point.

The Tipping Point for books is when word-of-mouth reaches a critical mass producing acceleration in sales. Advertising rarely produces these results.

This book is a bestseller and somewhere along the line, it had a Tipping Point. I look forward to a revised edition with an Epilogue describing what happened.

Dan Poynter, Author, Publisher.

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Summary: It changed the way that I look at Sesame Street
Review: This book is well written and the concepts presented are easily understood. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in socialogy.

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Summary: Infectious enthusiasm
Review: Malcolm Gladwell has a genius for getting a concept across. I have followed his career in the New Yorker ever since the "Blacks are like boys..." article, and was delighted to pick up his book. The separate segments in this book are strong, as he chronicles various phenomena around his thesis. The one distraction to me was the need to tie all the loose ends together. I would have enjoyed it more as a collection of essays. That said, whether you agree that it all comes together or not, it's an entertaining, edifying read.