Rating: 
Summary: Circular Reasoning around Old Ideas
Review: The book pulls together a few examples of trends illustrating how small behaviors sometimes shift suddenly from being unpopular to being very popular. These sharp, quick shifts in social life are commonplace, and a host of others have written and talked about it for many years. If you just haven't read and thought much about it before, you might learn from this book. Otherwise, it's a rehash of old ideas wrapped up in some very unenlightened, circular reasoning. If one engaged the author by asking questions aimed at sorting out the theory, the interchange might run something like this.Question: What causes a sudden new trend in people's behavior?
Answer: Lots of people start doing something that only a few were doing earlier. Question: That just sounds like the definition of a trend, and what I'm asking is, what actually causes many people to adopt a new behavior?
Answer: They are exposed to a few people already doing it. This experience "sticks" with them so well they adopt the behavior. With enough exposures, and enough stickiness, a chain reaction results. We witness a sudden trend. Question: Okay, if the change hinges on "stickiness," then how do we identify a sticky behavior, distinguishing it from other behaviors?
Answer: Behavior is sticky if people adopt after they are exposed. Otherwise, it is not sticky, or exposure happened in the wrong context. Question: How would we identify the wrong context?
Answer: New behaviors don't stick there. No sudden trend. Question: Let's see if I can sum up what you've told me. One never truly knows what might happen beforehand. But you can certainly tell me after the fact a certain behavior is sticky, and people were exposed to it in the right context, by the fact that a sudden trend occurred?
Answer: Yes. Question: Your theory really has no predictive value, does it?
Answer: Well, no. Except, I can assure you that some Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen will be involved. They're easy to identify because they do lots of exposing; they carry the epidemic-like trend forward. Question: If they didn't successfully carry the trend forward, they wouldn't be very good Mavens/Connectors/Salesmen, would they?
Answer: Well, no. But afterwards, once we have spotted the sudden trend, you can bet they'll be there. And so on . . . . This may be entertaining, but it's not science.
Rating: 
Summary: An interesting -- but not heavy -- read
Review: Serious (and even semi-serious) students of marketing, sociology or demographics will likely find the concepts outlined in "The Tipping Point" to be old-hat. But for the rest of us, Malcolm Gladwell's book is an entertaining and insightful read. Gladwell and his book deserve credit for offering some outside-the-box thought about social phenomena ranging from drug abuse to early childhood education to the spread of fashion trends to school shootings. An easy book, "The Tipping Point" is more appropriate for the reader curious about social trends than anyone looking to do in-depth research. However, it's also useful to the businessperson looking for a different way to understand sales and marketing trends.
Rating: 
Summary: Readable and Interesting, but . . .
Review: Gladwell has an interesting theory and his stories illustrating it are all interesting for what they're worth. It took me a few days to read it, which is fast for me. However, he is so enthusiastic about his theory that he gets carried away into making it the only way to solve problems. His solution for teen smoking, for example, was to admit kids are going to try it and only a few will really get hooked, so why bother. His theory becomes a template on which too many things are made to fit. It might explain a lot after the fact, but it seems awfully hard to apply practically to plan an "epidemic" in the manner he suggests. You have to find the "connnectors, mavens and salesmen" and then convince them that your idea or product is important, making it "sticky," which sounds much more simple that it really must be. The real problem is one he acknowledges late in the book: Epidemics run out. People develop immunity if the disease doesn't kill them. "Cool" is a condition that consciously avoids widespread adoption. Things are cool because only an elite few are doing, wearing or reading them. When everyone else gets in on the act, the Cool people have already moved on. So what's the point? If you can master his analysis and plan epidemics, you can be a master marketer, but there is still something artificial and manipulative about it. Maybe that's why this book has become a marketing hit.
Rating: 
Summary: great book
Review: What Mr. Gladwell wants you to do, though, is consider how that example--of the hotornot web site, for example--parallels seemingly unrelated phenomena, such as the attraction a TV show like _Blue's Clues_ has for children, or the way in which Hush Puppies took America by storm a few years back, or, tragically, how suicide among isolated populations can become a recurring theme of adolescent angst. In all these examples, Mr. Gladwell's underlying point is that the nature of the tipping point is the same as that of the beginning of an epidemic: at what point did AIDS change from an autoimmune disease affecting a very specific subset of the population (well educated, urban gay men) to a disease that could affect any member of the human race? Mr. Gladwell's talent is that he steps back from the details of each example and continually relates the overarching theme of his book: fads, epidemics, styles, and so on can in large part be explained by an amorphous period in which something belies the seeming limitations of its origins.
Rating: 
Summary: Do not waste your money
Review: Great hype, but the guts of this book could be compacted into 3-4 pages. It's amazing that someone can inject a blatant liberal slant into what should be an entirely apolitical subject. The author strays from the subject, makes rudimentary points by droning on with silly examples. Its called fluff and filler. This is one of the few books I have read in my life in which I took away vitually nothing. You would learn more taking the money and using it to buy a video on various strategies for changing light bulbs.
Rating:
Summary: Tipping Point: Tales of the Blatantly Obvious
Review: A whole book to tell us that the author has identified situations when an idea or a fashion spreads with epidemic strength, and that he is still thinking about how and why this happens.
Guess what, all of us had already noticed in our daily lives how fashion trends and other things happen literally overnight - and all of us have tried to imagine how this was possible, and the answers, or potential answers, we came up with, are as good as those in the book.
The Tipping Point can be summarised in about 2-3 lines and is not worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome
Review: This is an amazing book for anyone to read, even if you're not in a relevent business like advertising. I thought it was fascinating, I read it straight through in a few days, and found myself describing it to my friends. Very readable, very interesting. I'm sorry I've finished it, I want another.
Rating:
Summary: Change Leaders Will Want to Read This Book
Review: "The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire." The author blends social research, marketing, and examples such as the "rebirth" of Hushpuppies, the decline of crime in New York City, the development of "Blue's Clues", and the ride of Paul Revere. He outlines three rules of epidemics and challenges us to not only observe epidemics and tipping points, but to become leaders of tipping points. A "must read" for those involved in creating and leading change!
Rating:
Summary: Acorns, Oak Trees, and Forest Fires
Review: This book has generated a great deal of attention because Gladwell approaches creative thinking from a unique perspective: he focuses on a critically important moment (a "window of opportunity") when a decision must be made and explains how to (a) prepare for that moment and then (b) make a decision which is both creative and appropriate. He describes his book as "the biography of an idea", a simple idea: the best way to understand the emergence of all major social, economic, or political forces (what Kuhn and then Barker call a "paradigm shift") "is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do." But first they must be activated, set in motion, more often than not by what Gladwell characterizes as a "little thing." In the Conclusion of his book, Gladwell suggests: "Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push -- in just the right place -- it can be tipped." He offers an abundance of examples. As I read the book, and began to grasp this concept, I thought of Isaac Newton and his alleged encounter with a falling apple. Also of Richard III (as portrayed by William Shakespeare) who lost a kingdom because his horse lost a shoe. You get the idea. Tipping points can occur almost anywhere at any time. Most of us fail to recognize them because of what I call "the invisibility of the obvious." They can be the result of many different factors which, in combination, can sometimes change the course of history. During the next few years, my guess is that progressively more tipping points will occur and at progressively greater velocity but that they will reveal themselves not as windows of opportunity but as blinks of a strobe light. Those who see them and then know what to do about them will probably have a decisive competitive advantage, if not dominate the world they survey.
Rating:
Summary: Definitely got me thinking but not the best written book
Review: What do you want to get out of this book? If you want to learn how to apply "buzz" to your business I would recommend "Unleashing the Ideavirus" by Seth Godin as a better starting place. "Anatomy of a Buzz" by Emanual Rosen is another book on word of mouth social behavior but I have not read it, and as a result, I can't say if it is better or worse than this book. I personally enjoyed this book because Mr. Gladwell puts a great spin around it with lots of concrete examples. I personally enjoyed Unleashing the Ideavirus more, because Mr. Godin's writing style is VERY easy to read and his sole focus is business related, especially showing how online businesses can grow leaps and bounds with word of mouth marketing. This book is about the sociological behavior of "buzz" and word of mouth advertising that causes products, locations and services to become hot commodities. On the flip side Mr. Gladwell also describes how making the NY subways clean made people feel safe and caused criminal behavior to go down when the actual police budget only increased slightly. The overall principle exposed in the book is applicable to a lot of situations and I found that reading this book caused a little lightbulb to go off in my head several times, which is why I rated the book 4 stars. It would have been five stars but it isn't that well written, which makes the book drag on at times. Although the story flow could be sometime more structured, the style is great and makes it very easy to read and very clear. Hope this helps. If anyone wants to find out some great books on business management e-mail me or look in my reviews. Peter Drucker's The Essential Drucker and Built on Trust are the two books I would start with if you want to learn about business/management better. If you are solely interested in marketing you may want to read Robert Cialdini - Influence: The Science of Persuasion (a classic); Seth Godin - The Idea Virus; Elaine Hatfield - Emotional Contagion & Richard Koch's - The 80/20 Principle Examples of social "buzz" provided in this book include the resurgence of Hush Puppies, the rise of Airwalk, New York City's crime rate, Sesame Street, Blue's Clues and the rise of teen smoking.
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