Rating: 
Summary: Little Changes Produce Big Results
Review: There are few books that introduce a new idea that can be applied to multiple disciplines. This book contains more than an idea: it introduces a new way of understanding what often seems like major changes that appear to come from little or often unknown effort. Why do teenagers increase their rate of smoking in spite of the huge expense to convince them otherwise? Why did crime suddenly fall so drastically so fast in New York? What caused the sudden increase in sexually transmitted diseases in Baltimore? How did the sales of Hush Puppies more than quadruple with little or no conscience advertising effort?Understanding these changes allows a minimal effort to effect huge results. It is difficult to see this in advance using our normal viewpoints. In fact the impact of these changes seems difficult to comprehend even in retrospect but it does open your mind for some creative analysis. For instance at Yale what was needed to get better student participation in a tetanus shot program was not more and more information on the medical need for the shots, but a better map showing locations and times available. What may be needed to reduce the long term addiction from teen smoking is not more ads on the dangers of smoking, but cigarettes with lower nicotine, below the tipping point of 5 milligrams of nicotine a day. A nurse named Georgia Sadler, trying to increase the awareness of diabetes and breast cancer in the black community found that the best avenue was not the churches or community centers but..... beauty salons. Within this new tool is hope. Big problems seem less overwhelming. Big Changes become possible.
Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Review: Ideas and messages spread through human communities in the same way that viruses jump from person to person and group to group. This premise - that social trends saturate populations like contagious epidemics - is an intriguing foundation for a book, and indeed, Malcolm Gladwell's examination of the theme is at times a fascinating read. The book is at its best when applying the epidemic theory to marketing by attempting to identify the key individuals that help transmit a trend, or for that matter, a disease. However, Gladwell never quite succeeds in knitting these observations into a cogent and coherent argument. The book reads like a set of notes - some of which come off as unnecessary digressions. But on the basis of those sections that truly illuminate the cycle of trend dissemination, we from getAbstract recommend this book to marketing, advertising and promotional executives.
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Summary: Subtle--Not for the Impatient--and Useful to Revolutionaries
Review: For those aspiring to revolutionary change in any aspect of life (e.g. the Cultural Creatives), this book is a subtle revolutionary manifesto--at a more mundane level it is a sales guide. I like this book because as we all deal with the information explosion, it provides some important clues regarding what messages will "get through", and what we need to do to increase the chances that our own important messages reach out to others. This book is in some ways a modern version of Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." While more of a story than a thesis, there is a great deal here that tracks with some of the more advanced information theory dissertations, and the book could reasonably be subtitled "The Precipitants of Social Revolutions." The most subtle message in this book is that substance is not vital--perception is. The contagiousness of the idea, the life-altering potential of the smallest ideas, and the fact that revolutionary change is always cataclysmic rather than evolutionary, will frustrate those who think that years of intellectual exploration will be rewarded with acceptance. However, despite the revolutionary nature of the final "tipping point", there is actually a clear path taking up to 25 years, from the Innovators to the Early Adopters, to the Early Majority, to the Late Majority. My sense is that America today, with its 50 million Cultural Creatives, is about to cross over from the Early Adopters to the Early Majority stage, and will do so during the forthcoming Congressional elections when we see a rise in Independents and more attention to energy and other alternative sustainable lifestyle issues--hence, this book is relevant to anyone who either wants to promote a shift in America or elsewhere away from consumerism (or who wants to go on selling consumerism), or who wants to seriously revisit what many would call the failed strategies of the early environmentalist, human rights, and corporate accountability advocates. The book ends on an irresistably upbeat note--change is posssible, people can radically transform their beliefs for the common good in the face of the right kind of impetus. Each of us has a role to play, whether as a Connector, a Maven, a Salesman, or a Buyer, and our role will not be defined in rational terms, but rather in social terms. In many ways, this book is about the restoration of community and the importance of relationships, and it is assuredly relevant to anyone who thinks about "the common good."
Rating: 
Summary: Vacuous fluff
Review: The books entire thesis boils down to this: for a change to happen on a significant scale, it has to go beyond "The Tipping Point". This is either a truism or completely empty. If change is to spread ... well, it has to spread. Can we identify the TP beforehand? No. If we try and force a TP and it doesn't tip, does that prove the theory wrong? No, we just didn't do what had to be done to reach the TP. And of course if something doesn't spread, well, it just didn't reach the TP did it? Superficially profound, it is profoundly superficial. The really interesting question is: why has *this* book had a tipping point?
Rating: 
Summary: The Point is Clear...But Here's a Tip.
Review: Gladwell sets out in this book to convince us of the reality of a 'tipping point' in the way that change happens. He asserts that many changes are not, as commonly believed, the result of large, glacial forces driving history and events...but are the result of small things, well-timed, well-placed, and well-articulated to bring about their 'contagiousness.' This book is an exposition of his evidence for the existence of the principle, not a how-to book that helps a person figure out how to 'tip' things. The book itself is a pleasure to read. But it focuses so much upon narrative, and this reviewer would have liked to move a bit beyond anecdote and a little closer to raw discussion of theory. I would even have accepted that it was not his purpose to write a how-to book (though this would be helpful) if he would have engaged a bit more critical discussion of the principles. All in all, this is an excellent book and well worth the read.
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Summary: A Delightful Three-Note Symphony
Review: You finish this book and you wonder not only how you ripped through it as fast as you did but, pausing for the first time, how fully these ideas are really worked out. You're uncertain that Malcolm Gladwell has been consistent in his exegesis of "tipping"--first it's a combination of three elements that together produce the "tipping," then it's a mathematical point beyond which a incipient trend or fashion simply "takes off." Then, no--it's a person who can "tip" a trend. But who cares? The book literally hurtles down its path, from one fascinating, intuitively pleasing, observation to the next. Along the way, not only does Gladwell never raise the word "memetics" or "meme" (pace Richard Dawkins). He also skirts mentioning--and it seems inconceivable that he could write an entire this piece without ever having uttered--the term "complexity" (pace the whole Santa Fe crowd). The Tipping Point is all about emergence, path-dependence, increasing returns...in short, "complexity science." Not to worry. Beautifully articulated, with page after page of new findings from a broad range of social science disciplines, all fattening the notion of "tipping" in the three key epidemiological dimensions--agent, substance, context--The Tipping Point is a breezy, jazzlike run through the hows and whys of taste, fashion, hipness, and other varieties of social contagion. Never mind that much of this sounds familiar from other contexts. You'll enjoy the ride and wind up with a settled sense of "seeing through" a lot that might have puzzled you just an hour earlier. (And why is it you couldn't remember the content of that article on nutrition your girlfriend showed you just the other night? Gladwell knows. You can too. It'll save your relationshihp.)
Rating: 
Summary: Keep it simple, stupid
Review: There's been a great deal of buzz around "buzz" lately. "Viral", "Word of mouth", "Sleeper hit" and other manufactured terms are delivered at lectures, in HBR articles and in, the literary equivalent to The New York Post, the management literature. As always, the phenomenon is a simplification and dramatization of reality. All of a sudden, the notion is born that marketing departments are able to throw away budgets, very convenient as we are on the brim of a recession, and instead create "idea viruses" that will free float through time and space and impregnate whatever mind it touches. An engaing idea, indeed. Just like ideas of anti-gravity machines and the treasure of the Sierra Madre. Engaging and untrue. The human mind, however complex it is biologically, works in a fairly simplistic manner. We like to reduce complex things to more easily grasped concepts. The mental simplification is the basis for marketing; Don't think thousands of people in different offices around the world doing million things! Think corporate logo and slogan instead! The concept of the idea virus stems from the same belief. Instead of using the infinite amount of parameters to explain something, we use one. This line of argument holds true for such things as "the shooting in Sarajevo" that, our schoolbooks taught us, started World War One. Or the "Get Connected"-memo that in and by itself caused the giant turnaround of IBM from Big Blue dinosaur into an e-business animal. This line of reasoning is human and symptomatic of our inclination to simplify. But there lies great danger in simplification. The last year has seen a wave of cattle-disease outbreaks around Europe. Newsflashes have been filled with pictures of burning animals and wobbly calves and a whiff of anxiety has blown across the EU. What if the evil English people's dirty cattle arrive on our shores? Put the walls up, for crying out loud! Others claim that "the problem isn't ours, it's continental Europe's tendency to transport cattle for long distances that started this to begin with." On no side of the argument does anybody actually bother to get to the bottom of this. For example, the fact that BSE, "Mad Cow disease" for short, has very little if any proven medical effect upon humans has given very little publicity. The Cattle Wars is a symptom not of sick cattle but of integration-weary Europhobes. The different nationalities of Europe need very little, indeed, in order to succumb to the aggressive isolationism and protectionism that have so far "caused" two world wars in the last century. Simplification is comfortable, and dangerous. Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point central message is the power of simplification: "We don't need to understand and address the whole extent of the problem, we only need to attack the symbolical parts of it!". So whether we want to sell books about the "Ya-ya siterhood" or combat crime in New York City, let go of the analysis and get ready to construct idea viruses! In New York City, it was the zero tolerance of subway misconduct that apparently, and miraculously, decreased crime by half in the 1990's. The phenomenal sales of Hush Puppies and Rebecca Wells's "The Divine Secrets of the Ya ya sisterhood" are also attributed to the strength of epidemic ideas. "So it's a marketing tool, so what? Let CEO's ponder new ways of getting more attention for less resources." Well, that's a fair point to make but that is precisely the area where Gladwell runs into problems. The book is a little too philosophically complex to fit into the easily digested management book- category. Sure, his three explanatory tools for creating "a tipping point" are short and punchy, all right. But he litters the text not only with nice-to-know marketing examples but also with complex, sociological phenomena. Take the example of New York City's crime decrease. The "zero-tolerance" enforced by the NYPD is in no way non-controversial and it has often been criticized for being racist, inefficient and myopic. But there is no room for that discussion in the world of The Tipping Point (the name describes the point where several forces combine to create the point of outbreak of an idea epidemic). So, ironically, Gladwell's oeuvre gets stuck in the middle with a book that is too simplistic to be an analysis in company with the "No Logo's" or the "Future Perfect's" and too complex to get a run for the money on the "Who moved my cheese"-circuit.
Rating:
Summary: Want to make something catch on like an epidemic? Read on.
Review: Gladwell presents a well supported theory on how to initiate a turning point (a.k.a tipping point) for any type of product, service or social good. Included are many examples, both in the public and private sector, that allow the reader to apply three basic principles to their own lives. This is a great purchase for an entrepreneur looking to sell a new niche product or an educator looking to feed new infomration a clientele.
Rating:
Summary: Not only a great conversation piece, but a great book.
Review: I read this book over a year ago and the ideas and material are still fresh in my mind. I can not say that about most books that I read. This book does contain survey data. Like all research, some of the methodology could be questioned. So careful reading is required. Gladwell may lean a little to the left on some of his issues, but overall I did not feel that he was pushing a political agenda. Some of his ideas appear to be brilliant, but mostly likely idealistic. However, his phenomenon thesis and his ability to construct and presuade us along make this book an excellent read. When I first read this book I had to tell everyone about it. My wife was sick of me talking about "The Tipping Point." Over a year later, I still recommend this book to people. If you are interested in science, medicine, public policy, marketing, or social issues, you will enjoy this book. I think that pretty much includes 90% of us, so read this book.
Rating:
Summary: In a word, STELLAR!
Review: A tipping point, as the author discusses it, is that at which something catches fire, a spark explodes into a forest fire, a protest turns into a riot. More recently, this phenomenon has come to be termed "viral" marketing in the world of the web. The author presents numerous real world examples in which a tipping point has been reached. It is often small, seemingly insignificant actions, which are able to bring about dramatic change. Examples include social epidemics, as well as corporate growth success stories. Among them, the dramatic reduction of criminal activity in NYC, the rise of teenage smoking, the rapid rise and popularity of Airwalk (primarily skateboarding gear), Hush Puppy shoes, and even television programs like Sesame Street and Blues clues. Gladwell explores the actions, which cause something to tip, as well as the logic behind these actions. This book is a masterpiece, those working in marketing may be particularly interested. Viral marketing has become a popular buzzword for marketing consultants to drop far too often. This book will help you understand (probably more so than your marketing consultant) just what the possibilities of such a strategy are, and elements that must be in place for such a strategy to work. "The Tipping Point" is complimented well Theory of Constraints (TOC) literature. (search Amazon for it) TOC provides rock solid logical tools for finding the one constraint which prevents growth of a system or organization. That constraint is likely to be a high leverage "tipping point" which must be addressed to bring about real measurable change.
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