The TIPPING POINT – How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

MALCOLM GLADWELL

At first sight, The Tipping Point seemed like a lightweight and unassuming tome. Barely larger than a best-selling pulp fiction paperback and running to only 270 odd pages, I was skeptical about its message. Everyone knows that little things do make a big difference. The question in my mind was how Malcolm Gladwell, a former business and science writer at the Washington Post and a current staff writer for The New Yorker, could provide valuable business insight and understanding to the topic.

After all, aren’t all best-selling business books written by business gurus and consultants who have spent many decades accumulating business wisdom and translating it into thick manuals with titles such as The Fifth Discipline, The Profit Zone, etc.? What can a writer for The New Yorker shed light on, that others have not already done so?

You know a book is an unstoppable page-turner if the first chapter is awesome. And it was. The Tipping Point enthralled me for an entire Saturday and I just could not put it down. It was an easy read with simple and yet powerful points to make.

Although not an original idea, Gladwell takes the thread of fads and weaves us through the academic research to provide us with clear explanations and illustrative anecdotes, such as the retelling of the Paul Revere story, breaking it down to reveal the “Connector”, “Maven” and “Salesman” aspects of Paul’s successful warning of the British invasion and how William Dawes failed at the same undertaking. This epidemic phenomenon is still true in today’s world of emails. Think of how many forwarded messages are in your inbox that have passed through the inboxes of many before you. Think also of how devastating the “ILoveYou” and “Melissa” email viruses were.

Gladwell’s search for the cataclysmic turning point in events, the tipping point, takes us through the different personality types that make up our society (the Connectors, the Mavens and the Salesmen) and finds that the small things and a small number of people do make a difference, for example, the eradication of graffiti can cause a sudden drop in crime rates in New York subways. As an ex-policeman, I found the analysis of the crime situation in New York fascinating, especially the Broken Windows theory.

Besides looking for factors that cause the tipping point, Gladwell further examines how fads can be sustained or stalled by understanding the “stickiness” factors. His exploration of the children’s television programs, Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues, provides evidence that in order to sustain epidemics, we need to constantly test our intuitions and understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.

The material in The Tipping Point helps us make sense of the world around us and it does so by making us see the world in a different way. This little book did indeed make a big difference.

Esmond Chia