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

Gladwell, Malcolm

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316316962 ISBN 13: 9780316316965

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2000

Synopsis

Discover Malcolm Gladwell's breakthrough debut and explore the science behind viral trends in business, marketing, and human behavior.

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

About this title

Review:

"The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life," writes Malcolm Gladwell, "is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do." Although anyone familiar with the theory of mimetics will recognise this concept, Gladwell's The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject.

For example, Paul Revere was able to galvanise the forces of resistance so effectively in part because he was what Gladwell calls a "Connector": he knew just about everybody, particularly the revolutionary leaders in each of the towns that he rode through. But Revere "wasn't just the man with the biggest Rolodex in colonial Boston", he was also a "Maven" who gathered extensive information about the British. He knew what was going on and he knew exactly whom to tell. The phenomenon continues to this day--think of how often you've received information in an e-mail message that had been forwarded at least half a dozen times before reaching you.

Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the "stickiness" of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues, or explaining why it would be even easier to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger. Although some readers may find the transitional passages between chapters hold their hands a little too tightly, and Gladwell's closing invocation of the possibilities of social engineering sketchy, even chilling, The Tipping Point is one of the most effective books on science for a general audience in ages. It seems inevitable that "tipping point", like "future shock" or "chaos theory," will soon become one of those ideas that everybody knows--or at least knows by name. --Ron Hogan

Review:

Hip and hopeful, THE TIPPING POINT is like the idea it describes: concise, elegant but packed with social power. A book for anyone who cares about how society works and how we can make it better (George Stephanopoulos)

A wonderful page-turner about a fascinating idea that should affect the way every thinking person thinks about the world around him (Michael Lewis, author of LIAR'S POKER)

Genuinely fascinating and frequently startling . . . The kind of book from which you'll be regaling your friends with intriguing snippets for weeks to come (SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY)

A wonderfully offbeat study of that little-understood phenomenon, the social epidemic (DAILY TELEGRAPH)

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0316316962
• ISBN 13: 9780316316965
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 279