Every now and then you read a book that ties a whole bunch of the world together and makes sense of all of it. The Tipping Point did that for me.
As a consultant who's worked with companies in several industries, I've found that some of the very greatest insights come when an idea or a technique is taken from one field and applied in a different field. That's the premise that underlies The Tipping Point.
Malcolm Gladwell, who has written for The New Yorker, takes the basic techniques of epidemiology and transfers them from the medical world to the world of ideas. He outlines the mechanisms that medical researchers have found go with the spread of a flu virus and compare it to the explosion of interest in a brand or the effects of crime reduction efforts. The result is a fascinating look at how ideas spread through a population. It tied several concepts together for me.
First there was the idea that some things that you do get you a greater "bang for the buckä than others. This is essentially the principle studied in Pareto's Law. Gladwell shows why some of the activities of marketers, for example, yield big results while others don't seem to do much.
Working with clients in my own business, I'd noticed that there was a certain lag time between the time efforts started to be made and results started to be felt. I'd understood some of that through systems theory, but Gladwell gave me another way to look at this effect. He uses the analogy of The Tipping Point in an epidemic, that point before which not much seems to be happening, and after which effects begin to explode.
For years, I've studied network effects and how communications move through a network. Gladwell helps me understand that phenomenon better by assigning the names of "Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmenä to what I had been thinking of as nodes in a communications network. That enriched my understanding and made the knowledge I already had more useful.
I could go on listing these things, but I think you get the idea. This is an excellent book to read if you want to understand how communication works effectively in a society or another kind of network. It's also not a couple of things.
This is not a "how toä book for running effective marketing campaigns. Since the book's publication, several folks have tried to use the principles here and developed practices that generally show up under the heading of "buzz marketing.% The principles will apply, but they don't apply simply like putting together a recipe. Instead, they're more like guidelines, which give you some ideas of which are better routes to go than others.
This is a book that totally absorbed my attention when I read it. The principles are powerful, and Gladwell is a good writer. Even more important, for me, it's one of the books that I go back to. It's found a place on my "wisdom shelfä where I keep the books that I dip into from time to time, just to remain familiar and reminded of their contents.
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Created/Revised/Reviewed: 24 August 2002
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