Book Review

Book Review: The Tipping Point By Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell is an author whose books I totally love. “Blink” and “Outliers” were both so awesome, I couldn’t help but give “The Tipping Point” a whirl.

Besides being a Malcolm Gladwell book (read: awesome from the start) this book cleared up a mystery for me. Not a stay up late at night mystery, but along simmering Emily mystery: Why was Paul Revere’s ride so successful and whatever happened to the other guy that rode out that same night? I mean, if old Paul had knocked on my door late at night, I probably would have thought it was a burglar. But New Englanders sometimes do weird things (witch hunts, fluff sandwiches, wearing pink and green together, I can go on, but this is about Gladwell’s book) and it was to their credit that they did muster and face the British. But I could never quite envision in my head exactly how this went down. What did Paul say to these people?

Apparently Paul’s ride had all the elements in place to start a chain of events – it met his criteria for a tipping point. First, the people involved usually fall into the category of connectors, mavens and salesmen. Second, the information or object needs to have a stickiness factor. Finally, the overall message has to be in the right context.

Paul Revere was apparently a major connector and information maven, and the other guy who rode out that night, while being nice enough and a good citizen was not. So when Paul gave out the message they took it seriously. “If Paul’s telling me to muster, other people will be mustering too.” He also had the right information and knew enough people to go right to the salesmen in each town – the people that could get other people to muster in that town. The other guy probably told people who went back to bed, or who didn’t have enough pull to get the others to muster.

The second point is that the idea has to be “sticky”. Stickiness is something that MBA types – especially marketing MBA types- give a lot of thought to and it’s hard to pin down. What makes a piece of information actionable or distraction proof? Here he goes into a fascinating description of some of the research on children’s television, namely Sesame Street and its successor Blue’s Clues. The portion on stickiness was probably the weakest section of the book, but it’s a hard concept to pin down.

The third point is the importance of context. Here he makes the claim that the reduction in crime in NYC was a result of a crackdown on petty crimes, like vandalism and turnstile jumping. Gladwell writes that if the subway car is clean of graffiti and you know if you jump the turnstile you will be prosecuted, then you are less likely to engage in opportunistic crime. He states that people commit crime when they are in a context where crime pays, and will think twice otherwise. This was fascinating to me, since it is such a simple concept that has so obviously paid off in a big way for NYC. It also makes me want to go tear down all the abandoned factories in North Philadelphia.

All in all, this was very powerful book. Malcolm Gladwell deserves his reputation. For me personally, two things came out of the book. First, was that I was so happy when he quoted the David Hackett Fischer book, “Paul Revere’s Ride” and I was able to go to the bookshelf and flip through it. One of my bucket list dreams is to have a truly awesome personal library and I was so happy I was able to link these two seemingly random books. I’ve wondered lately about going all digital with books, but it was really nice to go to the shelves on the porch and scan through the titles till I found it. The second main point was that I will totally pay more attention to the little things that set the context in life. That is why this week I got these flowers at work.

They were just a few dollars from the flower lady outside, but besides being pretty I figured I’d work a little bit on setting a more positive context.