{On April 5, 2013, we will celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the First Friday Book Synopsis, and begin our 16th year. During March, I will post a blog post per day remembering key insights from some of the books I have presented over the 15 years of the First Friday Book Synopsis. We have met every first Friday of every month since April, 1998 (except for a couple of weather –related cancellations). These posts will focus only on books I have presented. My colleague, Karl Krayer, also presented his synopses of business books at each of these gatherings. I am going in chronological order, from April, 1998, forward. The fastest way to check on these posts will be at Randy’s blog entries — though there will be some additional blog posts interspersed among these 30.}
Post #6 of 30
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Synopsis presented January, 2000
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell (Little Brown & Co., 2000)
It’s hard to believe that I presented my synopsis of The Tipping Point so long ago. It is one of the books that I have presented many times. Like The New New Thing, the phrase “the tipping point” has become a part of our national, and business, vocabulary.
This is the book that introduced me to Gladwell. Since I first read it, I have also read and presented synopses on Blink and Outliers. I have also read many of his essays. We leave his blog up on our site as a “permanent” recommendation” in our blogroll, and I assign many of his essays to my students. (I teach Speech).
Here is a taste of what Gladwell wrote in his book:
The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into best sellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.
Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating. And when an epidemic tips, it tips because something has happened, some change has occurred in one (or two or three) of those areas. These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.
We tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make messages more contagious – how to reach as many people as possible with our products or ideas. But the hard part of communication is often figuring out how to make sure a message doesn’t go in one ear and out the other. Stickiness means that a message makes an impact.
The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.
My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid is a single person who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constitute my life. Not only is my social circle not a circle, but it’s not “mine” either.
Sprinkled among every walk of life are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. They are Connectors.
The law of stickiness says there is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.
(A side note – Chip Heath and Dan Heath give full credit to Malcolm Gladwell for coming up with the idea of “stickiness,” a concept which they then developed in their terrific communication book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die).
In The Tipping Point, we learn how Sesame Street has been so successful, and we think a lot about the “Broken Window” theory of crime prevention.
Malcolm Gladwell is so good with “words” and “phrases” and “labels” — “connectors;” “mavens;” “weak ties…”
And in the book we find these ideas more fully developed:
The three characteristics of an epidemic:
#1 — They are clear examples of contagious behavior.
#2 — Little changes have/produce big effects.
#3 — The changes happen in a hurry.and
Three agents of change.
#1 — The Law of the Few.
• Connectors – People with a special gift for bringing the world together.
• People get their jobs through connections – especially “weak ties”…
• Mavens – People who accumulate knowledge. (a Yiddish term).
• “Price vigilantes”
• “Market Mavens”
• Salesmen
#2 — The Stickiness Factor.
#3 — The Power of Context.
• Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur. (e.g., New York, crime, and Bernhard Goetz)…
The whole arena of marketing has seemingly become ever more complex since Gladwell published The Tipping Point.
And though The Tipping Point has much to say about marketing, it is more a “look at what spreads throughout the society, and how it spreads,” book.
And we now know so much about social media (it barely existed when the book was published) – and so little about how to actually master the challenge of using this modern marketing tool. When something goes viral, it is a wonder to behold, You can’t make it “happen.” There is always an element of “luck” when something goes viral…
But when a true tipping point hits, sit back and watch…and (to mix a metaphor), ride the wave.
First Friday Book Synopsis 