Tipping Point
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
I finally finished the book "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. It had a lot of key ideas that I want to remember:
Rule 1: The Law of the Few
The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social skills:
Connectors - the people who "link us up with the world ... people with a special gift for bringing the world together." To illustrate, Gladwell cites the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Milgram's experiments in the small world problem, Dallas businessman Roger Horchow, the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" trivia game, and Chicagoan Lois Weisberg.
Mavens - "information specialists", or "people we rely upon to connect us with new information." They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others.
Salesmen - "persuaders", charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They tend to have an indefinable trait that goes beyond what they say, that makes others want to agree with them. Gladwell's examples include California businessman Tom Gau and news anchor Peter Jennings, and he cites several studies about how people are persuaded.
Rule 2: The Stickiness Factor
The specific content of a message that makes it memorable and have impact. The children's television programs Sesame Street and Blue's Clues are specific instances of enhancing stickiness and systematically engineering stickiness into a message.
Rule 3: The Power of Context
Human behavior is sensitive to and strongly influenced by its environment. As Gladwell says, "Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur." For example, "zero tolerance" efforts to combat minor crimes such as fare-beating and vandalism on the New York subway led to a decline in more violent crimes city-wide. Gladwell describes the bystander effect, and explains how Dunbar's number plays into the tipping point, using Rebecca Wells' novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, evangelist John Wesley, and the high-tech firm Gore Associates.
posted by Bryan @ 5:02 AM,
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