A great book showcasing psychological and sociological studies with regards to how small movements can become huge societal currents by means of a few factors, be it that they are a specific type of people or environmental influences. A great book for anyone studying psychology/sociology and an even better one for everyone with a keen interest in these subjects.

This is sort of a treatise on the butterfly effect on a sociological scale. While the examples used seemed to spread out in all directions, I think that Gladwell was able to keep everything under one theoretical umbrella, with some wrestling. I'd be interested to see if Gladwell's observations tie into Hierarchy Theory on some level, and I suspect they do. There may also be underlying elements of stochasticity that effect the outcome of tipping point dynamics, though James Gleick would be a better judge of that. All-in-all a very interesting read about outliers, word of mouth, and epidemics.

It's official. I'm a Malcolm Gladwell fan. I find his insights brilliant, and his presentation absorbing. I didn't like this book quite as much as Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, but that may be because it depressed me slightly. I hoped, as I'm sure most of its readers did, to figure out how to apply his ideas to create epidemic popularity of my own creative efforts, (ie my writing) and my employer's (Rabbi Berel Wein's Destiny Foundation). According to Gladwell, it takes three kinds of people to spread an idea or a trend like an epidemic: a social connector, a maven, and a salesman. I'm a maven about a few things, most notably about Rabbi Wein's audio lectures, but I'm definitely not a connector or a salesman and I can't see myself transforming into either. So that was not encouraging.

But Gladwell has an answer about what to do if you're not one of the three: come up with a "sticky" idea. Yeah, if I could do that - write something that just sticks in people's minds - it would be my dream come true. So now I'm looking forward to getting hold of his book Outliers: The Story of Success, so I can develop the persistence I need to keep at writing until I hit upon that "sticky" idea. Writing fanfic is just being a creative maven with someone else's epidemic idea. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I'm still hoping to create one of my own.

But I can point to one concrete change this book made in my life, which is one of the reasons I'm rating it a 5. Surprisingly, it's in the area of parenting, and I wasn't even reading this as a parenting book. But if cleaning up graffitti can reduce crime in NYC, as Gladwell proves with statistics and studies, then perhaps a cleaner house will garner better behavior from my kids. So I guess I'll go clean up now. But someday, with Hashem's help, I hope I can get back to writing, too.

“A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.”

Tipping Point is a fascinating book. I enjoyed listening to Malcolm Gladwell narrate the audiobook and provide fascinating insights about social epidemics etc.

One of the easiest five stars I've ever given.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is a standalone nonfiction/educational business book written by journalist Malcolm Gladwell. As noted in the synopsis, "the tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire." Mr. Gladwell offers multiple examples of this phenomenon in various domains including business, education, religion, health, and crime.

My husband ONLY reads business books (how boring right?) and he has suggested this book to me on multiple occasions. When he shared with me the definition of a tipping point, I thought it was pretty much common sense and wasn't overly motivated to read this. But, my husband doesn't get excited over much in the reading world so I gave in. I have to admit though that Mr. Gladwell's thoroughness provided a valuable learning experience. I anticipate viewing business advertisements and public policy/protocol with new eyes now that I have a bit more insight into the psychology, sociology, and epidemiology behind them. Check it out!

If interested, take a look at a Q&A with the author HERE.

I've heard Malcolm Gladwell speak a few times at Harvard and had been interested to read The Tipping Point for a while. It's a mixture of anectdotes, psychology, economics, marketing, epidemiology and more.

The principle focus of The Tipping Point is how small changes, can bring about large effects. With examples such as marketing of Hush Puppies shoes, the broken windows theory, Airwalk shoes, Paul Reveres midnight ride, word of mouth, mass hysteria and more.

Gladwell really captures the spirit of human connections and the human need to feel part of something. A definate must read for anyone interested in looking at what moves people and how a small event can result in large response.


I felt the argument of this book proceeded very logically and was adequately developed and supported by the factual examples.

That argument is essentially this: that many social trends and phenomena follow the same basic pattern as epidemics; that they follow the same pattern because they are caused and sustained in much the same way; that the difference between trends that get past the "tipping point" and those that do not may often be one or more very small factors; and that if one wants to create any sort of social trend (whether that be buying a product or committing fewer crimes), it is important to attend to such very small factors.

But for my part, I think Gladwell is a perspicacious observer whose insights here are original, interesting, and even useful.

1 Start - Horrible book.

Yes, yes, even though I started this yesterday I did actually finish it. And after doing so, I regret reading this.

Full disclosure, the subject matter didn't really interest me but I've been wrong before so I gave it a go. I'll never be able to get back those precious reading hours.

There are two things that make this book, in my opinion, unreadable. The first is that the concept/central theme of this book is nothing new. Now, I know this was published ca. 2000 so I'm about 17 years late to the party but come on. I can't imagine how this book struck a chord with so many people. The idea that there is some sort of tipping point (clever) that causes certain trends, ideas, etc. to become phenomenon's. To me that seems logical and a no-brainer. I mean, duh. There are certain elements that cause certain things to catch on while others don't. I just wasn't impressed with the author's fervor and excitement in trying to explain a logical thing. I felt as if he was talking down to the reader.

The second thing that made me despise this book was that the author leaves a lot of half-thoughts. He rarely finishes an idea all the way to the end and the book is full of cases that are unfinished. He leaves one example before he's fully explained how it relates to his thesis and begins on another. I found it irritating and a bad way to write a book.

I have Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by the same author and while I'll probably read it, I need to cool down from this one before I can jump into another one of his (what I presume will be horribly done) books.

Do not read.

I wish there was another word I could use instead of sexy. I mean it metaphorically, obviously, but I want to tell you about the thing that I find to be the most sexy thing imaginable – and I’ve realised that sexy isn’t really the word I should be using at all. You realise, of course, I’m talking about intellectually stimulating or satisfying when I say sexy. That is what I want to talk about – the thing that gives me my biggest intellectual buzz.

Look, it isn’t any of the obvious things you might be thinking of – and all of those obvious things this book has in abundance. Not that I actually read this book – I listened to it as an audio book, and that is important to say because I don’t know if the book always has the afterword – and it is something in the afterword that I loved most about this otherwise merely wonderful book. (As you may have guessed, we will be returning to this later)

What I’m saying is that Gladwell is a sexy kind of guy anyway, even before he did the best of all possible things in the afterword of this book. He is what I like to call an interpreter. I think he even refers to himself as this somewhere. He straddles a number of worlds – psychology, medicine, marketing, social theory, economics – and he draws lines between those worlds in the way one might if one was to place a piece of plastic film over another piece of plastic film on an overhead projector, so that what is written on both films of plastic merge to ‘complete the picture’ in beautifully interesting ways. Now, that is sexy – but it is only level one sexy. I love watching relationships and patterns appear and I love a good story and Gladwell knows his stuff when it comes to patterns and he really knows how to tell a good story. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing the matter with level one sexy – but it is intellectual foreplay and needs something more to be truly satisfying.

One of the things this book is about is trends. How do trends start? What makes it fashionable for kids to start smoking? Why do books by unknown authors suddenly become best sellers? How is it that two people can do much the same thing (and he gives a fascinating example from American History to explain this) and yet have completely different (in fact, nearly opposite) results?

Or why did Hush Puppies, a brand of shoes that had virtually died, suddenly become – in the lingo of the streets – uber-cool? (Yes, I know, ‘don’t try being cool, McCandless, it really doesn’t suit’.)

Essentially, he talks about a small number of personality types that exist in the world that kick trends along, and these types of people help make ‘the virus of the latest thing’ spread to us all. Those types of people are, communicators (people who know essentially everyone), mavens (people who know essentially everything) and salesmen. Sometimes we think that if we want to spread an idea far and wide we should find a way to get it to as many people as possible – much like spam. But when was the last time you bought something recommended to you from a piece of spam you received in your inbox? See what I mean. But I guess most of us know some car nut we go to when we are thinking of buying a car, someone who reads all the car magazines and (maybe) even spends his (it is always a boy) weekends ‘test driving’ the latest models. This is the sort of person who can not only tell you the difference between an overhead cam-shaft and polyunsaturated margarine, but also why the cam-shaft is better than butter. (In case you have not quite worked it out yet, I am not one of those mavens)

In a world awash with ‘information’ – much of which is lies (although it is probably best we call it by its more polite name, advertising) – we are becoming, ironically enough, more dependent on word of mouth information from sources we know we can trust. Now, isn’t that a wonderful thesis and a direct confirmation of what you probably already suspected, but hadn’t put into words yet. I guess this might be the second level of intellectual sexy.

The next level towards intellectual nirvana is when someone says something totally unexpected that makes my brains resonate in a way that I know will have me thinking for weeks. And he did that this morning as I was walking back from the beach by talking about collective memory. This is penultimate in the scale of intellectual sexy – I knew when he said this that what he was saying was going to end up in my review.

They did a test on people, they put people through a series of remembering tasks – and they gave them these tests in pairs. Some of the pairs were people who didn’t know each other from a bar of soap – and the others were people who were literally couples, people in relationships. And the result? Well, the people in the relationships did lots and lots better at remembering stuff than the people that the fickle hand of fate flung together.

Isn’t that fascinating? Doesn’t that send a shiver down your spine? But it gets better. He then goes on to talk about why this might be the case – and essentially he claims that we use our partners as a memory extension slot for our own brains. In a relationship there is a division of labour when it comes to remembering stuff – with one partner remembering the kids’ birthdays and the other remembering how to use the ice cream maker.

And now comes the bucket of ice water that made me stop on my walk and think, “God, now, isn’t that really, really interesting”. Part of the reason people fall into a deep depression when they go through a divorce (and I thought, perhaps even die shortly after their ‘life partner’dies) may not just be that their partner has metaphorically taken away a part of their heart, but literally taken away a part of their brain. It is that line from Laurie Anderson about when her father died how she felt like a library had burnt down (I think from The Ugly One with Jewels, just before Speak My Language, but I could be wrong).

But do you know what is the sexiest thing about this book? And the reason why you should avoid a first edition and get an edition with the afterword? It is that after he has built a pretty good case for something, made a rather good comparison that he uses to sustain the last bit of the book, after he has finished writing the book, after it is printed and ‘done and dusted’, he thinks about it some more and makes a couple of major revisions to some of his thinking in the afterword that goes in a later edition. It is utterly clear to me that if he had the chance to write this book again he would do it differently. Essentially, the afterword is showing us how he would have made it different. He is showing that no idea is ever finished with, no idea can be finally put aside as a shining trophy, only to gather dust and bird shit, but ideas are only worthy of that name if they are alive and alive things change and grow or sometimes they sicken and die.

And someone who does that, that goes away and thinks about it even after it is done and finished with and then comes back and says, “Actually, I could have done that a bit better, let me see if I can just say it this way…” Now, that is sexy – that is the best. This book is not nearly as good as Outliers, and I only read this book because I read that book. But do you know what? This book is good enough that if I’d read this book first I would have gone on read that book too.

Written way back in 2002, before the social medial space exploded, this book explains what we now know and are founding principles. Without using terms like 'Viral', 'Influencers' etc, the book explains in a simple structured manner the science of social ideas give exponential result.

The Law of few chapters and examples introducing connectors, mavens and sales people were easy to understand. The stickiness factor is something which doesn't have the answers but the book seems to encourage experimenting. The sesame street example for kids attention span - I was able to relate.

The power of context resembled a bit to the chaos theory and causality. I think more than what was conveyed in the chapters, I really liked the idea of engineering incidents to happen. The epidemic reference was also contextual.

This is one of the good books for someone trying to make sense of the social media world - since it does not talk about any of it.

Loved it.

کتاب the tipping point
را دیروز تمام کردم. در راه فرودگاه، ترافیک وحشتناک، و باران شدید در ژنو. نگران رسیدن یا نرسیدن بودم، اما کتاب تمام شد. پنج سال قبل به توصیه ی دوست عزیزی خریدم، و در نیمه راه خواندن، آن را گم کردم و ناتمام ماند. بعد برای هدیه به دخترم خریدم و دوباره به خانه ی ما آمد، او خواند و من دوباره در سفر هدیه اش را گم کردم. مدتی پیش باز کتاب را خریدم، و این بار گم نشد و تمام شد.
درباره ی این کتاب بسیار صحبت شده و حرفها زده اند. یک سوم نخستین کتاب و معرفی "نظریه ی نقطه ی سرریز" عالی است. با مثالهای فراوان از تاریخ و بهداشت، تجارت و جامعه. این که چگونه افراد کمی، در زمان کوتاهی و با منابع اندکی میتوانند تغییری بزرگ ایجاد کنند. میانه ی کتاب به شرح ریز نظریه می پردازد و اندکی ملال آور می شود. اما پایان کتاب درخشان است. با مثال هایی کاربرد نظریه را در مداخله های بهداشت نشان می دهد؛ و راه حل هایی کم و بیش ساختار شکن به دست می دهد. به عنوان کسی که سالها به پژوهش در زمینه ی های علت موفقیت یا شکست سیاستهای بهداشتی و درمانی پرداخته ام (پژوهش در اجرا - implementation research)
، کتاب را بسیار مفید، آموزنده و جالب یافتم. و البته مثالها، مثالها. خلاصه آن که کتاب بسیار خواندنی است. کاش به فارسی ترجمه بشود (یا شده و من بیخبرم؟)
-پی نوشت: tipping point را نقطه ی سرریز ترجمه کردم. به مفهوم نزدیک است و امیدوارم رسا باشد.
آرش رشیدیان

في البداية مصطلح “نقطة التحول” هو مصطلح إجتماعي يرجع للحضة عندما يصبح شيء غير مألوف، معروف عند الجميع. يسعى إلى شرح“العدوى الجماعية” أو “الآفات الجماعية” بالمعنى الحرفي والمجازي وحتى بالتغيرات الفوضوية. فالإنخفاض في معدل الجريمة في مدينة النيويورك في التسعينات له بوادر وأسباب مشابهة تماما لتلك البوادر عندما ينتشر مرض معين مثل الإيدز والطاعون بين الناس وهي نفس البوادر والمبادئ التي يطلب المسوقون توفرها في حملاتهم وفي منتاجاتهم.. هي بوادر الإنتشار!

كتاب عن التسويق والشهرة، يشرح كيف ممكن سلعة معينة، أو فعل معين يصبح ترند بشكل محلي وبشكل عالمي. ففي كل فصل يشرح قانون وقاعدة. بالنسبة لي كان الكتاب جدًا واضح وجميل في توصيل المعلومات والإستنتاجات الي توصل لها الكاتب.

فئة معينة من البشر ممكن تبدأ وباء معدي من الصيحات أو الأمراض أو الأفعال وتعدي الجميع في جذبهم لتقليدهم ، بينما غيرهم ما يكون له نفس التأثير. نجاح أي براند أو سلعة يعتمد بشكل كبير على تواجد هؤاء الأفراد الذين يملكون كاريزما من نوع خاص أو هدية إلهية وهم أقلية من البشر وهنا يطلق على ذلك قلاديول “قانون تواجد القلة”. وقام بتصنيف القلة على ثلاث فئات وهي : المتواصلون، المتذوقون، البائعون. وذكر ذلك في مثالين مع أحذية “هاش بوبي” و “جرائم نيويورك”

ثم ركز الكاتب على أهمية جمع المعلومات التجريبية حول الأفكار، وليس فقط الإعتماد على النظريات والتوقع. لان مع كل تجربة يزداد برهان تأكدنا أن معلوماتنا صحيحة أو خاطئة وذكر ذلك في قصة “عالم سمسم” حتى تم إستكشاف مبدأ “الإلتصاق” الذي يساهم في عدم نسيان المادة المطروحة. فقال:” الأطفال لا يشاهدون وهم مُحفزون بشيء آخر، وينظرون لبعي�� عندما لا يرون، هم يواصلون مشاهدة البرنامج عندما يفهمون، وعندما يصبح الأمر معقد بالنسبة لهم يلتفتون لشيء آخر.” فكان التحدي في جذب إنتباه الأطفال. من خلال تجريب عده إشياء في البرنامح، فعندما تم فصل شخصيات الموبتس عن الأشخاص الحقيقين، لم يستمر الأطفال في المشاهدة، وعندما كانت تظهر الحروف في زوايا الشاشة لم يركز الأطفال معها ولم يحفظوها لذا أجريت عدة تغيرات لتساهم في إلتصاق المادة المطروحة في البرنامج.

من القوانين المهمة كذلك “قانون الـ ١٥٠”، يبين أنه مهما كان لديك من معارف وأصدقاء لا يمكنك أن تهتم بمشاعرهم وتضل صديق الجميع الا إذا كان عددهم أقل من ١٥٠. عقلك لا يستطيع معرفة كل شي عن كل أحد!.

بالنهاية أعتقد أن التسويق صناعة، تعتمد على أكثر من مكون وتؤدي لنتيجة أن المنتجات تضل في المجتمع أطول فترة وليس المكونات العشوائية التي طرحها الكاتب فقط.

I listened to this audio (my second ever audio) and I do believe it’s a little
dated now. However, the concepts are still valid. The examples sited to illustrate the author’s point throughout the book were all from the 80’s and 90’s. I was curious if listening to non fiction while driving would work for me; I found it quite easy to become distracted. Nevertheless, some good points made about how little changes can sometimes create the “tipping point.” Three point five stars.