"The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell

The Tipping Point examines how certain ideas can develop with people and grow within the mass population, just as an viral epidemic would. When Gladwell discusses these ideas he primarily uses fashion, and other trends, to illustrate his point as they are simple visual cues that almost everyone can know and relate to.

He breaks down how this epidemic takes place with 3 elements: the “Connecters”, the “Stickiness Factor”, and the environment.

The Connecters are certain people that know many more people than the average person. I remember learning about these people in a mass media communications class in my first years of college and they referred to these people as nodes.

The “Stickiness Factor” refers to the actual message that is trying to be conveyed. The message the message or idea that needs to reside with people must have some sort of memorable factor, whether it is important, different, new, innovative, ect.

The environment gives credit to other external factors that may contribute to an idea tipping. This seemed to be very ambiguous in the book, because I didn’t quite understand how this was different than just saying “other factors.”

These three things in combination (I think) or separately (quite possibly) can each cause an idea to tip. That’s about it.

I think that this book would have been much more worthwhile to a business student, not me. I think that I learned more from the antidotes themselves than the ideas that he was trying to portray with the stories. For instance, Gladwell goes into a detailed account of the process that Sesame Street went through to get put on the air and to become an engaging and effective educational television show for children. I thought that whole chapter was just fascinating and I think it referred to the portion on stickiness. How? I am not too sure. I am sure I can make something up right now but the clarity of the elements of the show to the stickiness factor and why the show tipped was very ambiguous and left me a bit confused.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book. I would probably recommend Blink before The Tipping Point to anyone who was interested in reading one of Gladwell’s books.