The Tipping Point

What caused Hush Puppies shoes to go from all but dead (30,000 pairs sold per year by early 1994) to a "best seller" (over a million pairs in 1996)? What caused New York City's crime rate to drop by two-thirds in five years? What made Sesame Street such a success with teaching pre-schoolers? And why was Blue's Clues even more successful?

"The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea os very simple. It is that 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 bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other 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."

[from the Introduction to The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, 2002]

But it's more than that. The subtitle of the book is "How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference".

Hush Puppies shoes became successful again because they were rare, unusual, and "unpopular"... and because a small group of people decided that these shoes were "cool" (and Hush Puppies took advantage of that). Another brand of shoes rose in popularity, then dropped sharply when the company first catered to, then ignored, the small cadre of stores responsible for their early success.

New York's crime wave dropped because the head of the Transit Police concentrated on two seemingly small and unrelated problems: graffiti in the subway and "fare-beaters" (people jumping turnstyles, etc). By 1996, New York had become the safest major city in the country.

Sesame Street was successful because the people behind the program actually tested it with pre-schoolers... and because they ignored what child psychologists and experts told them to do! Blue's Clues was even more successful because it built on what Sesame Street had learned... and did it better.

Read The Tipping Point. Learn about

• The Three Rules of Epidemics
• The Law of the Few: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen
• The Stickiness Factor
• The Power of Context
• Broken Windows
• The Magic Number: 150
• Rumors
• the Power of Translation

and what all these mean in the real world.

Malcolm Gladwell has produced an interesting, accessible, understandable, and well-written book. Fortune magazine called this "A fascinating book that makes you see the world in a different way."

Read it. The Tipping Point might make a difference to something in your life.

The Tipping Point ( in category Books, Movies, Music ) - posted at Sun, 06 Nov, 12:23 Pacific | «e»