The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell

Why did the crime rate in New York plummet so precipitously in the 1990s? How does a hitherto unknown writer become a bestselling novelist? Why is adolescent cigarette use rampant, when it is common knowledge that smoking is deadly? What makes a television program such as ?Sesame Street? so effective at teaching children how to read? Why was Paul Revere?s famous ride a communications success? In The Tipping Point, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell examines why big changes in society so often can occur suddenly and unexpectedly. Ideas, behavior, messages, and products, he asserts, sometimes spread like infectious-disease outbreaks. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a few fare-beaters and graffiti artists fuel a subway crime wave, or a satisfied customer fill the empty tables of a new restaurant. These are social epidemics, and the moment when they take off, when they reach their critical mass, is the ?Tipping Point.? Gladwell introduces the reader to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children?s television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world?s greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics.Here?s one of those books that offer a whole new spin on the way processes unfold. It is a convincing theory, and optimistic as well, in its illustration of ?the power of one? to make a big difference in an organization or a society.

ISBN: 0316346624
Format: Paperback, 304 pages
Pub. Date: January 2002
Publisher: Warner
Other Formats: Hardcover, Audiobook

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