Book Summary Preview : The Tipping Point

The Big Idea
A business and science writer presents a book that is full of brilliant, fascinating and groundbreaking ideas that should affect the way every thinking person sees the world around him. It is a must-read material for educators, parents, marketers, business people and policymakers. It shows how small changes can make a big difference.

The book contains an analysis of the strategies people apply to influence and mold its direction. It is a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. It is a road map to change, with a profoundly hopeful message--that one imaginative person applying a well-placed lever can move the world and shape and engineer the course of social epidemics.

How would you like to find answers for the following?

Why did crime in New York drop so suddenly in the mid-90s? How does an unknown novelist end up being a bestselling author? Why is teenage smoking out of control, when everyone knows smoking kills? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read? Why did Paul Revere succeed with his famous warning about the coming of the British?

How could a company like Hush Puppies in a span of two years after its rebirth in 1994 increase its sales from 30,000 pairs of shoes to over 1,000,000 pairs, setting the fashion trends among young Americans for the second time? Or like Airwalk, another shoemaker, whose sales exploded from $16M-a-year business to $175M in four years?

Why do various TV shows, movies, books and other products become so popular while others not? These and other unexpected phenomena are explained by the Tipping Point theory.

What is Tipping Point?

The best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, the rise of teenage smoking, the phenomena of word-of-mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to view them as epidemics.

Ideas, products, messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. These often spread like outbreaks of infectious disease. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of 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. The moment they take off, when they reach their critical mass, is the Tipping Point. The Tipping Point is one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once.

The three characteristics of epidemic:
1. contagiousness
2. little causes can have big effects
3. change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment

All epidemics have Tipping Points. The world of a Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more that possibility. It is a contrary to all our expectations, it is a certainty!

Chapter 1: The Three Rules of Epidemics

Epidemics are a function of:

1. the people who transmit infectious agents.
2. the infectious agent itself.
3. the environment in which the infectious agent is operating.

1. The Law of the Few

One critical factor in epidemics is the nature of the messenger. The message itself is something that can be passed on. A pair of shoes, a warning, an infection, a new movie can become highly contagious and tip simply if associated with a particular kind of person.

The Law of the Few suggests that what we think of as inner states – preferences and emotions are powerfully and imperceptibly influenced by seemingly inconsequential personal influences.

2. The Stickiness Factor

In epidemics, the content of the message matters too. The specific quality of the message to be successful is the quality of the “stickiness”. Is the message, or the food, or the movie, or the product memorable?

3. The Power of Context

The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.

Chapter 2: The Law of the Few:

Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen

Success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. The Law of the few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting social epidemics, and can make it tip.

The three kinds of people that control the word-of-mouth epidemics are:

• Connectors are the social glue, they spread the message
• Mavens are the databank, they provide the message
• Salesmen are the select group of people who have the skills to persuade people unconvinced of what they hear.

Connectors — are people with a special gift for bringing the world together. They link us up to the world—people whom we rely more heavily than we realize. Word-of-mouth epidemics are the work of Connectors.

What makes someone a Connector?

1. They know lots of people.
2. Their importance is a function of the kinds of people they know.
3. People whom all of us can reach in only a few steps because they occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches. Their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.
4. They are at the center of events.

The Connectors have instinct that helps them relate to the people they meet. They see the possibility of being acquainted with everyone while most of us are busy choosing whom we would like to know. Connectors are extraordinarily powerful — we rely on them to give us access to opportunities and worlds to which we don’t belong.

Knowing lots of people is a kind of skill, something that someone might set out to do deliberately. This skill can be perfected. The techniques that go with this skill are central to the fact that he knew everyone.

Connectors have instinctive and natural gift for making social connections. They simply like people in a genuine and powerful way. They find the patterns of acquaintanceship and interaction in which people arrange themselves to be endlessly fascinating. They collect people the same way others collect stamps. They keep on their computers a roster of names of acquaintances.

The point about Connectors is that by having a foot in so many different worlds can have the effect of bringing them all together.

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