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The Tipping Point
How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
The Tipping Point discusses why certain ideas, products and behaviors spread like epidemics and what we can do to consciously trigger and have control over such epidemics.
- Anyone who is interested in the way ideas spread
- Anyone who wants to learn how social epidemics break out
- Anyone who works in marketing, advertising or a related field
Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist and the author of five best-selling books, including Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Outliers: The Story of Success.
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The Tipping Point
How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
- Read in 15 minutes
- Audio & text available
- Contains 9 key ideas
Synopsis
The Tipping Point discusses why certain ideas, products and behaviors spread like epidemics and what we can do to consciously trigger and have control over such epidemics.
Key idea 1 of 9
It is only an epidemic once the Tipping Point threshold has been crossed.
The Tipping Point is the moment at which a trend turns into an epidemic and spreads like wildfire.
Take a flu strain, for example; it might spread through a population slowly at the start, but, day by day, it infects more and more people until finally it reaches that magical moment when the transmission rate soars dramatically and the epidemic spins out of control.
Represented in graphic terms, the growth would be a curve that is slightly inclined at first, and then juts up at almost a right angle. This dramatic turn is the Tipping Point.
The same kind of growth is also seen in the spread of technological innovations. When the electronics company Sharp made the first affordable fax machine in 1984, it sold around 80,000 of them in the first year and saw that number rise steadily every year, until 1987, when it reached the Tipping Point and sales skyrocketed.
At that particular Tipping Point, so many people owned a fax machine that anyone who didn’t decided they’d better get one, too.
In other words, a fundamental change takes place at the Tipping Point, causing the “infection” to suddenly spread rampantly.
It is only an epidemic once the Tipping Point threshold has been crossed.
Key ideas in this title
- It is only an epidemic once the Tipping Point threshold has been crossed.
- A certain few key people are often the cause of epidemics.
- Ideas spread particularly fast with Connectors, or people with a vast social network.
- Some people are born with the gift of persuasion and a knack for selling ideas.
- In every network there are Mavens who amass information and pass it on to others.
- An idea has to stick before it can spread.
- External circumstances have a much greater influence on our behavior than we think.
- Even the smallest changes in a context can determine whether an epidemic takes off.
- Final summary
