Tipping Point Review
FRAME: Emergence and Social Epidemics
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Book by Malcolm Gladwell – Review by Bryan Coffman
The book takes a crack at explaining how contagious behavior—like a fashion trend, or the emergence of a bestseller—starts and grows in an organic fashion, much like a virus does, without any central control or master plan. It focuses in particular on examples where little changes create big effects (like the temperature of fresh water drops from 32.2 degrees to 31.9 degrees and all of a sudden ice occurs). And it also tries to understand when change happens not gradually, but explosively. The “tipping point” from which the book takes its title is that point in a system’s development where a small change leads to a huge effect, in a very rapid time frame, and spreads through the system in a contagious fashion. Not all systemic change is like this, but for those people who want to foment rapid change, the principles or components of the tipping point model are worth examining.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- The Law of the Few
- Connectors
- Mavens
- Salesmen
- The Stickiness Factor
- The Power of Context
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