The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

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• Malcolm Gladwell's highly imaginative pop treatise on the flow of goods and ideas in society reached a tipping point of its own, spending many weeks on the New York Times best-seller list , and then appearing for weeks on both lists following its paperback publication.
  
  Proposing a contagion model, in which things spread through the population like viruses, Gladwell examines a range of phenomena--the sudden and unexpected popularity of Hush Puppies in the fashion world, the decline in the crime rate in New York City, how a book (THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD) became a bestseller out of the blue, a spike in youth suicide rates in Malaysia--teasing out the cause and logic, and showing how they all had a "tipping point" and how they illustrate one of three basic principles.
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  He cites sometimes arcanely sourced studies to support his theories, and along the way has popularized terms such as "word-of-mouth marketing" and "stickiness." THE TIPPING POINT has changed the way we look at and talk about "stuff," and Gladwell's ideas have energized fields such as business, marketing, education, and sociology.
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• "A lively, timely and engaging study....THE TIPPING POINT is worth reading just for what it tells us about how we try to make sense out of the world."
• "Gladwell's wide-ranging research has led him to believe that all trends...follow certain laws, which he delineates with skill and a palpable sense of excitement."
• An introduction to the Tipping Point theory explains how minor changes in ideas and products can increase their popularity and how small adjustments in an individual's immediate environment can alter group behavior.
• Reveals how focused advertising and promotion to the "right" people can be much more effective than nationwide campaigns to the most people. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.
• The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.
• This celebrated New York Times bestsellernow poised to reach an even wider audience in paperbackis a book that is changing the way North Americans think about selling products and disseminating ideas. Gladwells new afterword to this edition describes how readers can constructively apply the tipping point principle in their own lives and work. Widely hailed as an important work that offers not only a road map to business success but also a profoundly encouraging approach to solving social problems."The best way to understand the dramatic 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," writes Malcolm Gladwell, "is to think of them as epidemics.
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  Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do." Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell's The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject.

  For example, Paul Revere was able to galvanize the forces of resistance so effectively in part because he was what Gladwell calls a "Connector": he knew just about everybody, particularly the revolutionary leaders in each of the towns that he rode through. But Revere "wasn't just the man with the biggest Rolodex in colonial Boston," he was also a "Maven" who gathered extensive information about the British. He knew what was going on and he knew exactly whom to tell. The phenomenon continues to this day--think of how often you've received information in an e-mail message that had been forwarded at least half a dozen times before reaching you.

  Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the "stickiness" of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues, or explaining why it would be even easier to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger. Although some readers may find the transitional passages between chapters hold their hands a little too tightly, and Gladwell's closing invocation of the possibilities of social engineering sketchy, even chilling, The Tipping Point is one of the most effective books on science for a general audience in ages. It seems inevitable that "tipping point," like "future shock" or "chaos theory," will soon become one of those ideas that everybody knows--or at least knows by name. --Ron Hogan

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This book appears on the following bestseller lists:

#12 on Amazon.com Non-Fiction
#13 on Amazon.com Business and Investing
#30 on Best Book Buys Top 100