Review of Gladwell's "The Tipping Point"

Took me awhile to get to this one (it's been out since 2000), but it's still a great read, though not as interesting to me as Gladwell's "Blink." The basic argument of Tipping Point, is that small things can have big consequences, particularly if a few key people are great "connectors," "salesmen," and "mavens," if the "context" is ripe, or if you've found a way to make your message (or product) particularly "sticky." Much of reality, therefore, functions more like an epidemic with exponential swings up and down for reasons that seem almost impossible to predict in advance or even to determine after the fact (witness the recent financial collapse).

Gladwell offers a number of case studies of how this process works, the best being, from my perspective, the Paul Revere story about how a counterpart attempting a similar ride on that same night had almost no effect compared to the great effect that Revere had. Gladwell's a very effective story teller.

Some of what he said could have direct application for our educational setting and is probably closely connected to the whole "engaged learning" approach in which the goal is not so much to review facts but to find ways to create enthusiasm for learning (a contagion) and to help make that learning life-long (sticky).

Another interesting application of the "Tipping Point" philosophy is to the world of marketing and sales in which Gladwell argues that "word of mouth" is becoming even more important and not less as we might suspect in this age of efficient electronic communication. But what happens when everyone can receive everything on-line is that we become "immune" to all of this stuff being thrown at us, and we only really trust what people we really know, and know to be experts (mavens), tell us. Those mavens help us cut through the clutter, and so they are increasingly the unofficial gatekeepers to modern marketing success.

Which reminded me very much of the whole "new markets" initiative that we've been working on at JBU in which we attempt find key influencers at important organizations and market to them instead of just trying to do a mass appeal via print ads or some other major media approach. That would make sense in a "tipping point" world. We'll see how well it works at JBU.