I’ve had more time for personal projects lately and got around to completing “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” by Malcolm Gladwell.
I was introduced to the book a few years ago by my corporate CEO as a tool to help turn around the failing culture at the company. From the outside the company is taking an upturn now, but that wasn’t because of the book… they just got their head out of their assess…
The book, a best seller for over three years now is actually good. Malcolm is a New Yorker Magazine journalist who has the fortunate ability to interpret research findings and sociology theories, in order to apply them effectively to business and organizational problems and generate value out of what he finds.
The phrase tipping point is a term that refers to that dramatic moment when something unique becomes common. As best described in Gladwell’s book, “The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of other mysterious changes that mark everyday life it to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like the viruses do.”
If you get an opportunity take a day or two and read through it for some entertaining perspective at how events culminate into trends or epidemics.