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Book Reviews: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

The Tipping Point is the name given by epidemiologists for the dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once. The flu, for example, can be held in check for a long time without being an epidemic. But suddenly, once some threshold is crossed in terms of number of people infected, things get much worse very quickly. Gladwell’s premise is that in addition to applying to viruses, this type of pattern is observed in many other situations. The book is filled with far-reaching examples, from the resurgence of Hush Puppies shoes to the popularity of Sesame Street to an epidemic of teen suicides in Micronesia.

Perhaps the most well-known example described is the rapid fall in crime levels in New York City in the mid-1990s. Murder rates fell by 64.3% in a five year period, with other types of violent crimes dropping by 50%. This happened after years of steady increase. Gladwell argues that the factors conventionally cited as causing the improvement (improved policing, declining crack use, and aging of the population) are not sufficient to explain the suddenness of the change. All three factors included gradual shifts in behavior, and yet the drop in crime occurred very rapidly. Gladwell makes a convincing argument that the police in New York put into place certain conditions that suddenly “tipped” the crime epidemic, sending crime rates into a decline.

Gladwell believes that by understanding how such tipping points are reached, we can deliberately use them to market products, or push for social changes, or just understand ourselves better. He describes three types of people who disproportionately affect social and behavioral epidemics, and explains how their behavior starts the ball rolling. For example, Connectors are people who know a lot of other people, and can spread an idea through multiple communities. Their presence makes an idea contagious. Next Gladwell outlines the concept of “stickiness” that makes people who hear about a new idea actually remember it, and in some way do something about it. He suggests that little changes in the presentation of ideas, designed to make the ideas more sticky, can have big effects. Finally, he discusses the necessity of context for a real tipping point to be reached.

Many of the discussions illustrating contagiousness, stickiness, and context go off onto tangents regarding human behavior, nature vs. nurture, and various sociology experiments. This, perhaps, stems from the author’s background as a writer of science-based magazine articles. He is unable to resist a good story, even if it doesn’t directly relate to his main premise. However, most of these side excursions are interesting, and all are well-researched and documented.

One section of the book that we found especially interesting was a chapter in which the author draws a parallel between the tipping point and the chasm described in Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm (see our review at chasm.shtml). The premise of the chasm is that during the introduction of discontinuous technological innovations, a chasm exists because the majority of users are unwilling to accept the recommendation of very early users (innovators). Gladwell proposes that the chasm can be crossed by the same mechanics followed in reaching the tipping point. The tipping people that he has already identified move things across the chasm by translating them from what innovators want to what mainstream users want. He gives an example in which a marketing company deliberately courts these tipping people to move a sneaker from highly adventurous skateboarders to the mainstream market.

We also found it interesting that a tipping point-like behavior was observed in Jennifer Robinson’s Ph.D. dissertation on time-constrained processing for wafer fabs. Time constrained processing is when some process step must be completed within a particular time window of a previous step. If the time window elapses before the wafer is processed at the later step, it must return to the earlier step for reprocessing. In simulations, Jennifer found that for many systems, some small amount of reprocessing could be handled without any difficulty. However, once the level of reprocessing exceeded some threshold (different for each system), behavior would rapidly degrade into instability. This threshold is, apparently, a tipping point for time constrained systems.

Connections to our other areas of research aside, we recommend this book because it is a quick, interesting read that might give you a new perspective on human behavior.

If you would like to buy this book, just click on the following link to open a new window and go directly to The Tipping Point on Amazon’s website. FabTime is an Amazon affiliate.