Review

Rating: Unrated

Human societies – or at least the ones that have lasted long enough to be recorded by history – have all been characterised by continuous change. This change can come in all shapes and sizes. It can be profound, or it can be superficial. It can be sudden or it can be gradual. It can be driven by specific cataclysmic events, or by a great many individuals each making a small, subtle change in their lives.

It’s this latter type of change that Malcolm Gladwell is concerned with in The Tipping Point. At the core of this book is a model that Gladwell has constructed. It’s a model for explaining how ideas, products or attitudes can sweep through human societies and move from fringe to mainstream for no obvious reason.

At times Gladwell seems more interested in the superficial than in the profound. Topics discussed include the revival of Hush Puppies’ fortunes in the 1990s, the popularity of Sesame Street, and the success of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. These examples make it clear that the book was pitched primarily at a marketing community that was, back in 2000, looking for new ideas to stay relevant in a fast-changing, newly-online world.

Looking back on the years after The Tipping Point was published, its effect and influence are obvious. Marketers seem to have warmed in particular to what Gladwell calls The Law Of The Few, the idea that small numbers of special people (Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen) exert a huge influence on society at large. Even today marketers who want to be seen as “innovative” create viral strategies, targeting small groups of influential people with the hope that these influencers will do the rest of the work. With hindsight, I suspect many of these sorts of campaigns have derived intellectual legitimacy from The Tipping Point.

Saying that a book had a profound impact on the marketing community could understandably be contrived as damning with faint praise, so I feel I should also point out what I see as The Tipping Point’s main achievement.

Malcolm Gladwell is an undeniably successful and effective writer, even if the scientific validity of his ideas has been called into question from time to time. What makes him effective, however, is not just that he sells lots of books, or that he has a clever way with words. His particular skill is in taking problems of organised complexity and describing them in a way that genuinely engages audiences and quite possibly introduces them to new ways of thinking.

The thing that Gladwell is dealing with here isn’t easy to explain. You need to imagine society as a highly complex, fluid system in which change – even in an area as trivial as the popularity of Hush Puppies – comes about for reasons that are hard to determine. The model Gladwell describes here allows readers to conceive of that system, to understand how it moves in time, and to imagine the numerous small factors that combine to effect large-scale change. This is no small feat, and it’s something few writers could get across without losing most of their readers along the way.

But at the same time I think The Tipping Point contains a paradox. Its main theme can be understood in its published subtitle, “How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference”. But this message is contradicted by the centrality of the “special people” – the Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen – to the whole process. These special people seem to leap to the forefront, which isn’t helped by Gladwell’s awestruck tone when describing the real-life examplars he met while doing his research. Perhaps this wasn’t Gladwell’s intention, but I can imagine readers coming away with the impression that little things actually don’t make much of a difference; that all you need to do is get a Maven on your side and you’re laughing.

So, am I unwittingly playing a part in The Tipping Point by publishing this review? Am I a bibliophile Maven or a charismatic Salesman, subtly influencing your feelings about this book? I doubt it. I didn’t really identify with any of Gladwell’s “special people”, even though they did ring true to a certain extent. But the thing is to not dwell on these people. The really interesting change is that brought about by more complex factors than the recommendations of an elite group – and I’m sure this is what Gladwell really meant to get across when he wrote this book.

Edit: If you’d like to read a more intellectual discussion of The Tipping Point, try this three-part analysis from Lauchlan MacKinnon