Back in 1967, a certain Social Psychologist by the name of Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment titled ‘Small World Experiment’. In where, he tracked the chains of acquaintances in the United States by sending several packages to 160 random people living in Omaha, Nebraska, asking them to forward the package to a friend or acquaintance who they thought would bring the package closer to a set final individual - a stockbroker from Boston, Massachusetts. And, they all had to perform this activity under certain condition: They could only mail the folder to someone they actually knew personally on a first-name basis. At the end of the experiment, Milgram, surprisingly, noted that the very first folder reached the target in just four days and took only two intermediate acquaintances. Overall, Milgram reported that chains varied in length from two to ten intermediate acquaintances, with a median of five intermediate acquaintances between the original sender and the destination recipient thereby, coining a pretty famous phrase -The Six Degrees of Separation. This research had massive after-effects, with many people falling over themselves to either side with or trash down the findings. But of all the things, one peculiar aspect caught the eye of a certain British-born Canadian journalist by the name of Malcolm Gladwell, 22 years after the aforementioned experiment. He detailed out a theory based on his observation. And what was theory called? Right, ‘The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.’ - Which is what this book is all about.
The atypical facet which Gladwell uncovered was the finding that just three friends of the stockbroker provided the final link for half of the letters that arrived successfully. This gave rise to Gladwell's theory that certain types of people are key to the dissemination of information. And ‘The Tipping Point’ here is that critical, threshold borderline which when breached, translates into making ideas, messages, behaviors and, well, products spread like viruses do. An effect which is perpetuated by these set of key people.
The opening leaves of the book are consumed in Gladwell delineating these set of ‘Key’ people, who, when they get to ‘Disseminating information’, end up jacking up sales of a long forgotten footwear brand or becoming famous American Revolution patriot for alerting colonial militia of approaching British forces before the Battle of Lexington and Concord among other things. Now if that isn’t neat and nifty then I don’t know what else is. These ‘key’ people enter in the garb of being the ‘Connector’ i.e. someone who knows lot of people, the ‘Maven’ i.e. someone who takes the new bit and dumbs it down on all four for the lay person’s consumption and finally, the ‘Salesmen’ i.e. someone who is a charismatic persuader.
The book also talks about the environment and context the above mentioned people would require to successfully swoosh their wand. That’s when the ‘Stickiness Factor’ and ‘The Power of Context’ concepts kick in. Stickiness is that inexplicable something which makes one ‘stuck’ on something and ‘Power of Context’ is that important milieu on the foreground of which the impact of what a ‘key person’ does becomes twice as impactful.
The book, which was named as one of the best books of the decade by Amazon.com, is pretty engaging in the way it written. When a consummate journalist as Gladwell sells his idea to you, you have to give in. Add with it an interesting central idea and an unrelenting will on the part of the author to connect with the reader.
But the book does tumble down a slippery slope mid-way through, or so I feel. The examples that are thrown in by the author to back the central premise, sort of seems, how to put this delicately, forced. There’s a part where the reason behind the dipping of once-alarmingly-high crime rates in the New York of the 90s is attributed to – and I am not making this up – Graffiti-less metro wagons. I am not belting away the proposed idea altogether. In fact this reasoning does explain why Delhi Metro stations and trains are so squeaky clean while the adjacent Central Bus-Station is not even though the same sets of people frequent both the places. But when you give credit to the ‘clean and crispy public spaces’ to the conduct curve of people suddenly ‘tipping’ and they becoming well behaved, civil citizen from being raving mad gun-shooters, it kind of feels a bit stretched. And that’s the problem with such a book: an inner alarm, that’s which designed to detect ludicrous conclusion coming in, goes off, every other idea from the book then is forced to be taken in with a pinch of salt or two. The other pricky thorn in a erst-while honestly written prose is its trying-way-too-hard-to-convince undertone. A not-so-counter-intuitive idea such as ‘The Stickiness Factor’ is given many more pages than what the doctor would’ve ordered. Gladwell constantly leans on monkeys, cognitive science, psychological experiments, organizational structure of companies, and obscure concepts, in the hope that, together, they coalesce into something that inspires the reader to ‘buy’ his idea. And one does ‘buy’ it, only that the salesman over-stays his welcome.
All in all, it’s a decently healthy book which would make one analyze their quotidian surroundings more deeply as they go about their day and also, take a leaf from it and apply the presented concept to be better initiators, do-ers and disseminators of ideas.
“Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push — in just the right place — it can be tipped.” – is one of the quotes by Malclom Gladwell himself. The book did ‘tip’ so as to say — I mean Gladwell received a US$ 1.5 million in advance for it and it sold 1.7 million copies by 2006 — only that the ‘slight push’ could have been in a more ‘right’ place as far as the presentation was concerned.
Pick this one up for one of those read-rides when you want to take away something tangible once you are done reading.
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