Book of the Week: The Tipping Point

03 Aug 2014

Since I liked Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, I decided to read another one of his books, The Tipping Point. Tipping points are important, because they represent a drastic change that presents opportunities for those about to take advantage. One scientific example of a tipping point is when water under goes a phase change at zero degrees Celsius. It suddenly changes from water to ice. Two vastly different properties of a material with a slight temperature difference.

Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and others don’t? And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?

There are three rules of epidemics: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor and the Power of Context. Law of the Few Epidemics get started once a highly connected and effective person spreads the message. There are only a few individuals who are linked to others in this way. The amount of connectedness varies a lot from person to person, but everyone is connected. This is like 6 degrees to Kevin Bacon. He is a highly connected individual. If you want your message to spread, you need to pass it through the highly connected few. Stickiness Factor

The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.

Once you have a message, you need it to be sticky for people to act on it. If it is not sticky, people will only be affected immediately after the message, but forget about it after a period of time has passed. Power of Context Humans are influenced by their surroundings. If they see other people break the law, they are more inclined to break the law too. Malcolm mentions Dunbar’s number of how many social connections a person can have, 150. GORE-TEX sets the max population of a factory to 150 people to take advantage of social relationships. Any larger, you begin to lose the social peer pressure influence. If you want your ideas and products to spread virally, you need to get the right message wrapping (stickiness) to the right people (few) in the right environment (context). This can be compared to advertising where you are trying to get the right message to the right person at the right time. A viral idea requires more work than advertising.