“The Tipping Point”
by Malcolm Gladwell
Published: January 2002
ISBN: 0316346624

(Updated: November 30, 2006.)

From the Publisher…

This celebrated New York Times bestseller — now poised to reach an even wider audience in paperback — is a book that is changing the way Americans think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

About the Author…

He was a reporter for the Washington Post from 1987 to 1996, working first as a science writer & then as New York City bureau chief. Since 1996, he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker.

Definitely interesting.

In my words, this book works to establish a vocabulary around the successful transmission of an idea (or concept or product or news or…). I found the examples interesting and the connections made by the author intriguing. I liked that Gladwell was working to objectify and qualify relationships and relating. I liked less the fact that the content was not identified as that. And I remain fascinated that the barometer of “successful” was not all discussed.

The “tipping point” is described as that point where/when something takes off, is successfully “out there”, is established, is viable, is assumed by “more” rather than “less”. This book examines how to get to this “point”. I definitely liked the constructive nature of the thinking behind this work.

That written, I missed the discussion of the transformation that is necessary (explicitly, implicitly, inherently) for/of/by/in the context and the people of the context being “tipped”. To take Gladwell’s own analogy further, I found that this book described the symptoms and the spreading of the symptoms of Gladwell’s specific type of “epidemic”. The “disease”, the effects of the “disease” on those who contracted it was not discussed. This means that “success” is assumed to be static and any transformation affected by the spreading of the “epidemic” irrelevant. I guess I find this a little like dissecting the how and what of the making of a cake without knowing that it is a cake you are putting together and without questioning why you would want to make a cake in the first place.

This book though is a different sort of “start”, an interesting start and in many ways a noble start. We have much to learn about our collective being.