Regardless of whether you’ve read The Tipping Point or not (and if you haven’t, what’s wrong with you??), this Tipping Point Primer is a great read. Here’s the intro to get your hooked:
THE TIPPING POINT IS:
- That one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once.
- The moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point, a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is a certainty. Epidemics…
- Tip b/c of the extraordinary efforts of a few select carriers. But they also sometimes tip when something happens to transform the epidemic agent itself.
- Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.
- Are another example of geometric progression: when a virus spreads through a population, it doubles and doubles again into infinity.
- Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating:
- They (Epidemics) have clear examples of contagious behavior.
- They both have little changes that make big effects.
- It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic’s equilibrium.
- They happen in a hurry.
- This is the most important trait, b/c it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does.
- Epidemics involve straightforward simple things; a “product” (I put this in quotes b/c Gladwell writes this book using mostly marketing/business ideas. However, I see it as a way to spark revolution.) and a message.
- In order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
- Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message.
