This book, about the “Tipping Point”, is claimed to be an International Number One Bestseller and its an ‘Intelligent, articulate, thought-provoking’ book, according to the Observer.
Well it has enough selling point to raise my interest – the book is of course about the tipping point and it tries to explain what makes a product and/or a concept or an idea to reach its tipping point – if you vision a normal distribution curve, the tipping point is in the middle where it has reached its max and is about to go down or recline.
According to the author Malcolm Gladwell, it takes Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen to create the epidemic that makes an idea and/or a product to reach its tipping point. Interestingly, Gladwell spends the whole book in describing various ‘use cases’ (scenarios) from the infamous American history of Paul Revere who was spreading the message that the English was coming and saved many colonists of New England and really set off the American independence – to less bravura stories of children TV series, how to inform about breast cancer, cigarette smoking and how to make a new shoe brand sell etc etc.
He also tells the interesting story from NY on how the train authorities tackled the train-tagging as well as how the NY Police reduced serious crime by attending the 'small' crimes (zero tolerance) – all very interesting and good stories, but why Gladwell needs to invent theories about Rules of Epidemics, the law of the few and the stickiness factor, is really completely incomprehensible to me as all these interesting stories, which Gladwell has researched very well, is nothing else than “thinking out of the box”, strong believe and enthusiasm in what we do – thus this book is nothing else than a typical American book on re-inventing and re-labeling something that others already have done and has already labelled.
