Although it was neither my major or minor, I always loved the Sociology course electives that I would take when I was an undergrad. It seemed like I would always learn something very interesting in these classes and we would have the types of class discussions that I always imagined having in college. To this day, I still love the yearly NY Times Magazine issue, “The Year is Ideas,” which often highlights various sociological principles. I always found these sociology classes to be remarkably easy because I think most of the information presented therein was rather intuitive and simply required common sense to understand.

In a similar vein, the principle espoused in this book is that there are certain “tipping points’ for ideas, products, messages, behaviors, etc. that cause these things to spread like epidemics. When you think about it, this is a rather intuitive principle. Although I remember the concept of fax machines presented in the book, I think the better example might be cell phones which went from being pretty rare in the mid 1990s to nearly completely indispensable in the mid 00s. Clearly, at some point a tipping point was reached with cell phones.

Of course, Gladwell does a much better job of explaining the principle and making it seem interesting, his chapter regarding children’s television programming and the magic number of 150 really stood out to me. Obviously, there is a whole genre of books that owe a debt to this book, some like “Freakenomics” that I just love, and I think that is a good trend. A few bulleted points I took from this book are as follows:

• Some people are essentially key connectors that cause a message to spread. These are basically the key people that allow the six degrees of separation to work.
• The more people we think are observing a calamity, the less likely that any single one of us will help.
• Repetition is good for stickiness, which is why kids love “Blues Clues.” Messages are what make something spread, but the content of the message matters too.
• Realities like good school/broken home are better than bad school/good home. The broken windows theory of policing really makes a difference. I personally think that this principle has been adopted to such a degree that we are seeing real problems in both the volume and effectiveness of law enforcement, but that is another issue for another day.
• The magic number of 150 is really the point at which more than that, human interaction becomes unfocused. The number 150 is essentially the total number of people you can know well enough to have a unsolicited beer with – I think this is probably about right.
• Cool products are really placed on the market and become popular as a result of certain trendsetters making them popular. This was a concept I was familiar with from a PBS Frontline documentary and I find something very distasteful about this idea. The thing that bothers me most about this concept is that marketers focus their efforts on these trendsetters which creates an overall increase in the amount of phoniness in the world, which I think is a very bad thing.
• A lot of teens in Micronesia commit suicide for the same reason that kids in the U.S. smoke, because someone cool did it. People don’t smoke because it’s cool, people smoke because those who smoke are cool. Also interesting to read in this chapter and to have figures to back up something that I long knew – guys and gals who smoke tend to have more sexual experiences. Again, very intuitive.

In summary, I enjoyed this quick, easy, well-articulated book about the “tipping point” principle – one that makes sense, but is still pretty darn fun to read about.