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March 22 - April 1, 2020
People don’t have bosses, they have sponsors—mentors—who watch out for their interests.
The buildings only have to be distinct enough to allow for an individual culture in each.
The kind of bond that Dunbar describes in small groups is essentially a kind of peer pressure: it’s
knowing people well enough that what they think of you matters.
The fissures they see in Hutterite colonies that grow too big are the fissures that result when the bonds among some commune members begin to weaken.
Peer pressure is much more powerful than a concept of a boss. Many, many times more powerful. People want to live up to what is expected of them.”
What Buckley is referring to here is the benefit of unity, of having everyone in a complex enterprise share a common relationship.
Daniel Wegner calls “transactive memory.” When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains. Most of us deliberately don’t memorize most of the phone numbers we need. But we do memorize where to find them—in a phone book, or in our personal Rolodex.
Perhaps most important, though, we store information with other people.
Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system—a transactive memory system—which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things.
Expertise leads to more expertise. Why bother remembering how to install software if your son, close at hand, can do it for you? Since mental energy is limited, we concentrate on what we do best.
“When each person has group-acknowledged responsibility for particular tasks and facts, greater efficiency is inevitable,”
Gore has a highly effective institutional transactive memory.
“It’s not just do you know somebody. It’s do you really know them well enough that you know their skills and abilities and passions. That’s what you like, what you do, what you want to do, what you are truly good at. Not, are you a nice person.”
it’s knowing someone well enough to know what they know, and knowing them well enough so that you can trust them to know things in their specialty.
Not every company needs this degree of connectedness. But in a high-technology company like Gore, which relies for its market edge on its ability to innovate and react quickly to demanding and sophisticated customers, this kind of global memory system is critical.
That’s the advantage of adhering to the Rule of 150. You can exploit the bonds of memory and peer pressure.
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
SIX Case Study RUMORS, SNEAKERS, AND THE POWER OF TRANSLATION
It sponsored professional skateboarders, and developed a cult following at the skate events, and after a few years had built up a comfortable $13 million-a-year business. Companies can continue at that level indefinitely, in a state of low-level equilibrium, serving a small but loyal audience.
The experiences of Paul Revere and Sesame Street and crime in New York City and Gore Associates each illustrate one of the rules of Tipping Points.
In this section of the book, I’d like to look at less straightforward problems, and see how the idea of Mavens and Connectors and Stickiness and Context—either singly or in combination—helps to explain them.
Perhaps the best way to understand what Lambesis did is to go back to what sociologists call the diffusion model, which is a detailed, academic way of looking at how a contagious idea or product or innovation moves through a population.
analysis of the spread of hybrid seed corn in Greene County, Iowa, in the 1930s.
In the language of diffusion research, the handful of farmers who started trying hybrid seed at the very beginning of the 1930s were the Innovators, the adventurous ones. The slightly larger group who were infected by them were the Early Adopters.
Then came the big bulge of farmers in 1936, 1937, and 1938, the Early Majority and the Late Majority, the deliberate and the skeptical mass, who would never try anything until the most respected of farmers had tried it first. They caught the seed virus and passed it on, finally, to the Laggards, the most traditional of all, who see no urgent reason to change.
The business consultant Geoffrey Moore, for example, uses the example of high technology to argue that there is a substantial difference between the people who originate trends and ideas and the people in the Majority who eventually
take them up.
The first two groups—the Innovators and Early Adopters—are visionaries. They want revolutionary change, something that sets them apart qualitatively from their competitors.
“If the goal of visionaries is to make a quantum leap forward, the goal of pragmatists is to make a percentage improvement—incremental, measurable, predictable progress,”
The word risk is a negative word in their vocabulary—it does not connote opportunity or excitement but rather the chance to waste money and time. They will undertake risks when required, but they first will put in place safety nets and manage the risks very closely.”
There is a chasm between them. All kinds of high-tech products fail, never making it beyond the Early Adopters, because the companies that make them can’t find a way to transform an idea that makes perfect sense to an Early Adopter into one that makes perfect sense to a member of the Early Majority.
What they were looking for in fashion was a revolutionary statement. They were willing to take risks in order to set themselves apart.
How is it that all the weird, idiosyncratic things that really cool kids do end up in the mainstream?
This is where, I think, Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen play their most important role.
They are the ones who make it possible for innovations to overcome this problem of the chasm. They are translators: they take ideas and information from a highly specialized world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand.
that the same process occurs in the case of the fashion trends that periodically sweep through youth culture. The Innovators try something new. Then someone— the teen equivalent of a Maven or a Connector or a Salesman—sees it and adopts it. “Those kids make things more palatable for mainstream people. They see what the really wired kids are doing and they tweak it. They start doing it themselves, but they change it a bit. They make it more usable.
Perhaps the most sophisticated analysis of this process of translation comes from the study of rumors, which are—obviously—the most contagious of all social messages.
First of all the story was leveled. All kinds of details that are essential for understanding the true meaning of the incident were left out.
Then the story was sharpened. The details that remained were made more specific. A man became a spy. Someone who looked Asian became Japanese.
Finally, a process of assimilation took place: the story was changed so it made more sense to those spreading the rumor.
Psychologists have found that this process of distortion is nearly universal in the spread of rumors.
