The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

by Malcolm Gladwell

“I just came back from Lucent Technologies up in New Jersey,” Buckley told me. “It’s the plant where they make cells that operate our cellular phones—the pods, the boxes up and down I-95 that carry the signals. I spent a day in their plant. They have six hundred and fifty people. At best, their manufacturing people know some of their design people. But that’s it. They don’t know any of the salespeople. They don’t know the sales-support people. They don’t know the R and D people. They don’t know any of these people, nor do they know what is going on in those other aspects of the business. The pressure I’m talking about is the kind you get when salespeople are in the same world as the manufacturing people, and the salesperson who wants to get a customer order taken care of can go directly and talk to someone they know on the manufacturing team and say, I need that order. Here’s two people. One is trying to make the product, one is trying to get the product out. They go head to head and talk about it. That’s peer pressure. You

One of the problems at Lucent. Too big to know everyone.

don’t see that at Lucent. They are removed. In the manufacturing realm, they had a hundred and fifty people, and they worked closely together and there was peer pressure about how to be the best and how to be the most innovative. But it just didn’t go outside the group. They don’t know each other. You go into the cafeteria and there are little groups of people. It’s a different kind of experience.”

Coninued from last page.

an implicit joint memory system—a transactive memory system—which

What Harris argues is that this is also true more generally, that the environmental influence that helps children become who they are—that shapes their character and personality—is their peer group.

My sense is that the way adolescent society has evolved in recent years has increased the potential for this kind of isolation. We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves — and less time in the company of adults. We have given them e-mail and beepers and, most of all, cellular phones, so that they can fill in all the dead spots in their day — dead spots that might once have been filled with the voices of adults — with the voices of their peers. That is a world ruled by the logic of word of mouth, by the contagious messages that teens pass among themselves. Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teenagers. It will not be the last.