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.