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

by Malcolm Gladwell

somehow, that’s exactly what happened. The shoes passed a certain point in popularity and they tipped. How does a thirty-dollar pair of shoes go from a handful of downtown Manhattan hipsters and designers to every mall in America in the space of two years?

Contagiousness, in other words, is an unexpected property of all kinds of things, and we have to remember that, if we are to recognize and diagnose epidemic change.

Whether a child will practice deceit in any given situation depends in part on his intelligence, age, home background, and the like and in part on the nature of the situation itself and his particular relation to it.

we need to remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though that fact appears to violate some of our most deeply held assumptions about human nature.

The lesson of Ya-Ya and John Wesley is that small, close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic potential of a message or idea.

If you belong to a group of five people, Dunbar points out, you have to keep track of ten separate relationships: your relationships with the four others in your circle and the six other two-way relationships between the others. That’s what it means to know everyone in the circle.

The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.

in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action.

Kelly calls this the “fax effect” or the law of plentitude, and he considers it an extraordinarily radical notion. In the traditional economy, after all, value comes from scarcity.

Lexus realized that it had a captive audience of Mavens and that if they went the extra mile they could kick-start a word-of-mouth epidemic about the quality of their customer service — and that’s just what happened. The company emerged from what could have been a disaster with a reputation for customer service that continues to this day. One automotive publication later called it “the perfect recall.”