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

by Malcolm Gladwell

These three characteristics—one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment

The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.

These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.

When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused.

The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.

Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people—Salesmen—with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.

The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.

What we should be doing instead of fighting experimentation is making sure that experimentation doesn’t have serious consequences.