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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Dunbar’s argument is that brains evolve, they get bigger, in order to handle the complexities of larger social groups. 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. You have to understand the personal dynamics of the group, juggle different personalities, keep people happy, manage the demands on your own time and attention, and so on.

If you belong to a group of twenty people, however, there are now 190 two-way relationships to keep track of: 19 involving yourself and 171 involving the rest of the group. That’s a fivefold increase in the size of the group, but a twentyfold increase in the amount of ...

Even a relatively small increase in the size of a group, in other words, creates a significant additional ...

Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the com...

Dunbar has actually developed an equation, which works ...

“The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”

“Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people,” Bill Gross, one of the leaders of a Hutterite colony outside Spokane told me. “When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another.”

“In smaller groups people are a lot closer. They’re knit together, which is very important if you want to be effective and successful at community life,” Gross said. “If you get too large, you don’t have enough work in common. You don’t have enough things in common, and then you start to become strangers and that close-knit fellowship starts to get lost.”

“What happens when you get that big is that the group starts, just on its own, to form a sort of clan.”

“You get two or three groups within the larger group. That is something you really try to prevent, and when it happens it is a good time to branch out.”

If we want groups to serve as incubators for contagious messages, then, as they did in the case of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or the early Methodist church, we have to keep groups below the 150 Tipping Point.

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 don’t see that at Lucent. They are removed.

What Buckley is referring to here is the benefit of unity, of having everyone in a complex enterprise share a common relationship.

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.

Transactive memory is part of what intimacy means.

“Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems,” he writes. “They once were able to discuss their experiences to reach a shared understanding....They once could count on access to a wide range of storage in their partner, and this, too, is gone....The loss of transactive memory feels like losing a part of one’s own mind.”

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.

Women tend to be the “experts” in child care, even in modern, dual-career families, because their initial greater involvement in raising a baby leads them to be relied on more than the man in storing child-care information, and then that initial expertise leads them to be relied on even more for child-care matters, until—often unintentionally—the woman shoulders the bulk of the intellectual responsibility for the child.

“When each person has group-acknowledged responsibility for particular tasks and facts, greater efficiency is inevitable,” Wegner says. “Each domain is handled by the fewest capable of doing so, and responsibility for the domains is continuou...

psychological preconditions for transactive memory: 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.

It’s the re-creation, on an organization-wide level, of the kind of intimacy and trust that exists in a family.

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. It makes the company incredibly efficient.

It means that cooperation is easier. It means that you move much faster to get things done or create teams of workers or find out an answer to a problem. It means that people in one part of the company can get access to the impressions and expertise of people in a completely different part of the company.

“It’s hard to appreciate that unless you are working in it. It’s the advantage of understanding people’s strengths. It’s knowing—where can I get my best advice? And if you have some knowledge about people, you can do that.”

In order to be unified—in order to spread a specific, company ideology to all of its employees—Gore had to break itself up into semi-autonomous small pieces.

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.

Rebecca Wells says that what she began to realize as the Ya-Ya epidemic grew was that it wasn’t really about her or even about her book: it wasn’t one epidemic focused on one thing. It was thousands of different epidemics...

“I began to realize,” she said, “that these women had built their own Ya-Ya relationships, not so much t...

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. One of the most famous diffusion studies is Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross’s analysis of the spread of hybrid seed corn in Greene County, Iowa, in the 1930s.

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. They were the opinion leaders in the community, the respected, thoughtful people who watched and analyzed what those wild Innovators were doing and then followed suit.

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.

If you plot that progression on a graph, it forms a perfect epidemic curve— starting slowly, tipping just as the Early Adopters start using the seed, then rising sharply as the Majority catches on, and falli...

The first two groups—the Innovators and Early Adopters—are visionaries. They want revolutionary change, something that sets them apart qualitatively from their competitors. They are the people who buy brand-new technology, before it’s been perfected or proved or before the price has come down.

They have small companies. They are just starting out. They are willing to take enormous risks.

The Early Majority, by contrast, are big companies. They have to worry about any change fitting into their complex arrange...

“If the goal of visionaries is to make a quantum leap forward, the goal of pragmatists is to make a percentage improvement—incrementa...

“If they are installing a new product, they want to know how other people have fared with it. The word risk is a negative word in their vocabulary—it does not connote opportunity or excite...

They will undertake risks when required, but they first will put in place safety nets and man...

Moore’s argument is that the attitude of the Early Adopters and the attitude of the Early Majority ar...

Innovations don’t just slide effortlessly from one group to the next. There i...

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 th...

That’s clearly not an easy task either. How did they do it? 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. In the chapter on the Law of the Few, I talked about how their special social gifts can cause epidemics to tip.

Here, though, it is possible to be much more specific about what they do. They are the ones who make it possible for innovations t...

are translators: they take ideas and information from a highly specialized world and translate them into a langua...

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. Maybe there’s a kid who rolls up his jeans and puts duct tape around the bottom because he’s the one bike messenger in the school. Well, the translators like that look. But they won’t use tape. They’ll buy something with Velcro.

others say, that’s so cool.

They look at it and say, it’s a little off. But there’s a way I can change it and make it okay. Then it takes off.”