The Tipping Point (Gladwell 2002)

     Malcolm Gladwell. The Tipping Point (2002) Gladwell developed the book from an article in The New Yorker, and it shows. While the whole text is interesting, longeurs do threaten to set in before the halfway mark. Extending the text to book length required adding examples, which means repetitions. I read the first four chapters over a couple of days, then took almost three weeks to finish the book.
     Gladwell examines the tipping point in a social context, and identifies the factors that trigger a “social epidemic.” His bibliography suggests that he didn’t look at chaos theory, else he would have realised that he was discussing a classic chaotic system: a network of feedback loops that can change size and state very rapidly when one or more variables reach some threshold.
     It’s a tricky business identifying those variables and thresholds. Gladwell is most interesting (to me, anyway) when he discusses how experience established some of them. For example, Hutterites have found that when a colony reaches 150, it must fission. They’ve made it a rule. Just why group size has a negative effect on how well the group fulfills its goals when it passes 150 is “not well understood”. A priori, there is no reason to suppose that communication should become compromised at this size, but that’s what happens. The group size effect is important for management theory and practice: Gladwell has a case study that examines how one company rigorously enforces the group size rule when organising projects and expanding capacity.
     Gladwell is most interested in how insights into several factors can be be used to control and to trigger social epidemics. Marketers love the book for this reason, as the pre-title blurbs make only too clear. Group size, message “stickiness”, and the behaviours of key figures he labels connectors, mavens, and salesmen are key factors. He wrote the book before the rise of Facebook and other social platforms, which have magnified and accelerated social epidemics. For this reason alone, the book is worth reading. It certainly clarified my thinking about why and how Facebook has exacerbated tribal divisions.
     Despite its age, the book is not outdated. Recommended. ***½