Tipping Point - A Book Review

Yet another interesting insight from Malcolm Gladwell. This book talks about what it takes for ideas to click to  create epidemics  - positive or negative. It all begins with the "message" and he talks about different kinds of people - the Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.

Talking about the message his key point is about the "stickiness" of the message. The concept where a message does not goes through one ear and goes out via the other. He says the message should stick "you can't get it out of your head" for it to be effective.  Connectors are those who can take that sticky message out to the world using their multitude of connections. I guess the Facebooks and LinkedIns are popular purely because of this concept. Mavens are those who are truly passionate about the message that is being passed on. Salesmen are those who can be very persuasive about spreading the message. Talking about persuasion he stresses quite a bit on the "non-verbal" messages that accompany a message for it reach the intended audience.

One of the most interesting concepts I found was the Power of Context. "Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment.". He narrates a study where an experiment was conducted on a group of seminaries to test their "character". Not all of them demonstrated the behaviour of a "Good Samaritan" when forced to be in slightly different conditions. He says "....the convictions of the heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behaviour."

He talks about a "Social Channel Capacity" where he says that at any point one can be "close" to only 10-15 people. Any "network" beyond that he claims will be an overload. He says "To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting." A very strong statement I guess!!

There is something called "Transactional Memory".  "Not everything that we remember is actually stored inside our brains." The book says when people know each other so well, they create an implicit "joint memory system" -  a transactive memory system - which is based on an understanding of who is best suited to remember what kind of things. I suppose this is true of any kind of relationship - personal or business.

So...concepts like the above definitely gives an interesting view point on many things that are required to Tip a message.

Happy Reading!!

C