Review: The Tipping Point

Title: The Tipping Point

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Genre: Sociology

Trigger warnings: Mentions of murder/death

Back Cover:

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

Review:

Confession time: I “read” this as an audiobook. Actually the first audiobook I’ve listened to since Stuart Little in third grade. So my experience with this book (and how much I retained from it) is a little different than if I’d have read it as a traditional book. I picked it up, though, precisely because it was an audiobook, as my morning commute has gone from 10 minutes to 40 minutes and I decided to try to maximize my driving time. I also picked it up because I have several Malcolm Gladwell books on my reading list, and I honestly didn’t even read the back cover.

This book was definitely interesting. Gladwell presents a framework that explains how all trends, from fashion to products to crime rates, happen and why. He also explains the role of different kinds of people (who he calls “Mavens,” “Salesmen,” and “Connectors”) in starting and influencing trends. All in all, it made for a fascinating theory.

The main drawback is that it seems like just theory. The book was more illustrative than prescriptive – it gave a lot of examples of how things from crime to shoes fits into his framework, but it doesn’t actually give any practical advice on how to use that framework. There’s nothing that tells you specifically how to start a trend, influence a trend, plot the course of a current trend, or predict what’s going to be the next trend. It’s more about fitting what’s happened in the past into his framework than anything – which is interesting, but I’m all about practical application.

Overall, this was a good book. It was interesting, and the concept of the tipping point makes a lot of sense. But even though it was interesting, I didn’t find it useful, and that’s a big strike against it in my book.