Just fin­ished a quick read of Mal­colm Glad­well’s “The Tip­ping Point: How Lit­tle Things Can Make a Big Dif­fer­ence.” I remem­ber devour­ing some of the orig­i­nal pieces in _The New Yorker_ and was thrilled when a friend loaned me a copy of the book.

Glad­well looks at how social phe­nom­e­non act as epi­demics. A retro shoe style like Hush Pup­pies might get picked up by cer­tain trend­set­ters, then by super-networkers, and from there into the mass media so that soon it seems every­one’s wear­ing it. The trans­mis­sion pat­tern for this pop­u­lar­i­ty looks a lot like the way dis­eases get passed along and you can ana­lyze it in sim­i­lar ways.
There are some impor­tant lessons in all this. The most impor­tant is that we are social beings, and the sucess of any idea (web­site, orga­ni­za­tion­al flow­chart, what­ev­er) is depen­dent upon social cri­te­ria. Glad­well breaks every­thing down to num­bered lists and his main the­sis is the “three rules of epi­demics.” In the “Law of the Few,” he argues that the best way to mar­ket some­thing is to get to the right peo­ple (what Glad­well calls the Mavens, Con­nec­tors and Sales­men) who will pro­pel it out­ward. In “The Stick­i­ness Fac­tor” he shows how just a small change in pre­sen­ta­tion can often cause a big dif­fer­ence in reten­tion. In the “Pow­er of Con­text” he tells sto­ries of peo­ple act­ing dif­fer­ent­ly than we might think just because of changes in con­text: we’re all less rigid­ly defined than we think.
The book sim­pli­fies things a lot and Glad­well has an overly-optimistic atti­tude toward cap­tial­ism. This book was writ­ten before Martha Stew­art’s fall from grace, before Enron’s col­lapse, and before a hun­dred dot-com fail­ures. It was also writ­ten before the Flori­da pres­i­den­tial recounts and Bush’s man­u­fac­tured war. We’ve learned that raw pow­er still counts more than a few low­er Man­hat­tan hip­sters in Hush Puppies.
For all its _New Yorker_ cre­den­tials, this book is filed under “Busi­ness” and it can trace its geneal­o­gy straight from Dale Carnegie’s _How to Make Friends and Influ­ence People_. Glad­well breaks every­thing down into num­bered lists and every rule is called by a buzz-friendly catch-phrase that’s all cap­i­tal­ized. This book is a fleshed out power-point pre­sen­ta­tion. (I high­ly rec­om­mend read­ing a used copy that’s had all the key points under­lined and the catch-phrases re-written in the margin).
Before you think I’m just dis­miss­ing the whole book, I should admit that a year ago I actu­al­ly sat down and read _How to Make Friends_ (sheep­ish­ly, pulling it out unob­tru­sive­ly every morn­ing on the train). I told myself I was read­ing it to under­stand the social phe­nom­e­non trig­gered by this 1937 clas­sic but like most like cheesy pop sen­sa­tions, I loved every minute of it. It was like eat­ing cot­ton can­dy. It’s a vision of Amer­i­ca, famil­iar and flat­ter­ing, dis­tilled into a can-do for­mu­la. Crack­ing open Carnegie and Glad­well is like set­tling into your seat for a good Jim­my Stew­art flick (“Just remem­ber this, Mr. Pot­ter: that this rab­ble you’re talk­ing about, they do most of the work­ing and pay­ing and liv­ing and dying in this com­mu­ni­ty. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a cou­ple of decent rooms and a bath?” _Yea!, you tell ’em George Bailey!_)
So of course I liked _The Tip­ping Point_. Here are some of the power-point con­cepts I’ve been think­ing about:
bq.. *The Mag­ic Num­ber One Hun­dred and Fifty.* Although one could prob­a­bly pick any num­ber out of a hat and find exam­ples of social phe­nom­e­non that peak at this lim­it, Glad­well makes a con­vinc­ing case that there’s a nat­ur­al opti­miza­tion of social­iza­tion and information-sharing that hap­pens when groups reach 150 or so mem­bers. He finds some exam­ples from biol­o­gy and busi­ness and while he does­n’t real­ly con­nect this up to his main the­sis (“If we are inter­est­ed in start­ing an epi­dem­ic… what are the most effec­tive kinds of groups,” p. 174), it is still inter­est­ing to note that there are a num­ber of Quak­er orga­ni­za­tions that hov­er around this lev­el. For exam­ple, FGC’s Cen­tral Com­mit­tee has about this many mem­bers and I sus­pect too many more would force the group become unnec­ces­sar­i­ly more com­plex and bureau­crat­ic. Most Quak­er meet­ings are incred­i­bly small by church stan­dards and I sus­pect most of their mem­bers would­n’t want to be part of a thousand-member con­gre­ga­tion. What sort of uncon­scious break does this put on our out­reach? What if Amer­i­can Quak­ers were to increase their num­bers by an order of mag­ni­tude? Would we estab­lish ten times as many small meet­ings or increase our cur­rent meet­ings’ mem­ber­ship by ten?
*The role of Con­nec­tors. We all know peo­ple who seem to know _everyone._* These are peo­ple Glad­well calls the “con­nec­tors” and they play a key role in trans­mit­ting infor­ma­tion out­side of the insid­er groups most of us inhab­it. I love these sorts of peo­ple, I love talk­ing with them and watch­ing them. I’m not nat­u­ral­ly one myself but I am curi­ous enough to reg­u­lar­ly stretch out­side my insid­er cir­cles and over the years I’ve trained myself to be more of a con­nec­tor than I think I nat­u­ral­ly am.
*The Stick­i­ness Fac­tor.* Small changes in the way we present infor­ma­tion can make a big dif­fer­ence in how its received. Glad­well gives exam­ples, all based on exten­sive test mar­ket­ing of the intend­ed audi­ence. Boy, how I’d like to see this sort of thing in the peace and Quak­er worlds. So many times we present the mes­sage we think we would like to hear, with­out regard as to how it might be received. In my web­site pub­lish­ing work, I often try to stress that board mem­bers and staff are pre­cise­ly not the tar­get audi­ence of the web­site and that we need to think beyond our own preconceptions.
p. I’m sure a whole class of go-getting mar­ket­ing whiz-kids read this book as soon as it came out, high­lighter pens in hand, ready to mine it for buzz phras­es and con­cepts (the term “tip­ping point” is cur­rent­ly fea­tured in a com­mer­cial for IBM). Too many of the sto­ries in the book are bro­ken down into tech­niques divorced from their mes­sage, divorced too from the fun­da­men­tal integri­ty of those trans­mit­ting it along. There’s a lot calo­ries in the book, but they’re tasty and a fun read going down.Malcolm Glad­well is a won­der­ful sto­ry teller and writer and I would rec­om­mend this book.

h4. Relat­ed Reading:
bq. Mal­colm Glad­well has a great web­site at “http://www.gladwell.com”:http://www.gladwell.com.