Why I Love This Book...

I really like Mr. Gladwell.  He is such a polite and articulate man.  I have read nearly everything he has written and I love to listen to him speak.  Unlike many writers, Malcolm Gladwell's voice is his writer's voice, a wonderfully warm writer's voice punctuated with a captivating style.  When he writes and speaks, he does a great job tying interesting concepts together that tell a story that is bigger than the sum of the parts.

However, as much as I like Mr. Gladwell, his style and his voice, I have to admit, I don't understand his meteoric rise to the strata of business thinking Guru.

Perhaps, it has to do with a prevailing optimistic belief that the next big thing, the next big break, is just around the corner waiting to "Tip".  A belief that latches onto the most recent Tip as if it is begging for the flattery of imitation.

Of course, this isn't Mr. Gladwell's fault.  He is the messenger bearing good, interesting and apparently applicable-to-me-and-my-situation news.  He is the messenger we love to listen to. We could be friends.  We could share a cup of hot tea and talk.  We might even call him Malcolm.

Fortunately, that's not all there is to Mr. Gladwell's writing.

I think part of the Gladwell phenomenon is because he is right.  Actually, I know he is right.  Not about the next Tip, people read that part into his message and then dream about making the Tip happen.  No, the next Tip is not where he is right.  Rather, it is in the Tip you hold in your hands when you read The Tipping Point.

In Malcolm's words, "The best way to understand the emergence of trends is to think of them as epidemics.  Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do"

This happens because of three elements that encourage spread:
1. Contagiousness
2. The ability for small causes to generate big effects
3. Change happening not gradually but at one dramatic moment

"The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is The Tipping Point."

In many ways, these thoughts echo the underlying concepts that Henry Hazlitt speaks to in Economics in One Lesson; small actions can have large, often unexpected, consequences that reach beyond the immediately visible.

While I may not agree with many of Gladwell's interpretations of events; particularly when the cause and effect relationships are better explained by empirical analysis, I have to agree with his underlying premise; ideas spread like a virus.

This truth, that ideas, like viruses, catch, spread and develop a life of there own is the foundation and enabler of much of today's popular thought and conventional wisdom.  In The Tipping Point, Mr Gladwell provides an invaluable insight into this phenomenon.  As such, he is deserving of his Guru status.

If only his acolytes would quit pushing for the next Tip long enough to see the truth in his writings.  Unfortunately, that part of the virus is out of everyone's hands.

Enjoy...

John