The Tipping Point

"The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell which was published by Little, brown and company is one of the best books that I have read in a decade.  The author who is a writer for The New Yorker magazine also wrote "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking".

One of the things that captivated me with this book was the excellent writing style which is combined with good research and interesting stories to support the thesis. 

Mr. Gladwell challenges the reader to think about things that make a difference when it comes to expertise.  He describes modern-day phenomena that explain what he terms "laws" that affect the way that our social world behaves.  At the same time, he links these ideas to the way that people's thinking is changed when is comes to seeing products or disseminating ideas because of specific occurrences that might be overlooked which become the "tipping point" that throws a commonplace event into a strong fad or marketing event.

Perhaps the author's words best describe this book. He states "The Tipping Point" is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple.  It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics.  Ideas and product and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do."

When you decide to start reading this book, I hope you will not have other plans because you will not want to put it down until you come to the very last page.