The Tipping Point

Dear John,

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Are we converging? You're right that Gladwell should have acknowledged the exploitive, manipulative potential of tipping points. Con artists can trick honest Mavens and Connectors into bringing their wealthy friends and acquaintances on board. Cult leaders and demagogues know all about the power of context. The political police of the old East Germany, the Stasi, recruited Ph.D. psychologists to train its officers to combat the spread of oppositional thinking by mapping relationships and isolating would-be Paul Reveres of democracy.

And tipping is indeed used in the marketplace to squelch competition, not just to give Gladwell's resourceful underdogs their day. The powerful have a way of commandeering populist ideas and technologies. Gladwell's Law of the Few can be traced to the conservative economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), who wrote of "the vital few and the trivial many."

But is The Tipping Point therefore lightweight? Here's where we still differ. I think it has important lessons, even if I'm skeptical about how many social judo moves we can find for our public dilemmas. Some of its assets are powerful concepts. Take the idea of "sharpening,'' the spuriously concrete details that grow up around rumors and urban legends. I had wanted to know more about it, and there it was on Pages 201-2. More important, The Tipping Point can indeed be read as a self-help book.

To return to my experience in publishing, all writers and editors would like their books to spread infectiously. But I couldn't test two titles or even two dust-jacket designs against each other as Gladwell's children's-television producers evaluated features. I could send five or 10 copies of new books to influential scientists--Mavens--but I knew that many of them had stacks of unsolicited proofs. So all that the author, and my colleagues, and I could do was to assume that every detail of content and manufacturing might contribute to a tipping point, whether the book was for an advanced or a popular audience. We had to produce something that could be hyped with a good conscience: The work ethic returns.

Connectors were essential. But I usually didn't have time to tell who they were. While reading The Tipping Point, I interviewed (for my next book) the co-designer of a celebrated reclining chair who told me that the product had become a sensation after the World War II largely because a one woman in Florida with a large circle of celebrity friends discovered it accidentally while following her interest in another invention. That break could not have been planned, but it might be repeated--that is, if the product is as beautiful, ingenious, and economical as the Barwa Chair. Next time, the person might be an ordinary person who happens to know a Connector. The lesson is vintage Dale Carnegie: Be nice to everybody.

In the public arena, too, The Tipping Point is meaningful. Political scientists preoccupied with models of modernization missed the biggest technological story of Iran in the 1970s: audio cassettes circulating among mullahs (Mavens) and pious bazaar merchants (Connectors) bearing the voice of Ayatollah Khomeini from exile in France. The collapse of the German Democratic Republic, Stasi and all, was equally unexpected by experts. The Tipping Point should remind us that politics also has an epidemic and contagious side. Against the current academic trend to quantitative modeling: History matters.

Gladwell's book takes us back to the old copybook maxims. That's what's both refreshing and disconcerting about its implications. For as one of my freshman lecturers remarked, "There is nothing more embarrassing to the educated mind than a true cliché."

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This week, a discussion of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (click hereto buy the book; click hereto read an excerpt). Edward Tenner is a visiting researcher in the Princeton Department of Geosciences and the author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (click hereto buy it). John Horgan is the author of The End of Science (click hereto buy it) and has written for Scientific American, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and numerous other publications.

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