6. The Tipping Point: How Little Things can make a big difference
Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 book links naturally with Seth Godin’s ideasvirus. It was described by the Daily Telegraph as “a wonderfully offbeat study of that little-understood phenomenon, the social epidemic”. He uses as examples Baltimore’s problem with syphilis, the Ride of Paul Revere that sparked the American War of Independence, New York’s success in reducing its high crime rate, the sudden resurgence of the Hush Puppy and the success of the children’s TV show Sesame Street. Revealing how these things take off also shows the mechanisms that can make any business more popular, better known and used.
Gladwell identifies three key factors that he calls:
- The Law of the Few – that a few key people have a disproportionate effect.
- The ‘Stickiness’ Factor – that small changes in presentation can make enormous difference to the effect of a message.
- The Power of Context – ‘epidemics’ are very sensitive to time, place and the external situation.
The thing that I believe is quite different about Gladwell’s approach is that most business writers think in terms of grand strategies, getting the vision right, complex operations to get the delivery right and use all sorts of success stories to prove how ‘right’ their particular theory is. They focus on the ‘big issues’.
What Gladwell highlights is how lots of relatively small things – and particularly in combination – can make enormous differences. And intuitively to me this seems right. Because the best-laid plans do go completely wrong and unplanned things can sometimes go surprisingly right. And these can often be post-rationalised, but the reasons can often be relatively trivial. Which is why the world in general and business in particular is particularly unpredictable. That does not mean give up the palnning, but it does mean look at the implications of the small things and try to take them into account.
