The book explains why some ideas ‘tip’ or become really successful, while others never get off the ground. A lot of the book explained psychological reasons for why people behave the way we do in certain scenarios. From well known theories such as group think, to defining types of people, and the roles they play in the dissemination of ideas. I found Gladwells categorisation of people into connectors/mavens/salesmen intriguing, and spent a while thinking of various people I know and trying to categorise them accordingly. (It’s possible for someone to be in more than one category).

There’s also a lot of anecdotes in there to back up most of his points, coming from some wide and varied scenarios (The studies done by the Sesame Street researchers in order to create the perfect ‘sticky’ educational TV show for example). In some cases they do drag on a bit. In some cases there are multiple examples where one would have sufficed, but overall, it wasn’t tedious whilst hammering home the point.

My only gripe with the book was that there was no mention of the opposite scenario. There’s lots of examples of successful ideas that ‘tipped’, and some ideas that didn’t, but there are no examples or dissection of “Why don’t bad ideas die?”. Some ideas no matter how many times they get shot down seem to bubble back up to the surface every so often. I have some of my own theories why these zombie ideas never go away, but I would have liked to have read the authors take on it..

Anyway, rambling… Good book. Recommended. Wikipedia also has a pretty decent summary of all the points covered in the book.

Book review: The tipping point is a post from: codemonkey.org.uk

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