I've read about Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point from many sources since it was originally published back in 2000.    Most recently my little sister said it's become a bit of a hot book in the b-school crowd.  I was doing my pre-biz trip book shopping in the airport bookstore, saw it prominently displayed, and decided to give it a try.

It was NOT very good.   It wasn't as bad as No Logo -- which actively made me angry -- but I truly fail to see why this book is considered so enlightening given the relatively lightweight intellectual content.  The back cover lays out the books' ambitious goal:

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.  Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate.  

Science geek that I am, I expected to see a Chaos-inspired model for identifying when things are close to a tipping point.   Are there interesting threshold conditions we can observe right before things go haywire?   If so, Gladwell's book doesn't enlighten us.

The hype-to-delivery ratio is similar to Smart Mobs -- provocative thesis but 90% of the book is just (limited) example after example.  You can clearly see in hindsight how each of Gladwell's scenarios constituted tipping point behavior BUT he provides very little structural material for figuring out when / if other tipping points are about to occur.  The false positive problem here is truly massive and never touched.

To Gladwell's credit, his examples are diverse and each individually enlightening.   The case studies from fashion, business, epidemiology, and so on left me incrementally educated about each of these fields.   He starts, for example, by examining the sudden, unexpected rise of Hush Puppies as a fashion statement in the late 90s (a fashion trend that apparently passed me by).   Cool NYC kids were visibly seen wearing  'em making a strong counter-cultural statement that other kids quickly wanted to emulate.   

Gladwell identifies 3 characteristics of "tipping":

• Contagiousness -- the underlying meme / gene / virus is visible and hops from peer to peer
• Small changes creating larger downstream ripples -- small changes in a tipping phenomena result in massive consequences.   Here, Gladwell has a huge intellectual debt to the Chaos / Fractal scientists who provided the core proofs
• Massive change happening at once rather than incrementally -- these consequences happen very quickly

In a great example of a narrow crossover point, one study examined teenage delinquency correlated with professional status of the neighborhood they are raised in [p 13]

...little difference in pregnancy rates or school drop-out rates in neighborhoods of between 40 and 5 percent of high-status workers.  But when the number of professionals dropped below 5 percent, the problems exploded

So there's a magical tipping point correlation between professionalism of parents and how teenagers that occurs right around 5%.   This is a cool factoid but the existence of these types of thresholds is old news.  Water has a startling tendency to suddenly organize & crystallize at 0C.  The existing of these thresholds even in social settings was well publicized in the early 90's when Chaos and Fractal science was in first bloom.

The book lays out 3 rules that lead to tipping points:

• law of the few - a small number of super contagious people (like Patient Zero of AIDS or the hipsters in NYC) are responsible for bootstrapping the epidemic
• stickiness factor - once you have it, you have it;  it doesn't pass out too quickly;  in an epidemic, the host can't die too quickly otherwise the epidemic collapses on itself.   Fashion trends, knowledge, etc. need to easily consummable by the target audience
• power of context - factors need to exist within the proper environment to manifest.   The message must be delivered in a specific manner to maximize stickiness.

Diving into the "law of the few" Gladwell lists 3 types of folks involved:

• connectors -- these are "people-people"  -- they literally know tons of people and "collect relationships" with others almost as a hobby.   They are key for spreading the word
• mavens -- recognized as experts -- they provide subject matter expertise and trust to communication of a social mem
• salesman -- persuasive folks who sell the meme even to skeptics

A chapter on stickiness discussed the need to find the right way to package your tipping phenomena.   He used GREAT examples from childrens' television to talk about how small changes in programming format led to BIG changes in retention.   But once again, the theory itself isn't that earth shattering -- his examples, being far outside of my realm of expertise were.

Finally, a chapter outlining context described how individuals withing different context behave different ways.   His best example was the sudden collapse in the crime rate in NYC once the "broken windows" policing policy had been put into place.   By eliminating the general air of "chaos", the policy was wildly successful.

I didn't feel like Gladwell's theory was very comprehensive.   There several, VERY obvious examples of tipping point phenomena I felt he could have examined for a more rigorous proof -- how about computer viruses & internet worms?   Or wars?  (WWI, WWII;  is Iraq about to become a tipping point for liberal democracy in the middle east?)   Without these elements, the book felt like some very lightweight generalizations built atop a loose set of anecdotes.  Where's the beef?