Key lessons from The Tipping Point Who should read these blinks? Anyone who is interested in the way ideas spread Anyone who wants to learn how social epidemics break out Anyone who works in marketing, advertising or a related field Who wrote the book? Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist and the author of five best-selling books, including Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and Outliers: The Story of Success. Big ideas in small packages Review of The Tipping Point Price: $15.00 Rating: 60% Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for the New Yorker, has a way with words. He also has a way with ideas, and in this book posits an interesting concept: that major changes occur when things reach a "tipping point" (or "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point"). This idea is similar to that of the "paradigm shift", which is generally applied to science and our understanding of the world, but Gladwell attempts to show how it affects more mundane things: the sale of Hush Puppies shoes, epidemics, or the fall of crime in New York.

The first example in the book - that of how Hush Puppies went from being a moribund brand, sold only to the un-hip, to a hugely successful national brand, thanks to a handful of downtown New York trendsetters - is a prime example of how such shifts can occur. A group of "opinion makers" started wearing these shoes; others saw them and copied the style, with people even driving to out-of-the-way places to buy up stocks of Hush Puppies. Then a few fashion designers used them on the walkway, and visibility reached the "tipping point". The brand then experienced a renewal that, to this day, astounds even those in the company, who had been ready to throw in the towel. But Gladwell then strays from this concept, talking about Paul Revere's famous ride to warn patriots that "the British are coming". Gladwell says that this event "is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-of-mouth epidemic." But this doesn't fit in his other descriptions of "tipping points". After all, Revere's ride was a single incident - albeit an important one - but not one where anything "tipped".

He alerted lots of people, in part because he knew them and was known, but there was no accumulation effect that caused this "ride" to have its famous results. Gladwell should also talk about what I'll call the "dipping point", that point in a book when the reader starts paying less attention because of information overload. For me, this started on page 112, when Gladwell had already spent far too many pages trying to convince me that "stickiness" was a key factor in the success of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues. Stickiness seems to be that indescribable, yet analyzable, factor that keeps you attention "stuck" on something. In this case, it is what keeps pre-schoolers glued to the TV screen. But this seems to have little to do with any "tipping point"; sure, it may attract and hold people, and contribute to the popularity of these shows, but I dipped as Gladwell stretched this example out over too many pages. The problem is that when Gladwell talks about people, he is sticky; when he talks about technology and processes, he dips.

Chapter 2, The Law of the Few, talks about "connectors, mavens and salesmen", or three types of people who help spread ideas. Gladwell is in awe of all these people, and his prose is energetic. Yet when he describes the focus groups of pre-schoolers watching Sesame Street, it just gets turgid. Gladwell approaches the dramatic fall in crime in New York as a "tipping point", but tries to discount every meta-change that helped drop the crime rate: increased police presence, tougher sentencing, and, above all, a vibrant economy that lowered unemployment drastically among the underclass, those who commit crimes. He prefers to believe in some mystical force that "tipped" everyone from being mean to being nice. He claims that the first element that caused the tip was a crackdown on graffiti on subway cars: graffiti was cleaned off subway cars, showing the taggers that they would no longer be tolerated. Then it was a crackdown on fare-beating; stopping people from cheating obviously gave them new moral values.

He loses me when, talking about the 1984 incident when Bernard Goetz shot four youths who were harassing him on a subway train, he claims this: "...the showdown on the subway between Bernie Goetz and those four youths had very little to do, in the end, with the tangled psychological pathology of Goetz, and very little as well to do with the background and poverty of the four youths who accosted him, and everything to do with the message sent by the graffiti on the walls and the disorder at the turnstiles." This after describing how Goetz, after a stern upbringing and being mugged and injured, got a gun, with clear plans to become a vigilante. This, after describing how the four youths had all been previously arrested for assault, and how at least two of them were on drugs at the time. But Gladwell finds nothing more than graffiti and turnstile-jumping to be the cause. Balderdash! Goetz was mad as hell, and was not going to take it any more. It's interesting how a tipping point can work in reverse. When an author writes well, he draws you into his stories, but his conclusions can be too ludicrous to accept.

When the reader reaches that point, the BS detector goes on, and one starts noticing other stretches in logic, other concepts that just don't fit. He bandies around facts, ideas, studies and theories, none of which fit together neatly. But if you read the book enjoying the writing (Gladwell is a consummate journalist), you'll simply accept his ideas without question. Sort of the "power of context" that he describes in chapter 3, where he says that the environment where we do something is as important as what we do. The strong points of this book are many: an interesting idea, one that catches your mind; excellent writing; and a true desire, on the part of the author, to communicate with the reader. But the weak points are legion, and are an example of the current trend in "best-selling non-fiction books": a wealth of statistics, concepts and ideas, tossed about liberally, as if they are all being thrown against the wall to see which ones stick. There are so many, that the reader loses track, and actually loses sight of the initial idea behind the book.

Gladwell is constantly leaning on monkeys, cognitive science, psychological experiments, the organizational structure of companies, and obscure concepts, in the hope that, together, they coalesce into something that inspires the reader to "buy" his idea. But I got lost in the muddle of disparate ideas that Gladwell used to try and ensure that some of them "stick". In the end, I finished this book without being convinced by Gladwell's arguments. I might have been convinced had he been more focused, instead of flitting from one idea to another, quoting studies and statistics. Above all, I wasn't sold by his argument; I saw it as a "dipping point" because of the way he presented it. Other readers may feel differently, but to me this book is incomplete, overburdened by factoids, and strays too much from its otherwise interesting premise. Kirk McElhearn Kirk McElhearn ( kirk@mcelhearn.com ) is a freelance writer and translator living in a village in the French Alps. You can find out all about him at his web site, . Blink Blink Google Play Blink In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us.

Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren’t as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others? In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of “blink”: the election of Warren Harding; “New Coke”; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren’t those who process the most. © 2017 Malcolm Gladwell.

The Tipping Point, Mindfulness and Your Mental Health | Mindfulness and Psychotherapy The Tipping Point, Mindfulness and Your Mental Health By Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. ~ 2 min read Malcolm Gladwell wrote a best-selling book called The Tipping Point. In this book he discusses different products or ideas that have come up in history that at some point caught on to the masses. While it seems like crime may drop out of no-where in the mid-1990’s in certain cities or that Sesame Street just hit it big, a lot of little things happened to get to a tipping point where things catch on like wildfire. This can be a great metaphor for how many different stresses can arise in daily life to lead us into states of depression, anxiety, panic or addictive behavior. A variety of different interactions are at play between our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviors during any mood shift and an awareness of them can give us the ability to intervene before we reach the tipping point. The scenario: Maybe you woke up in the morning feeling tired; your brain associated that with a past depressive state, so you start to feel a bit down.

As you’re taking a shower, your mind begins to swim with all the responsibilities there are to do at work and home and by the time you get out of the shower your heart is racing a bit and your breath is slightly shallower. On your way out of the house you forget to say goodbye to your partner leading to feelings of disconnection and a memory of a recent argument bringing up feelings of frustration with the relationship. Moving through a barrage of traffic, subtle feelings of anxiousness are at play about being late, while thoughts swirl around about how you wish you would wake up earlier. By the time you arrive at work you feel overwhelmed and at the tipping point, ready to explode or implode. The thought comes, “I hate my job, things are never going to get better.” The interplay among all the various elements subtly build upon one another without our awareness. In practicing mindfulness we become more intimate with our thoughts, feelings, and emotions by learning to approach them and watch them with an attitude of curiosity or beginner’s mind. We become more aware of the nuances that build on one another that lead to that state of exploding or imploding.

With this awareness we can begin to intervene and choose a different approach that might be more effective in the moment (e.g., doing a mindfulness practice, taking a breath, relaxing our shoulders). While mindfulness teachers often recommend engaging in formal practices that you set time aside for, listen to and be guided by, you can also choose to engage in brief ones like the S.T.O.P , walking and checking in with how you’re feeling, breathing, or a R.A.I.N practice for 1 to 3 minutes a few times a day. These will help you become grounded and practice awareness of the present moment more often. Give it a try, treat it as an experiment with no agenda and see what arises. As always, please share your thoughts, stories, and questions below. Your interaction provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from. About Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. Book Review | 'Outliers: The Story of Success,' by Malcolm Gladwell - The New York Times The New York Times Sunday Book Review |Chance and Circumstance Search Continue reading the main story In 1984, a young man named Malcolm graduated from the University of Toronto and moved to the United States to try his hand at journalism.

Thanks to his uncommonly clear writing style and keen eye for a story, he quickly landed a job at The Washington Post. After less than a decade at The Post, he moved up to the pinnacle of literary journalism, The New Yorker. There, he wrote articles full of big ideas about the hidden patterns of ordinary life, which then became grist for two No. 1 best-selling books. In the vast world of nonfiction writing, he is as close to a singular talent as exists today. Or at least that’s one version of the story of Malcolm Gladwell. Here is another: In 1984, a young man named Malcolm graduated from the University of Toronto and moved to the United States to try his hand at journalism. No one could know it then, but he arrived with nearly the perfect background for his time. His mother was a psychotherapist and his father a mathematician. Their professions pointed young Malcolm toward the behavioral sciences, whose popularity would explode in the 1990s. His mother also just happened to be a writer on the side.

So unlike most children of mathematicians and therapists, he came to learn, as he would later recall, “that there is beauty in saying something clearly and simply.” As a journalist, he plumbed the behavioral research for optimistic lessons about the human condition, and he found an eager audience during the heady, proudly geeky ’90s. His first book, “The Tipping Point,” was published in March 2000, just days before the Nasdaq peaked. These two stories about Gladwell are both true, and yet they are also very different. The first personalizes his success. It is the classically American version of his career, in that it gives individual characteristics — talent, hard work, Horatio Alger-like pluck — the starring role. The second version doesn’t necessarily deny these characteristics, but it does sublimate them. The protagonist is not a singularly talented person who took advantage of opportunities. He is instead a talented person who took advantage of singular opportunities. Gladwell’s latest book, “Outliers,” is a passionate argument for taking the second version of the story more seriously than we now do. “It is not the brightest who succeed,” Gladwell writes.

“Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story He doesn’t actually tell his own life story in the book. (But he lurks offstage, since he does describe the arc of his mother’s Jamaican family.) Instead, he tells other success stories, often using the device of back-to-back narratives. He starts with a tale of individual greatness, about the Beatles or the titans of Silicon Valley or the enormously successful generation of New York Jews born in the early 20th century. Then he adds details that undercut that tale. Continue reading the main story So Bill Gates is introduced as a young computer programmer from Seattle whose brilliance and ambition outshine the brilliance and ambition of the thousands of other young programmers. But then Gladwell takes us back to Seattle, and we discover that Gates’s high school happened to have a computer club when almost no other high schools did. He then lucked into the opportunity to use the computers at the University of Washington, for hours on end.

By the time he turned 20, he had spent well more than 10,000 hours as a programmer. Photo Credit Illustration by Stephen Doyle At the end of this revisionist tale, Gladwell asks Gates himself how many other teenagers in the world had as much experience as he had by the early 1970s. “If there were 50 in the world, I’d be stunned,” Gates says. “I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time, and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events.” Gates’s talent and drive were surely unusual. But Gladwell suggests that his opportunities may have been even more so. Many people, I think, have an instinctual understanding of this idea (even if Gladwell, in the interest of setting his thesis against conventional wisdom, doesn’t say so). That’s why parents spend so much time worrying about what school their child attends. They don’t really believe the child is so infused with greatness that he or she can overcome a bad school, or even an average one. And yet when they look back years later on their child’s success — or their own — they tend toward explanations that focus on the individual.

Devastatingly, if cheerfully, Gladwell exposes the flaws in these success stories we tell ourselves. The book’s first chapter explores the anomaly of hockey players’ birthdays. In many of the best leagues in the world, amateur or professional, roughly 40 percent of the players were born in January, February or March, while only 10 percent were born in October, November or December. It’s a profoundly strange pattern, with a simple explanation. The cutoff birth date for many youth hockey leagues is Jan. 1. So the children born in the first three months of the year are just a little older, bigger and stronger than their peers. These older children are then funneled into all-star teams that offer the best, most intense training. By the time they become teenagers, their random initial advantage has turned into a real one. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy At the championship game of the top Canadian junior league, Gladwell interviews the father of one player born on Jan. 4. More than half of the players on his team — the Medicine Hat Tigers — were born in January, February or March.

But when Gladwell asks the father to explain his son’s success, the calendar has nothing to do with it. He instead mentions passion, talent and hard work — before adding, as an aside, that the boy was always big for his age. Just imagine, Gladwell writes, if Canada created another youth hockey league for children born in the second half of the year. It would one day find itself with twice as many great hockey players. “Outliers” has much in common with Gladwell’s earlier work. It is a pleasure to read and leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward. It also, unfortunately, avoids grappling in a few instances with research that casts doubt on those theories. (Gladwell argues that relatively older children excel not only at hockey but also in the classroom. The research on this issue, however, is decidedly mixed.) This is a particular shame, because it would be a delight to watch someone of his intellect and clarity make sense of seemingly conflicting claims. For all these similarities, though, “Outliers” represents a new kind of book for Gladwell. “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” his second book, were a mixture of social psychology, marketing and even a bit of self-help.

“Outliers” is far more political. It is almost a manifesto. “We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that 13-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur,” he writes at the end. “But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one 13-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?” After a decade — and, really, a generation — in which this country has done fairly little to build up the institutions that can foster success, Gladwell is urging us to rethink. Once again, his timing may prove to be pretty good. OUTLIERS The Tipping Point | Alternet News & Politics The Tipping Point Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell talks about how the worlds of fashion, crime, smoking and taste all follow the patterns of a contagious disease.

Comments "A world that follows the rules of epidemics is a very different place from the world we think we live in now," Malcolm Gladwell writes in the introduction to his best-selling new book, "The Tipping Point." The kingdom of epidemics turns out to be one we already inhabit in much of our lives. In the book, Gladwell shows how the worlds of fashion, crime, smoking and taste all follow the patterns of contagious disease. Beneath those seemingly diverse fields lies a recurring phenomenon, captured in the book's understated subtitle: little things make a big difference. In epidemics -- as in most non-linear systems -- dramatic change can happen suddenly, almost without warning. A virus circulates quietly through a population, and then something changes in the environment -- or in the virus itself -- and it explodes. That moment used to be called a "phase transition" in the language of chaos theory, but for Gladwell it's the "tipping point." Tipping points can be terrifying things, as the influenza outbreak of 1918 demonstrated, but they are also cause for hope.

For many people, Gladwell first made a name for himself as a journalist with an essay published in The New Yorker that examined the tipping point that New York City experienced in the mid-nineties, as the annual murder rate dropped suddenly from two thousand to seven hundred in the space of three years. Gladwell became one of the first public voices to explore the now-famous "broken windows" hypothesis, and The New Yorker essay became the basis for a widely-Xeroxed book proposal that landed him a lavish contract with Little Brown. Two years later, the final book has arrived, to mostly positive reviews and brisk sales on Amazon. It even appears to have "tipped" in the business community, surprising Gladwell himself, who says now he had "no idea" who the audience for the book was going to be. I spoke with Gladwell over lunch at the JOHNSON offices in Manhattan, as a torrential rainstorm flooded the streets of Soho. He was entertaining, emphatic, and surprisingly self-deprecating for a writer with such confidence and range on the page. We talked about smoking, his generational relationship to AIDS and New York City's crime situation.

JOHNSON: So let's talk first about how "The Tipping Point" came into being. You talk about the book as a kind of biography of an idea, and I was curious about the autobiography of the idea. What first inspired you to write it? GLADWELL: I got interested in epidemics because I was covering AIDS. I'm of the generation that came to intellectual maturity during the age of AIDS. So in a way it made perfect sense that I should be so interested in epidemics -- it grows out of that kind of generational obsession, an obession that our parents didn't share. Our parents' parents may well have had something like it, but even then, you know, the flu epidemic of 1918 didn't inspire any cultural obsession. In fact, it was immediately swept under the rug the minute after it was over. No one wrote a thing about it. Whereas AIDS, by contrast, is something that we obsessed about. JOHNSON: And it was a cultural event as much as it was a medical one. GLADWELL: Yes. The epidemic of 1918 was not a cultural event. So that was kind of the beginning of the book.

And when I was covering HIV it just became clear that epidemics are deeply interesting things. They work in really kind of weird ways. And just from a kind of "gee whiz" standpoint, a lot of epidemiological research is just really cool. It wins the cool battle. (Laughter) And then I just, I mean, the germ of the book is simply the incredibly banal observation that things other than viruses are contagious. Right? And so why not use all this wonderful work about contagion and epidemics and apply it to non-disease epidemics. So I don't think there's any great leap that hasn't been made before, but I just wanted to play with it -- in realms and in areas where people hadn't necessarily played with it before. JOHNSON: So do you have an ideal reader for the book? GLADWELL: I don't. Actually, once I'd written it, I had no idea whatsoever who the audience was going to be. And when people before publication asked about where in the bookstore they ought to shelve it, I'd be completely lost. (Laughter) As it turns out, it's becoming a business book to my astonishment and delight.

The earlier adopters were people in the nonprofit worlds, but it's taken a hold of marketers, which is actually interesting to me because I actually don't think of the book as being that prescriptive. I tell lots of stories, but a lot of those stories are being told in hindsight. I mean, I think you can draw some important lessons, and I can talk about things that I think marketers take out of it and should take out of it. But I never pretended that I can call epidemics in advance. People always say to me, "What do you think is going to tip next?" And I have no idea. (Laughter) JOHNSON: Let's talk about this wild passage kind of at the end of the discussion of the New York City crime situation, where you write, "This is what I meant when I called the power of context a radical theory. Giuliani and [former New York City Police Commissioner] Bratton -- far from being conservatives, as they are commonly identified -- actually represent on the question of crime the most extreme liberal position imaginable. A position so extreme that it's almost impossible to accept." That's a pretty contrarian position.

GLADWELL: Well, the idea is that for years and years in this country -- if you go back to the way we talked about crime in the 1980s, particularly the conservative movement -- there were a series of arguments that presented the notion of criminality as a trait, as a permanent feature of certain people's lives. It was either that there was a genetic element, or there was some permanent maladaptive psychological transformation, or the William Bennett approach, which is that society, the general lack of moral cohesion in society, had essentially corrupted certain people permanently. We've forgotten this, because our memories are so short when it comes to crime; we've forgotten that for years and years and years in the seventies and the eighties and the early nineties, we thought of crime in the urban context as a permanent condition. Because we thought of criminality as an inherent trait. And so it was thought that we could do very little about crime, except to arrest criminals and throw away the key or run to the suburbs and live in gated communities, or just to kind of barricade ourselves into our houses.

Giuliani and Bratton come along and they say, "Oh, actually the cops can do an incredible amount to bring down crime, if we just change the technical aspects of policing." And some of those changes are good and some are bad -- I'm not passing moral judgement. But if we frisk kids, if we take the graffiti off, if we reduce the quality-of-life crimes, if we use computers to deploy cops in the right way, then actually we can cut criminal behavior by seventy-five percent over three years. We don't have to do a single thing to affect the fundamental disposition, the character of the population. They're doing nothing to change the psychological circumstances or the economic circumstances or the social circumstances. They're doing nothing to improve the economies of the inner city, to improve the schools. Zero. They're not even concerned with that. They are merely tinkering with the technical particulars of policing. And they can bring about this huge change. This city had this overnight transformation in crime that was not accompanied by any long term demographic or economic change. People from time to time bring up some demographics they think are responsible, but our population did not get younger -- that happened before the drop in crime, not during.

The economies of the inner city, the neighborhoods of this city did not get better during this period -- they got worse, because it coincides with the cut in social spending. The Machiavellian genius of the study was such that you didn't even have to make the economy better, you could make the economy worse and still lower the crime rate. It's hard to wrap your mind around this, but they proved that the crime rate had nothing to do with the inherent nature of the criminal. It had everything to do with situation, with context, with changing the context in which crime appears. Now, first of all, that is a massive repudiation of everything the conservatives said in the 1980s, and in that sense, Giuliani could not be more at odds with William Bennett, right? Because Bennett said something 180 degrees different. Point A. But point B is that they're picking up on a similar argument we made in the sixties when we said that the situation matters and that criminality wasn't inherent. We were obsessed with these environmental factors causing crimes, but we were obsessed back then with macroenvironmental factors, with, you know, poverty, racism, unemployment, drug use.

Giuliani has gotten so far to the left on this, that he's even rejected all of that kind of structural environmental factors, and is just now focused on the immediate details of the environment. It is a position so out there, it's in a certain sense hilarious, but also it's scary. I mean, what I didn't get into in the book is the political implications of what Giuliani has done in New York with crime. I think we will be dealing with these implications for the next twenty-five years. Because there was an implicit contract -- social contract, political contract -- made between the left and the right in this country for many years when it came to social programs. And that is, conservatives went along with social programs, because they were convinced there was something in it for them. And this wasn't always articulated, but I believe it was deeply felt, and it was at the core of the political behavior of the right in this country for many years. If you were a suburban politician from, you know, outside Atlanta, a hard-core Republican, you went along with all these social programs, which did not benefit your own constituency, because you believed they benefited you indirectly, in that they bought you social peace.

In other words, if you needed to create a crime-free environment for your constituency, the way you bought a crime-free environment was that you spent heavily in order to improve the macroenvironment of the inner city. Giuliani has come along and said, "You know what? You don't have to do that anymore. In fact, it's irrelevant. I can cut social spending and I can still bring down crime." The example of New York City has, I believe, permanently ruptured this incredibly useful alliance that existed between liberals and conservatives in this country. It's over. When we go back and we have this debate, ten years from now, five years from now, when we're in the middle of a recession, and all of a sudden they're all up to people in the inner city who don't have jobs, and all of a sudden there's a huge question about how big your AFDC paycheck is, the Republicans are not going to be lined up anymore to vote for these things. They're going to say, "You know what? There's no reason for them." They're not committed to these programs on a moral basis. They're committed to these programs on a pragmatic basis, and the pragmatic basis has now been removed.

And so it is incumbent on all of those who believe in a progressive social policy, an active social policy, to come up with a new rationale. JOHNSON: Speaking of social policy, let's move on to the smoking debate. Because that's a point in which you really are the most prescriptive, and you've got a plan there that's very persuasive. GLADWELL: I think if you look at smoking, it becomes clear that there's very little you can do to stop the spread of the behavior. There's an internal logic to smoking that has to do with the way that teens perceive certain kinds of character traits and behaviors that are privileged -- and there's very little we can do about it. And, in fact, to the extent that the authorities have tried to convince teens that smoking isn't cool, they're just enhancing the very qualities of smoking that appeals to teens in the first place, which is that it's an act of rebellion. The louder that we have argued in recent years about smoking, the more teens have smoked. It's been an utter and complete failure. So the question is what do you do?

Well, I think you can stop this epidemic by preventing not the experimentation with smoking, but making sure that the results of that experimentation are not permanent. And there are several ways to do this. One is to find some way to interfere in the addictive process of nicotine. A nicotine addiction first of all is very clearly a threshold process. It is not the case that if you smoke a little you get addicted a little, if you smoke a lot you get addicted a lot. You smoke and smoke and smoke and smoke and smoke, and once you hit a certain amount of nicotine -- and it varies from person to person, but it's fairly consistent -- once you hit a certain amount of nicotine, then you become addicted. It is possible to smoke at a low level and not be addicted, which is something we learned relatively recently. So given this threshold process, if we can keep the level of nicotine and cigarettes below that threshold for beginning smokers, we can prevent them during the period when they are experimenting with cigarettes from getting addicted. Now there is a problem with that -- a practical problem with doing that in the real world -- and that is that if you lower nicotine in all cigarettes, people that are already hooked will compensate by smoking more in order to get their dose.

But if they smoke more, they're going to die faster. Because the dangerous thing in cigarettes, of course, is not the nicotine, but all the other components. So there's a problem in the implementation of this in the short run. Now, you may be able to do things like, you know, encourage at least the presence of some low-nicotine cigarettes, but then teens will just gravitate towards the high-nicotine ones. But there are other things you can do. We also have now at our disposal a series of drugs, and we will get more soon, like Zyban, which are incredibly effective in diminishing the addictive consequences of nicotine in some people. In fact, Zyban plus the patch is -- the numbers are not to be believed how good they are in helping people quit smoking. And what amazes me is, and this goes back to my earlier rant, even as we have been shaking down cigarette companies for all of this money, no one has suggested that some of that money go to treatment on demand for nicotine addiction. If you're a smoker, you ought to be able to get, for free, both Zyban if you want it or the patch if you want it.

I mean, all of this stuff should be available to you. After all, isn't that why we've gotten hundreds of millions of dollars out of the cigarette companies, if not to treat the people that they've enslaved? Well, you know, we're spending it on cultural centers and bridges and PCs in classrooms. Which I think is an outrage. JOHNSON: I was also thinking about how The Tipping Point relates to the Web. I was curious how historically specific you think your model of cultural epidemics is. You go back to Paul Revere's ride and other older historical examples, but when you're talking about tastes and how tastes are formed, these things are very much dependent on the communications technologies of the day. You and I have both written about this in different places: Television probably pushes us a little bit more towards a top-down system, but presumably the Web is a technology that's pushing us in the other direction. GLADWELL: Absolutely. Yes. JOHNSON: Here's one quote I found that I thought related to this, even though you're not talking about the Web at all.

You write: "Another study found that if you ask somebody why he's friendly with someone else, he'll say it's because he and his friends share similar attitudes. But if you actually quiz the two of them on their attitudes, you'll find out what they actually share is similar activities. We're friends with the people we do things with as much as we are with the people we resemble." But I wonder if the Web is one of these forces that is actually introducing you more and more to people whose tastes you share? And so whatever kind of lateral forces that are unleashed by that will only get stronger. GLADWELL: The top-down world had the effect of reinforcing and of exaggerating this idea of loyalty, whether it's to a brand or to an activity or to an idea. Top-down is very status-quo. It locks people into relationships. The effect of the kind of relationships I'm interested in -- and of the Web -- is to fight, first and foremost, loyalty. Look at the role of mavens in the supermarket world and the world of grocery shopping, which is where we've studied this the most. These guys are not enforcing loyalty.

They are the agent that breaks loyalty, because, left to your own devices, you would go to Gristede's. But the maven calls you up and says, "Did you know that there's a great deal on such and such at this store that you never go to? You ought to go there." He breaks you out of your habit. He enforces the business of the market, which says that you ought to go where the best price is or the best service is, not that you ought to go where you've always gone. Right? Most of us don't think about that. The maven thinks for us. So the maven is a force for volatility, and he's a force against the kind of structured, status-quo relationships that have been enforced by this kind of top-down system. He's fighting the effect of advertising; he's a collaborative filter. You already know about the blockbuster. You need the maven, because he tells you about the sleeper. And the Web has the same effect, say, with all those kinds of sites that find you the best price. We're absolutely right to think that those are very transformative. They're doing what mavens do.

They're institutionalizing the maven, breaking those patterns of very status-quo-oriented brand loyalty. You can also think about the role that the Web has in facilitating the role of connectors. It exaggerates the ability of certain people to be in contact with lots of other people. Which is another profoundly subversive act. Because, once again, it's granting power to people who aren't in the normal power structure. JOHNSON: Paul Krugman wrote an interesting op-ed about your book in the Times, which critiqued some of your more optimistic hopes using the tipping point in social policy. His point was that people have looked at this kind of nonlinear behavior for the last couple of decades, and they've been able to show how little things can have large effects, with hindsight. But as a way of predicting or triggering behavior looking forward, it's much harder to do. GLADWELL: That was an interesting critique, and it's a function of where he's coming from. When I was making a lot of my arguments, I was not coming from an academic, economic standpoint, but more from a kind of traditional marketing standpoint.

What I was reacting to in the book was this notion that was out there that you could affect major change in people's behavior and people's thinking and ideas through a very traditional top-down approach. In other words, it was the impression of many people for many years that behavior was predictable. That if you bought enough advertising time and if you had the right corporate spokesman, and if you did all these kind of things, things would happen. And I became convinced that this is not the case. I thought that the top-down view was an incredibly unsophisticated view of human behavior. And my book was an attempt to re-mystify human behavior in a certain sense. To say, "You know what? It's not that straightforward." There are these organic methods of communication that are not dependent upon people of status or formal communication. They're dependent on, as in the word-of-mouth example, people who play a personal role in our lives. Personality types that are randomly distributed that have nothing to do with intelligence, income, education, make of car, size of house. That have to do with somebody's either innate personality or the nature of their relationship to us, which is unknowable by a marketer.

And also when you argue, as I do, that communication and social change is happening because of the actions of a very, very small number of influential people, then what you're saying is that the marketplace is unbelievably volatile. I thought I was reintroducing volatility into the equation, because I thought it had been taken out prematurely by people who assume that the world worked in this very kind of straightforward, prosaic manner. I'm saying no, no, it doesn't. It's in the hands of these people who we have no way of knowing. Good luck trying to find them. Because they're not in the directory, and you can't do it by people who went to Harvard who make more than one hundred thousand a year. So, in a certain sense, Krugman's critique is one that I wholeheartedly agree with. (Laughter) Which makes me puzzled as to why he thinks it's a critique. Amazon.com: Books Books Books Advanced Search New Releases Best Sellers The New York Times® Best Sellers Children's Books Textbooks Textbook Rentals Sell Us Your Books Best Books of the Month Kindle eBooks Malcolm Gladwell Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996.

He is the author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. Prior to joining The New Yorker, he was a reporter at the Washington Post. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He now lives in New York. The Tipping Point The Tipping Point Google Play The Tipping Point 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. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas. © 2017 Malcolm Gladwell.

Question: Who wrote the best selling book The Tipping Point?
Answer: Malcolm Gladwell