Tipping points

Was talking to my friend Eric yesterday when he suggested that I read Gladwell's The Tipping Point and think about some of its implications for the way I should be trying to generate business for myself.  This is a different way of thinking for me.  As a blogger seeking to pretend to a certain Zen level of generating a General Theory of Everything which will wow and generally overawe my readers, when I have read Gladwell in the past it has, naturally, generally been in the spirit of competition.  As in, "though I'll never have hair as good as Gladwell's, my blog is nonetheless deeper than his writings, and therefore I am superior."  You can see the fruits of my sophomoric sniping during my first reading of this book by following this link.

So now I'll go back and reread Gladwell, more in the spirit Eric suggested of trying to take useful nuggets from it which will help me provide good services to clients and thereby generate more business. We'll see how it goes.

The dipping point

The Times coverage of Heath Ledger's death brought to mind earlier instances of young idols killing themselves, begetting imitators, and being considered bellwethers (frankly, I hadn't thought of Ledger as a big deal, cute though he may have been). The writer pulls up Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther as a reference point where lots of young people had gone out and killed themselves after the book came out.

Back to Malcolm Gladwell and The Tipping Point, where the author drones on and on about suicide epidemics in Micronesia. Why didn't Gladwell have anything to say about the Werther suicides or other similar incidents (including the "Eseninschina" outbreak in Russia after Sergei Esenin killed himself in 1925, and which led Mayakovsky* to write a poem to pull young folks back from the brink of death[and before he capped himself on April 14, 1930] )? He should have at least remembered Werther. My point is, Gladwell's seeming polymathism is a little shallow. He shoulda had some of them New Yorker fact-checkers and fact-suggesters working with him.



*By the way, since Mayakovsky rears his head here again, lets return for a moment to the provenance of this blog, a short poem from 1913:

Eat your pineapples,
Chew your grouse,
Your days days are coming,
You bourgeois louse

I think that about says it all.

The Tipping Point

I stole a copy of Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling extravaganza The Tipping Point off of the shelf in George's room in Larchmont. He's a smart guy and he pulls together lots of disparate material -- some of it interesting -- but it doesn't, at the end of the day, cohere. Here's what he tells us about social "epidemics":

1. They are spearheaded by charismatic, well-connected people ("Salesmen", "Mavens", "Connectors") who know how to boil things down so they make sense to people
2. They are "sticky," well-thought out and placed for their audiences
   
3. Something else, which I should remember because he repeats it and would remember if it made sense and hung together
   

This book has been a huge business best seller, and has presumably been influential. I'll bet you executives the land around discuss what it means to their businesses in frequent flier clubs. But I don't see how telling them to have well-targeted products in the hands of well-connected smooth talker adds a whole lot to the discussion.