∎ Libro Free The Tipping Point How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Malcolm Gladwell 9780316346627 Books

The Tipping Point How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Malcolm Gladwell 9780316346627 Books

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The Tipping Point How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Malcolm Gladwell 9780316346627 Books

Some may say “The Tipping Point” belabors the obvious, which is that things change, sometimes overnight. True, too true, but so what? Malcolm Gladwell, the master of popularized social research, makes us care about the mechanisms of seemingly abrupt shifts in the course of human events—such as why William Dawes’ midnight ride to warn that the British were coming didn’t start the American Revolution, but Paul Revere’s did. Turns out Revere’s personality helped his news galvanize patriots to pick up their rifles, while Dawes’ identical cry made people turn over and go back to sleep. Revere had two of the three traits Gladwell identifies as necessary to the spread of social trends: he was a Connector and a Maven. Revere had a vast rolodex of acquaintances in colonial Massachusetts and he knew everything there was to know about the nascent independence movement. He set the scene for resistance to the onmarching British, and a few local men of Gladwell’s third type, the Persuaders, finished the job of rallying the militias of Concord and Lexington.

Gladwell is adept at explaining the academic research that led to such popular ideas as “six degrees of separation” and relating such social science experimentation to his overall theme of how change happens. He goes deeply into the discoveries about learning that led to the success of “Sesame Street” and “Blue’s Clues”—these shows’ producers used the idea of “stickiness” to instill basic principles and values in pre-schoolers. The “broken windows” theory of policing gets a thorough explainer, including a side trip into how do-gooding seminarians can allow themselves to avoid being good Samaritans. Advertising is one of the great accelerators of trends, and Gladwell marshals a few Madison Ave. case studies to show how commercials tip us into parting with our hard-earned cash.

Absolutely painless learning is what Gladwell offers, with a side benefit of greater self-awareness.


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The Tipping Point How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Malcolm Gladwell 9780316346627 Books Reviews

Gladwell approaches things in a non-scientific way, so it's more inspirational than educational. He tries to show what he percieves as truths, but doesnt go about supporting them in a systematic way. Some of the basis of this book has been overturned by more recent studies. Gladwell is an excellent writer and is convincing, but he should be read with a skeptic eye.
Other reviewers have done an excellent job of reviewing the book’s thrust and content, so I’m going to assume I don’t need to do that here. I do want to say I did not expect a scientific journal article. What I anticipated is what I got – a delightful application of fascinating social psychological evidence to ways of approaching and understanding real life problems.

With a degree in social psychology, I can’t help being excited and impressed by the research contributions of the field. The findings he cites often seem obvious and “of course” once the results are in. And sometimes the results contradict “common sense.” Always they require clever design by those who create the hypotheses and methods of measurement.

But this book does not claim to produce new research. What the author does is present interesting and validated findings in a way that organizes them for potential application to a given range of problems. Readers who want more scientific journal type evidence are free to take the suggestions and create their own statistically designed clever research.

As for me, his suggestions set me to thinking and observing life as it is lived. I will confess, I wish he had been able to identify a numerical
tipping point. It would help me a lot in my efforts to create an epidemic of readers for my latest book. But maybe some of what I’m doing will be helped by thinking along the lines he suggests.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book – a good, thought provoking read.
As Usual, Malcolm Gladwell is a great story teller. The book is about the small things that can make huge changes. The book is interesting and fun to read, but there are two big problems
a) Malcolm Gladwell is not a scientist, and he lacks the skepticism which is so mauch an important part of science. He starts with the story of the crime fall in NY that came shortly after the start of the "broken windows" policy. The "fact" that the "broken windows"policy made such a huge change serves him well for his arguments, but there is a problem here. the claim that the "broken windows" policy was the main factor in reducing the crime at that time in NY, is an assumption, and by now we have strong reasons to believe that it played only a mior role in the crime reduction. Other factors such as reduction of lead in fuel have much stronger correlation with the crime reduction, and in many other places, as well, while efforts to replicate the "broken windows" policy elsewhere did not produce the same results. So his first chapter is about a nice but false story that if it was true, was showing an interesting nature of how vast changes in behavior happen.

The second problem, is that the book was written before that Internet became a major player in the field. By now it is problably the most major player, but the book describes how things were before the Internet became a major player. In this sense, the book describes how things were in another era. Things have completely changed since then.
Some may say “The Tipping Point” belabors the obvious, which is that things change, sometimes overnight. True, too true, but so what? Malcolm Gladwell, the master of popularized social research, makes us care about the mechanisms of seemingly abrupt shifts in the course of human events—such as why William Dawes’ midnight ride to warn that the British were coming didn’t start the American Revolution, but Paul Revere’s did. Turns out Revere’s personality helped his news galvanize patriots to pick up their rifles, while Dawes’ identical cry made people turn over and go back to sleep. Revere had two of the three traits Gladwell identifies as necessary to the spread of social trends he was a Connector and a Maven. Revere had a vast rolodex of acquaintances in colonial Massachusetts and he knew everything there was to know about the nascent independence movement. He set the scene for resistance to the onmarching British, and a few local men of Gladwell’s third type, the Persuaders, finished the job of rallying the militias of Concord and Lexington.

Gladwell is adept at explaining the academic research that led to such popular ideas as “six degrees of separation” and relating such social science experimentation to his overall theme of how change happens. He goes deeply into the discoveries about learning that led to the success of “Sesame Street” and “Blue’s Clues”—these shows’ producers used the idea of “stickiness” to instill basic principles and values in pre-schoolers. The “broken windows” theory of policing gets a thorough explainer, including a side trip into how do-gooding seminarians can allow themselves to avoid being good Samaritans. Advertising is one of the great accelerators of trends, and Gladwell marshals a few Madison Ave. case studies to show how commercials tip us into parting with our hard-earned cash.

Absolutely painless learning is what Gladwell offers, with a side benefit of greater self-awareness.