The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell always seems to bring a fresh perspective to society's behavior. In this book, he talks about the causes that lie behind fads, crazes or waves that behave almost like an epidemic in our society, whether it's the sudden popularity of Hush Puppies shoes, teen suicides, or falling crime rates.

He identifies three agents of change that most of these things have in common: The Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

The Law of the Few says that "in a given process or system some people matter more than others." We can see this in the 80/20 rule known to economists, but "when it comes to epidemics, though; this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of the people do the majority of the work."

"The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes."

"The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem."

Gladwell talks about a personality type he calls a Connector. These people just seem to know everybody, across all different groups of professions, ethnicities, and geographic areas. One example of Connectors he mentions strikes a chord with me, as I just got done traveling to Philadelphia, and one of the tour guides said much the same thing. Paul Revere was a classic Connector. He knew hundreds of people all around the countryside, and he was well liked and respected by everyone. When he made his "midnight ride" to warn of the British coming, people listened and responded. William Dawes rode in another direction. Dawes was not a Connector, and he didn't know many people well enough to knock on their doors and disturb them. In the end, very few responded to his message.

I think we all know some Connectors. They're the folks who listen to your complaints and then say, "I know a guy..." (Jersey accent optional)

There are some people, whom Gladwell calls Mavens. Mavens are extraordinary experts in one or more areas, and just love to share their knowledge with others. They're the folks, for example, who read all of the computer magazines and keep up on what Apple and Microsoft are developing, then they try it out and write reviews, share their information online, or babble to their friends about the latest, greatest widget. If you're really lucky, you'll have a financial planner, CPA or stockbroker who's a Maven in his field.

And then there are the Salesmen (or women). "Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue, they spread it...Salesmen...with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing."

One of the key illustrations Gladwell uses in talking about Stickiness is the development of the children's tv show, Sesame Street. Most of what "everyone knew" about how children learn by watching tv turned out to be wrong, and the producers of Sesame Street (and Blue's Clues, which came along later) spent a great deal of time studying children while they watched the show, and adapting the show to be better all the time. It's super successful today, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues from its licensing agreements (so don't let anyone tell you defunding Big Bird is going to be a huge tragedy, ok?).

"Kids don't watch tv when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused."

I wonder if this phenomenon might be observed in adult populations at times, as well.

When the show first aired, the animation and muppet segments were kept completely separate from the live action sequences. Children rapidly lost interest in the live shots - adults talking probably sounded to them about like the teachers in the Charlie Brown special. When the muppets were brought into the street scenes, the kids suddenly started paying attention to the dialogue. Developmental psychologists told the producers that children were too easily confused by blending fantasy and reality, but in order to make their message more "sticky" Sesame Street broke the rules, and gained enormous popularity, teaching children around the world. I think it might have made Jim Henson a famous man, as well.

A real world example of the power of Context is drawn from a crime epidemic in New York City in the 1980s. Oddly enough, it wasn't tightening up sentencing guidelines and sending more murderers and rapists to prison that brought about a sudden reduction in those crimes. It was adopting a zero tolerance policy for a whole slew of lesser crimes that turned things around. When the city declared war on grafitti, subway fare-beating, public drunkeness, vandalism and other quality-of-life crimes, the whole environment was changed, and "the criminal - far from being someone who acts for fundamental, intrinsic reasons and who lives in his own world - is actually someone acutely sensitive to his environment, who is alert to all kinds of cues, and who is prompted to commit crimes based on his perception of the world around him." Criminals appear to know from the way that society reacts to the most minor of criminal acts whether their more heinous ones are going to be taken seriously.

Have you ever heard (or voiced) the complaint "You act differently when you're around your friends than when you're around your family." or "You're a whole different person at the office Christmas party."?

It seems that some studies have been done that show, according to Gladwell, that:

"Character...isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment."

A really odd and scary thing about context (and I've seen some of this before with teen suicide "waves") is that not only are more suicides attempted after highly publicized suicides, but in a study done by sociologist David Phillips in L.A., "on the day after a highly publicized suicide, the number of fatalities from traffic accidents was, on average, 5.9 percent higher than expected. Two days after a suicide story, traffic deaths rose 4.1 percent. Three days after, they rose 3.1 percent and four days after, they rose 8.1 percent." So, the contagion of suicides is even higher than most of us know.

Gladwell's book is chock-full of interesting things to ponder. You might even find some innovative ways to make your ideas contagious.

Outliers by Malcom Gladwell

I've run across references to Outliers in my reading over the last couple of years, and thought it might be interesting. Then, Lo and Behold! It was on the new book shelf at the public library, and I just had to check it out. I mean, I had to, didn't I?

Outliers examines some of our apocryphal and traditional cultural stories about success in a number of different fields, and tears down a few idols in those areas with the studies it contains. The style is quite clear, not at all like a research paper, and I found it fascinating.

The first thing that Gladwell examines is the odd phenomenon that the great majority of the hockey players who make it to the major leagues in Canada are born in the first three months of the year; January through March. As it turns out, there's a simple explanation for this. The cutoff date for enrolling in youth hockey is January 1. If an adolescent is ten years old on January 2, he will be playing in the same league with boys who don't turn ten until the end of the year, and he has a huge advantage in terms of his size, speed and coordination. The biggest, fastest, most skillful players then get the most attention from the coaches, become far better than the smaller, slower players, and enjoy those advantages, for the most part, for the rest of their hockey careers, up to the time of selection for the professional leagues. It's not all just about developing natural talent, the happy accident of birthdate plays a huge role.

Another principle that applies to success is, perhaps, not so controversial, but is still a bit surprising. In the field of musical talent, we generally assume that those who have some innate musical ability will be successful, and perhaps eventually play professionally. However, in a study done in Berlin, at an elite music academy, they discovered that when students all began playing at around the age of 5, most of them practiced two to three hours a week. Around age 8, the students who would end up being the best began to practice more hours than all the others, six hours a week by age nine, eight hours by age twelve, sixteen hours by fourteen, and upwards until by the time they were twenty they were practicing over thirty hours a week. By the age of twenty, they had put in over ten thousand hours of practice.

The idea that excellence in performing a complex task requires a minimum of ten thousand hours of practice threads through the discussions throughout the rest of the book. Contrary to popular wisdom, Mozart was not a child prodigy. His early compositions were derivative and he was helped by his father. But by the time he was twenty one, he had practiced composing for over ten years, and was thereafter regarded as a genius.

Sociologist Annette Lareau conducted a study which confirmed something I'd observed while raising my own children. She gathered a large cross section of students and their families across race and gender at different economic levels. Eventually, only two distinct parenting styles emerged (you'd think there would be way more than that, but...no). The wealthy parents "were heavily involved in their children's free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates." The poor children's parents considered their children's activities as something they didn't need to be involved with. In one example, "...Mrs. Brindle does not discuss Katie's interest in drama or express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter's talent...She sees the shows her daughter puts on as 'cute' and as a way for Katie to 'get attention.'"

I saw this happening all the time when my kids were in school. I would run into the same group of parents at soccer practices, football practices, baseball practices, choir, orchestra and band concert.I never really thought of the group as "rich", I've always been just solid working middle class, myself. These parents were all heavily involved in their kids' lives, and eventually I saw that same group of parents at the awards and scholarship ceremony just before graduation (also, we all worked as chaperons at the graduation bash).

Gladwell applies the principles of the "happy accident of birth" in a particular month or era, the crucial opportunity to get ten thousand hours of practice in a skill, and the preparation for the real world done by involved parents, to a number of fields and people's careers. Bill Gates just happened to attend a high school where the mothers in the PTA raised the money to start a computer club for the kids, and he lived near the University of Washington, where his connections got him free computer programming time in a lab there, plus he was born at the right time in history when the personal computer was just coming on the scene, and the operating system he created was desperately needed.

One of the founders of Skadden, Arps, Meagher and Flom was a Jewish law student from the Bronx when all the big law firms in New York were only hiring WASPs, so he and others had to start their own firm. The bottom-feeding firms like them were the only ones who would fight corporate proxy fight and takeover battles, the WASP firms "just didn't do that." So, after thousands of hours of practice, when the laws and regulations and environment changed and the crazy Wall Street merger boom of the eighties took place, they were in the right place at the right time with the right preparation to become giants themselves.

I'm sure you've heard about how Asians are all good at math, right? Gladwell digs into that bit of common knowledge, too. He ties this success into a couple of things - their language, which has much shorter names for the numbers used in counting, and a more logical structure, as well, which makes it easier for Asian children to learn to count. With an early advantage, and an attitude that it's "easy", they make far more rapid progress than Western children. The other thing is that most of the Chinese who have emigrated are from the southern areas of China, where rice cultivation provides both food and a livelihood for millions.

Growing rice is not the same as growing corn, in a number of ways. First, the preparation of the fields is painstaking, the paddies must be constructed perfectly. Then, the level of the water must be kept at exactly the right level throughout the growing season. The amount of fertilizer used must also be exactly measured and applied at the right times. Rice farmers in China work from dawn to dark - 365 days a year! This cultural accustomization to long hours and hard work is instilled in their children, and when you study the study habits of Asians in this country, you find that they put in far more hours than their western counterparts.

On the subject of education, Gladwell talks about how a group of reformers in the early nineteenth century decided that it was harmful to children for them to attend school all year long. They believed that children needed several months off each year in order to "digest" the information they had learned. They thought that "working students too hard would create a 'most pernicious influence upon character and habits...Not infrequently is health itself destroyed by over-stimulating the mind.'"

But what really happens is that children actually "lose ground" over the summer break, forgetting a portion of what they have been taught. This isn't so bad for the rich kids, as their parents have the time and resources and motivation to keep them busy with other educational activities during the summer, but for the poor kids, it means that they fall farther and farther behind every year. A study by sociologist Karl Alexander suggests "the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop (they're doing this in Boise right now), and increasing school funding - all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing." The study data "shows what happens between September and June. Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it."

There's a ton of great food for thought in Outliers. I highly recommend it - for the thoughtful.