Keeping the MBA Fresh with “The Tipping Point”

I finally had a chance to complete Malcolm Gladwell’s book, "The Tipping Point." It is an excellent book. My favorite chapter (by far) was the one that covers social analysis and leverage points surrounding swinging the tide of suicide and smoking. If you only have time to read one chapter from that book (and provided that you get some working knowledge of the terms "maven", "connector", "salesmen", and "context"), that is the chapter that touched me most, and one I would recommend to read.

Some things one may have a different perspective on after having read this chapter include understanding:

• how one can help today’s youth if the hypothesis is correct that children and adolescents are more influenced by peers than family
• what purpose an 800 toll-free support number on the box of a bar of Ivory soap might serve (we all know how to use soap, right?) – note: topic actually covered in the Afterword section
• the role of genetics and how it may impact where and when you may need to monitor things in children and adolescents

After reading the book and thinking about my feelings on my favorite chapter, I pleasantly found an Q&A session on BusinessWeek.  There you can find the following exchange:

Q: You
spend quite a bit of time in the book talking about how these insights
might really help with a very pressing social need, the whole smoking
issue. I’m curious as to whether anyone has taken you up on that.
A: To be honest, no. When I was writing the book, that was my
favorite chapter, one of the more original parts of the book. I thought
I’d made a contribution. But I haven’t really gotten a lot of feedback
or response from that part of the book. I don’t know why that is.

Maybe it’s sufficiently at odds with the kinds of strategies people
have been following to address this issue. Perhaps I should have been a
bit more diplomatic in my assessment of this issue. It has been a
disappointment, actually.

During my vintage of the MBA degree (late 90s), "The Tipping Point" was not available as it was released in 2000. Without having done a lot of research, I suspect that it may be used in some business schools now (in the process of trying to confirm with some people in my network). It probably makes sense to cover in marketing contexts, but I could see it being covered in organizational behavior classes or special courses on innovation and sales & marketing.

As Malcolm himself admits in other contexts, he is a story writer, not a scientist. While I find his book full of some very interesting statistical information and insight about the scientific method used to reveal some of the patterns, biases, and leverage points that are invisible to the casual observer, in some chapters I had the sense (not confirmed) that a biased path of confirming evidence had been laid out. This is great from a storytelling and persuasion perspective. I speculate that it may make the contents harder to defend from a proven theory point of view.

That said, I’m not a stickler for theory when it comes to something as good as the content of Malcolm’s book. Always remember core business theory. Recognize when things fly in the face of theory. When things conflict with core theory, recognize this and make a contextual choice. But when something new, like Malcolm’s book, is introduced that augments the way we think, I say make a conscience effort to continually renew oneself.

Steve Shu