The Tipping Point

[Umm Sahabah]

bismillah, wa salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh


The International No. 1 Bestseller

The Tipping Point

How little things can make a big difference

Malcolm Gladwell



Publication info: First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Little, Brown and Company.

It may be helpful while reading the review or the book to relate it to a current issue such as the H5N1 bird flu virus. This may help to put things into perspective.

[Umm Sahabah]

The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word-of-mouth, or any number of the mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics.
Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do.
The 3 characteristics of epidemics – i) contagiousness; ii) the fact that little causes can have big effects; and iii) the change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment – are the same principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter.
Of the three, the third trait – the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment – is the most important. The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point.

[Umm Sahabah]

Contagiousness


We have in our minds a very specific, biological notion of what contagiousness means. But if there can be epidemics of crime or fashion, there must be all kind of things just as contagious as viruses. Have you ever thought about yawning, for instance? (Did the word really prompt you to yawn, because I can’t stop)
Yawning is incredibly contagious. I made some of you reading this yawn simply by writing the word ‘yawn’
Simply by writing the word, I can plant a feeling in your mind.

[Umm Sahabah]

Little things = Big effects


The second of the principles of epidemics – that little changes can somehow have big effects – is also a fairly radical notion.
We are, as humans, heavily socialised to make a kind of rough approximation between cause and effect. If we want to communicate a strong emotion, if we want to convince someone that, say, we love them; we realize that we need to speak passionately. If we want to break bad news to someone, we lower our voices.
We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension to what comes out.
Epidemics are an example of what in mathematics is called geometric progression: when a virus spreads through a population it doubles and doubles again.
As human beings we have a hard time with this kind progression, because the end result – the effect - seems far out of proportion to the cause.
To appreciate the power of epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these can happen very quickly.
We are all, at hear, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time. But the world of the Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than a possibility. It is – contrary to all our expectations – a certainty.
The point of all of this is to answer two simple questions that lie at the heart of what we would all like to accomplish as educators, parents, marketers, business people, and policy makers. Why is it that some ideas or behaviours or products start epidemics and others don’t? And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?



It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemics equilibrium. Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agents itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating.
When an epidemic tips, when it is jolted out of equilibrium, it tips because something has happened, some change has occurred in one (or two or three) of these areas.
These three agents I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.
When it comes to epidemics: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.

[Umm Sahabah]

The Stickiness Factor


The idea of the importance of stickiness in tipping has enormous implications for the way we regard social epidemics as well.
We tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make messages more contagious – how to reach as many people as possible with our products and ideas.
But the hard part is often figuring out how to make sure a message doesn’t go in one and out the other.
Stickiness means that a message makes an impact. You can’t get it out of your head; it sticks in your memory.
E.g. of stickiness in action – when Winston filter-tip cigs were introduced, the company came up with the slogan “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should”
To this day, if you say to most Americans “Winston tastes good,” they can finish the phrase, “like a cigarette should.” That’s a classically sticky advertising slogan.

[Umm Sahabah]

The Law of the Few – Connectors, Mavens & Salesmen


Why is it that some ideas and trends and messages “tip” and other’s don’t?
The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependant on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts – This is the Law of the Few.
Look up Stanley Milgram’s Six Degrees of Separation Study
Connectors are people with a special gift of bringing people together. What makes someone a Connector?
The first – and most obvious – criterion is that Connectors know lots of people. They are the kind of people who known everyone.
Connectors are important for more than simply the number of people they know. Their importance is also a function of the kinds of people they know.
Connectors are people whom all of us can reach in only a few steps because, for one reason or another, they manage to occupy many different worlds and subcultures and niches. Their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability and energy.
The point about Connectors is that by having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together.
The reason why so many fashion trends don’t make it into mainstream America is that simply, by sheerest bad fortune, they never happen to meet the approval of a Connector along the way.



IMPORTANT: “When he (Paul Revere) came upon a town, he would have known whose door exactly to knock, who the local militia leader was, and who the key players in town were. He had met most of them before. And they knew him and respected him as well.”
Abu Bakr Siddiq (ra) had all the qualities of a successful Connector – he knew the genealogy of the Quraish, their leaders and who was who & who the important people were. He once went with the Prophet (sws) to make dawah to the Qura****es tribe and he would tell the prophet this is so and so, and he’s a poet. And when the prophet once came across this poet again, he exclaimed ‘you are so and so, the poet’ and the person was delighted to have been identified and remembered by the prophet. [apologies I don’t know the story word for word] The point is, the fact that Allah (swt) guided Abu Bakr Siddiq to Islam is astounding in that his personality as a Connector helped spread Islam greatly. – In fact 6 out of 10 promised paradise became Muslims at the hand of Abu Bakr Siddiq (r)
Word-of-mouth epidemics are the work of Connectors.

[Umm Sahabah]

Mavens


It would be a mistake, however, to think that Connectors are the only people who matter in a social epidemic.
If you look closely at social epidemics, however, it becomes clear that just as there are people we rely upon to connect us to other people, there are also other people we rely upon to connect us with new information.
There are people specialists, and there are information specialists.
The second of the three kinds of people who control word-of-mouth epidemics are – Mavens.
The word Maven comes from the Yiddish and it means one who accumulates knowledge.
A Maven is a person who has information on a lot of different products or prices or places. This person likes to initiate discussions with consumers and respond to requests.
Mavens are the kinds of people who are avid readers of Consumer Reports and who also write to Consume Reports to correct them.
What makes people like Mavens so important in starting epidemics? Obviously they know things that the rest of us don’t. They read more magazines than the rest of us, more newspapers, and they may be the only people who read junk mail.
The fact that Mavens want to help, for no other reason than because they like to help, turns out to be an awfully effective way of getting someone’s attention.
The one thing that a Maven is not is a persuader. They are not the kind who wants to twist your arm. Their motivation is to educate and to help.
To be a Maven is to be a teacher as well as a student.
Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know.
For social epidemics to start, some people are actually going to have to be persuaded to do something.
In a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people – Salesmen – with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.
Who are these Salesmen? And what makes them so good at what they do?

[Umm Sahabah]

Salesmen


Moine’s argument is that what separates a great salesman from an average one is the number and quality of answers they have to the objections commonly raised by potential clients.
What was interesting about great Salesmen is the extent to which they seem to be persuasive in a way quite different from the content of their words. They seem to have some kind of identifiable trait, something powerful and contagious and irresistible that goes beyond what comes out of their mouth that makes people who meet them want to agree with them. It’s energy. It’s enthusiasm. It’s charm. It’s likeability.
Three things that make Salesmen so effective are: 1) Little things can make a difference 2) nonverbal cues are as or more important than verbal cues. The subtle circumstances surrounding how we say things may matter more than what we say. 3) Persuasion works in ways that we do not appreciate. It’s not that smiles and nods are subliminal messages. They are straightforward and on the surface. It’s just that they are incredibly subtle.
What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because that’s the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.
They engage in what can only be described as an elaborate and precise dance – what is called the study of cultural microrhythms and is termed as ‘interactional synchrony’
The two people’s conversation had a rhythmic physical dimension. Each person would, within the space of one or two or three 1/45th-of-a-second frames, move a shoulder or cheek or an eyebrow or hand, sustain that movement, stop it, change direction, and start again.
And what’s more these movements are perfectly in time with each person’s own words – so that the speaker was, in effect, dancing to his or her own speech.
At the same time the other person dances along as well, moving their faces and shoulders and hands and bodies to the same rhythm.
It’s not that each person was moving the same way – it’s that timing of stops and starts of each person’s micromovements – the jump and shifts of body and face – were perfectly in harmony.
Subsequent research has revealed that it isn’t just gesture that is harmonized, but also conversational rhythm.
When two people talk, their volume and pitch fall into balance. What linguists call speech rate – that number of speech sounds per second – equalizes.
What we are talking about is a kind of super-reflex, a fundamental physiological ability of which we are barely aware. And like all specialized human traits, some people have more much mastery over this reflex than others.
Part of what it means to have a powerful or persuasive personality, then, is that you can draw others into your own rhythms and dictate the terms of the interaction.
The essence of a Salesman is that, on some level, they cannot be resisted.
There is another dimension to this – When two people talk, they don’t just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry.
If you show people pictures of a smiling face or a frowning face, they’ll smile or frown back.
If I hit my thumb with a hammer, most people watching will grimace: they’ll mimic my emotional state. This is what is meant, in the technical sense, by empathy.
We imitate each other’s emotions as a way of expressing support and caring and, even more basically, as a way of communicating with each other.
Mimicry, it has been argued, is also one of the means by which we infect each other with our emotions. In other words, if I smile and you see me and smile in response – it’s not just you imitating me; it may be also a way that I can pass on my happiness to you.
We normally think of the expressions on our face as the reflection of an inner state. If I feel happy, so I smile. I feel sad, so I frown. Emotion goes inside-out.
Emotional Contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.
If we think about emotion this way – as outside-in, not inside-out – it is possible to understand how come people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than others.

[Umm Sahabah]

Salesmen


Moine’s argument is that what separates a great salesman from an average one is the number and quality of answers they have to the objections commonly raised by potential clients.
What was interesting about great Salesmen is the extent to which they seem to be persuasive in a way quite different from the content of their words. They seem to have some kind of identifiable trait, something powerful and contagious and irresistible that goes beyond what comes out of their mouth that makes people who meet them want to agree with them. It’s energy. It’s enthusiasm. It’s charm. It’s likeability.
Three things that make Salesmen so effective are: 1) Little things can make a difference 2) nonverbal cues are as or more important than verbal cues. The subtle circumstances surrounding how we say things may matter more than what we say. 3) Persuasion works in ways that we do not appreciate. It’s not that smiles and nods are subliminal messages. They are straightforward and on the surface. It’s just that they are incredibly subtle.
What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because that’s the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.
They engage in what can only be described as an elaborate and precise dance – what is called the study of cultural microrhythms and is termed as ‘interactional synchrony’
The two people’s conversation had a rhythmic physical dimension. Each person would, within the space of one or two or three 1/45th-of-a-second frames, move a shoulder or cheek or an eyebrow or hand, sustain that movement, stop it, change direction, and start again.
And what’s more these movements are perfectly in time with each person’s own words – so that the speaker was, in effect, dancing to his or her own speech.
At the same time the other person dances along as well, moving their faces and shoulders and hands and bodies to the same rhythm.
It’s not that each person was moving the same way – it’s that timing of stops and starts of each person’s micromovements – the jump and shifts of body and face – were perfectly in harmony.

[caramel]

Habibtee, your pm storage box is full! Empty it out!

I wanted to pm you a question I have on being a salesperson.

I work as a salesperson and I am having trouble.

I have realized that with interested customers I have to say the right things at the right time. My strategy is to fill their heads with great information about the photography studio I work for, the great products we have, a vague statement on the prices( "The price depends on the customer. The larger the volume of packages they buy, the greater the discount. A package has 11 portraits, so if you buy different packages, you get it for cheaper. Instead of paying $100 per package, you pay only $80 for 5packages") Proceed to give them a tour of the studio where they see framed photographs hanging. I want to plant juicy ideas into their head and then just show the great pictures we have taken of our previous customers. Then, I want to give to tell them when is our next appointment opening and try to book them.

Honestly, if I don't book any customers I will be paid less than $80 than what I was at my old job. The last time I pmed you was the last time everything was okay with my job. I got suspended twice and was fired. I don't want to beg them for a job and I dont want to work as a cashier again. It is time to move on. I dont get much hours at this new place so I have no option but to book. If I book, I get paid in commision. $20 per party plus a percentage of what the party pays for their photographs. One employee who worked 2 and 1/2 days earned $700!


My biggest issue is with attracting customers to the store. I mean alhamdolillah that our store has some cool photos hanging by the door and we have sales and we have a cute little motorbike for kids. People stop and ask about the store but what about customers who just see this great store and keep moving on? How do I make them stop in their tracks? Most of the other girls who work by the door just stand there and wait for insterested customers to coem to them with questions. I tried that and honestly I was falling asleep just waiting. I was literally yawning and one of the employees told me to smile because I loooked like I was dying.

One employee who I have learned from is an amazing salesperson. She tries different tactics and succeeds well. Sometimes she stands by the door and smiles at passing customers. Other times if she sees customers, she cries out that we do hair and makeup and we have a sale going on and if customers walk away, she cries out: "Take photos with us when you have time. Not now. Later. Hopefully you'll take pictures with us." Other times, she sees families walking with their little children and cry out things such as: Cute baby! Hello baby! Or something of that sort. Both the child and parent look up and she involves them in some weird conversation and they leave either with a booked appointment or with a brochure about the studio. Other times she sees some one with clothes on, with a good looking face, with a fit body and she just works with it. She'll be like: where did you get that shirt from? What a great body you have. If I stopped eating for two years, I can look like that!", brings them into the store, and books.

I tried her tactic. I find myself enjoying it more when I smile and when I cry out random things such as sale going on or how hopefully the customer will do business with us. And I am improving on giving good information to interrested customers. When I tried to cry out random things such as: "Nice bag!, "Hello cutie baby" Well I failed. No one paid attention to me.:( And I feel as if I'm talking to myself especially in front of the employees who usually are mum. :( So how do I work on making strangers feel comfortable enough to talk to me? Strangers who arent even interested in our store?

[Umm Sahabah]

Habibtee, your pm storage box is full! Empty it out!

Thanks for bringing that to my attention.

As I was typing the notes on the "Salesperson" I was hoping you'd come across this and read it. :)

I work as a salesperson and I am having trouble.

I'll try and help with some ideas but to be honest with you I've never been a fan of most sales people because of the annoying tactics they adopt and my personal experience with them - if you refrain from such tactics, you'll be okay. For the time being, anyone who has relevant experience in this area, please post your input. :)

Carey, I'll get back to you, insha'Allah okay? :)

[Umm Sahabah]

The Stickiness Factor 2



The Law of the Few says that one critical factor in epidemics is the nature of the messenger.
A pair of shoes or a new movie can become highly contagious and tip simply by being associated with a particular kind of person.
In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of the “stickiness.” Is the message – or the food, or the movie or the product – memorable? Is it so memorable, in fact, that it can create change, that it can spur someone to action?
Stickiness sounds as if it should be straightforward. When most of us want to make sure what we say is remembered, we speak with emphasis. We talk loudly, and we repeat what we have to say over and over again. Marketers feel the same way.
There’s a maxim in the advertising business that an advertisement has to be seen at least 6 times before anyone will remember it.
If you pay careful consideration to the structure and format of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness.
The line between an epidemic that tips and one that doesn’t is sometimes a lot narrower than it seems.
The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.
The lesson of Stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.

[Umm Sahabah]

The Power of Context

The Law of the Few looked at the kinds of people who are critical in spreading information.
The Stickiness Factor suggests that in order to be capable of starting epidemics, ideas have to be memorable and move us to action.
We’ve looked at the people who spread ideas, and we’ve looked at the characteristics of successful ideas. But the subject of this chapter – The Power of Context – is no less important than the first two.
Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.
The Power of Context is an environmental idea. It says that behaviour is a function of social context.
The Power of Context suggests that 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.

[Umm Sahabah]

The Rule of 150

There is a concept in psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information.
“There seems to be some limitation built into us either by learning or by the design of our nervous systems, a limit that keeps our channel capacities in this general range,” the psychologist George Miller concluded in his famous essay “The Magical Number Seven.”
This is the reason that telephone numbers have seven digits – “Bell wanted a number to be as long as possible so they could have as large a capacity as possible, but not so long that people couldn’t remember it.”
The figure 150 seems to represent the maximum no. of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.
Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.


There is a useful concept in psychology that refers to the benefit of unity, of having everyone in a complex enterprise share a common relationship is what psychologist Daniel Wagner calls “transactive memory.”
When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions, and facts stored inside our heads.
In fact, an awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains.
Most of us deliberately don’t memorize most of the phone numbers we need. But we do memorize where to find them – in a phone book or we memorize the number 411, so we can call the directory assistance.
Nor do most of us know the capital of Paraguay. Why bother? It’s an awful lot easier to buy an atlas and store that kind of information there.
Perhaps most important, is that we store information with other people. Couples do this automatically.
Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create and implicit joint memory – a transactive memory system – which is based on an understanding about, who is best suited to remember what kind of things.
Transactive memory is what intimacy means. In fact, Wegner argues, it is the loss of this kind of joint memory that helps to make divorce so painful.
“Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing a loss of their external memory...They once were able to discuss their experiences to reach a shared understanding....They once could count on access to a wide range of storage in their partner, and this, too, is gone...The loss of transactive memory feels like losing a part of one’s mind.”
In a family, this process of memory sharing is even more pronounced.
Most of us remember, at one time, only a fraction of the day-to-day details and histories of our family life. But we know implicitly, where to go to find the answers to our questions – whether is up to our spouse to remember where we put our keys or our 13-year-old to find out how to work the computer or our mother to find out details of our childhood.
Perhaps more important, when new information arises, we know who should have responsibility for storing it. This is how, in a family, expertise emerges.
Why bother remembering how to install software if your son, close at hand, can do it for you?
Since mental ability is limited, we concentrate on what we do best.

[Umm Sahabah]

The Law of the Few 2

In the chapter on Law of the Few, I talked about how certain people’s special social gifts can cause epidemics to tip. Here, though, it is possible to be much more specific about what they do. They are the ones who make it possible for innovations to overcome this problem of chasm.
They are the translators: they take ideas and information from a highly specialised world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand.
Perhaps the most sophisticated analysis of this process of translation comes from the study of rumours, which are – obviously – the most contagious of all social messages.
In a rumour – first of all the story is levelled. All kinds of details that are essential for understanding the true meaning of the incident are left out.
Then the story is sharpened. The details that remain are made more specific.
Finally, a process of assimilation takes place: the story is changed so it makes more sense to those spreading the rumour.
This is what is meant by translation. What Mavens, Connectors and Salesmen do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning.
If anyone wants to start an epidemic – he or she has to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen in this very way: he/she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand.

[Umm Sahabah]

The End




Bismillahir rahmani raheem