Idea 45 - Tipping point

Idea 45 - Tipping point

 

The combative former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously used the term 'tipping point' to describe the position that the Iraq war had not yet reached. On his and many, many other lips, 'tipping point' has passed its own tipping point, and business has leapt aboard the bandwagon.

 

A quick dance around the Web reveals the term - usually prefaced by 'Have we reached the .. .' - applied to the Iraq war, opinion on the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, online media, oil, various proprietary brands of software, online advertising, online video and autism. It also shows that a surprising number of businesses have hijacked it as a trading name, including advertising agencies, marketing agencies, training companies and, bizarrely, an IT security business.

 

It was coined by US political scientist Morton the late 1950s. He found that white families would stay for a while after the first few black families moved in, but the arrival of 'one too many' caused sudden and mass white flight. That moment was the tipping point. In 2000, the principle was dressed up in new clothes by New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his book of the same name. The subtitle unveils its theme - How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

 

Gladwell begins with the story of how, in the mid-1990s, Hush Puppies crepe-soled shoes leapt from being strictly for trainspotters to the hottest fashion item in town, raising annual sales from 30,000 to 430,000 in a year. What marketer wouldn't like to have some of that? But it had nothing to do with marketing. In a spirit of inverted cool, a few hip Manhattan kids started wearing them precisely because they were so deeply unfashionable. Isaac Mizrahi, a well-known designer, began wearing them. Another designer used them in his spring collection, then another, and before long one of Hollywood's most fashionable stores had a 25-foot inflatable basset hound - the puppy in Hush Puppies - on its roof. A tipping point had been reached, and all by word of mouth or, in this case, infectious imitation.

 

Infectious is the word. Gladwell calls this sudden avalanche of enthusiasm an epidemic and, in fact, tipping points are a very real phenomenon in epidemiology. The difference between a viral infections dying away and flaring, in an exponential spiral, into an epidemic is very small in terms of the numbers of people who are passing on the virus. That can explain what happened to Hush Puppies. But how did it happen? Gladwell offers three reasons: the Law of the Few; the Stickiness Factor; and the Power of Context.

 

Three champions The Law of the Few says that for a message to spread like an epidemic it needs three kinds of people to champion it:

 

1.      Connectors - those people who seem to know everyone, and operate across many different social sets. These are people specialists, social glue.

2.      Mavens - people who amass knowledge in a particular subject and love to share it. They're the kind of people who can remember prices from ten years ago, know everything about sound systems or write to the "newspaper. They're information specialists, human data banks.

3.      Salespeople - people who have what it takes, whatever that is, to convince you to try something. These are the persuaders.

 

The Stickiness Factor is harder to define, but it's often something quirky about the way it was delivered that makes people pay close attention to an idea or a product. Gladwell maintains Sesame Street, the TV programme, demonstrably improved millions of children's reading because the Muppets made it sticky. The Power of Context means the moment and the . environment must be right, or no tipping power. In the crime-ridden New York City of the early 1990s, the crime rate tipped - murders fell by over 60% in five years and overall crime halved. It was thanks to a shrewd and resourceful police chief and the original message was spread not by people but by the cleanup of graffiti on the subway system. The context, powerful indeed, was that the people of the city had finally had enough.

 

Gladwell believes that groups can playa role in the context effect. Rebecca Wells's Divine Secrets of the Ya- Ya Sisterhood sold 2.5 million copies thanks largely to its adoption by women's book groups. Being in a group affects people's behaviour- films are always funnier or more thrilling when the movie theatre is full. Group conclusions are often rather different to those that would be reached by individual group members on their own. Gladwell says that, as with Ya-Ya, close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic potential of an idea. But how big can a group become before it starts to lose cohesion, and are there lessons here for companies?

 

 

Dunbar's number Research and experience suggests a magic maximum of 150 people - sometimes known as Dunbar's number - is the largest group with whom anyone can maintain stable relationships. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar came up with this limit having studied primates as well as prehistoric tribe and village sizes. Settlements of Hutterites, the communal Anabaptist sect, traditionally split when they reach 150. At WL Gore Associates, makers of Gore-Tex, when a plant has 150 people in it the company opens a new one. Gore has been highly profitable for nearly 40 years and ranks high, if not top, in 'best places to work' lists in the US, UK, Germany, Italy and the European Union as a whole.

 

 

Gladwell believes Gore has created 'an organized mechanism that makes it much easier for new ideas and information to tip' - in other words, to go from one person or part of the group to the whole group all at once, exploiting the bonds of memory and peer pressure: 'Were Gore to try to reach each employee singly, their task would have been much harder.

 

Gladwell has been mobbed as an instant management guru, and has joined the lecture circuit, though he insists he remains committed to his journalism. Though some accuse him of merely stating the obvious, he has been admired by management theorists as eminent as Henry Mintzberg  W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne were sufficiently drawn by his ideas to write 'Tipping point leadership', a detailed case study of New York's crime-busting project.