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 ...