Greatest Hits

The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Little things can make a big difference
• Explains and defines the "tipping point" – the moment at which ideas, trends and social behaviour cross a threshold, tip and spread like wildfire
• Just as one sick person can start an epidemic, very minor adjustments to products or ideas can make them far more likely to be a success
• The overall message of the book is that, contrary to the belief that big results require big efforts that are beyond the capacity of the single individual, one imaginative person applying a well-placed lever can move the world

 

WHAT'S GOOD ABOUT IT

• It is optimistic in outlook and suggests that individuals can make a significant contribution. It cites the example of Paul Revere who, in 1775, overheard a conversation and rode all night to warn Americans in Boston that the British would attack in the morning. The Americans were ready and defeated them
• The three areas (below) are a good working template for all communications:

1. The Law of the Few – the idea that the nature of the messenger is critical
2. The Stickiness Factor – the quality of the message has to be good enough to be worth acting on
3. The Power of Context – people are exquisitely sensitive to changes of time, place and circumstance

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• The three areas aren't that original – they are roughly similar to medium, message and target audience
• It is easy to get distracted by the three groups of people who may start a tipping point: Connectors (people who know a lot of people), Mavens (those who accumulate knowledge, but are not persuaders), and Salesmen (people who are very persuasive). These may be more relevant to PR than paid-for communication
• It is quite American, with many examples relating to the USA (for example, how removing graffiti reduced the crime rate in New York in the eighties). Thought is needed with regard to application elsewhere
• Even if a marketing strategy overtly sets out to create a tipping point, they are so idiosyncratic and hard to predict that it might not work

 

 

What The Dog Saw - Malcolm Gladwell

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

This is not a book on one theme – it is a compendium of his best essays for the New Yorker magazine over the last ten years or so, organised into three sections: i) Obsessives, pioneers, and other varieties of minor genius; ii) Theories, predictions and diagnoses; iii) Personality, character & intelligence.

The title refers to his take on how Cesar Millan, aka the Dog Whisperer, does what he does. Gladwell is more interested in the dog’s perspective, and it transpires that the dog’s response is mainly to his body language.

He teases out scores of curiosities, including:

• Most things are not interesting
• Perfection is plural: everybody has different version of it
• Heinz Ketchup remains unchanged and unbeatable because it covers every one of the five tastes we crave - salt, sweet, sour, bitter and umami – all in one product (umami is a proteiny, full-bodied taste).
• The Clairol strapline “Does she or doesn’t she?”, followed by L’Oreal’s “Because I’m worth it” plots the course of female liberation in the 20th century.
• Progress often comes in advance of understanding, as with the invention of the contraceptive pill.
• A puzzle is not the same as a mystery. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. How Enron collapsed is actually a mystery.

 

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

 

The wisdom keeps coming:

• Stop managing problems and start ending them.
• Solving issues means connecting the dots and spotting the sequence. Many people just can’t do it. They just see ink blots like the Rorschach Test (he was the 20th century Swiss psychiatrist who invented it).
• Claiming retrospectively that something was coherent or made sense all along is a case of creeping determinism (x apparently determined y, but it didn’t really). This affects many business case histories, and much journalism.
• Choking is loss of instinct (a tennis player reverts to thinking about each shot and loses the game). Panic is reversion to instinct (a diver grabs instinctively for a companion’s air supply without realising they can share and both be fine).
• Risk homeostasis is where changes intended to make a system safer actually make it worse. When ABS brakes are fitted to cars people drive faster and have more accidents, because they think they are safer.
• There is no such thing as inherent genius. There are as many late bloomers as there are child prodigies.
• If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe the box needs fixing.

 

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

All the essays are available for free on his website, so you don’t have to pay £20.

 

 

Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Our ability to “know” something in a split-second judgement, without really knowing why we know, is one of the most powerful abilities we possess
• A snap judgement made very quickly can actually be far more effective than one we make deliberately and cautiously
• By blocking out what is irrelevant and focusing on narrow slices of experience, we can read seemingly complex situations in the blink of eye
• This is essentially “thinking without thinking”
• He introduces the theory of “thin slicing” – using the first two seconds of any encounter to determine intuitively your response or the likely outcome
• He demonstrates that this “little bit of knowledge” can go a long way, and is accurate in over 80% of instances.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• There are scores of vivid examples in which peoples’ first instincts have been right, but they cannot explain why. These include an art dealer identifying a fake statue that the Getty museum believes to be genuine, a tennis coach being able to predict every time when players are about to serve a double fault, and a psychologist accurately guessing years in advance if married couples will stay together or not
• The thinking is a welcome counterpoint to a world in which too much reliance on proof and data has replaced hunch and instinct
• The value of spontaneity is highlighted by the example of a forces commander who comprehensively beats better-equipped opposition in a US military exercise because he consistently does the opposite of what the computers predict
• He goes on to show that, strangely, it is possible to give “structure” to spontaneity, by consciously going against the grain in order to generate an outcome that is surprising to the other party, but not to you.

 

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• Although the subject matter is fascinating, there are so many experts interviewed that the average reader would not be able to enact any of the skills necessary to take advantage of the findings, other than the basic point that you should trust your first instincts more.

 

 

Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell

 

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• When we try to understand success, we normally start with the wrong question. We ask What is the person like? when we should really ask Where are they from?
• The real secret of success turns out to be surprisingly simple, and it hinges on a few crucial twists in people’s life stories – on the culture they grow up in and the way they spend their time.
• An outlier is a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others in the sample – tiny influences have made certain people ‘special’.
• Opportunity is the first crucial element of being successful at anything. Legacy is the second - behaviour handed down over many generations that dictates the way people react to circumstances.
• Countries with subservient cultures have pilots involved in more plane crashes because the co-pilots do not impose on their superiors – sometimes not even making emergencies evident to air traffic control.
• Easterners have a stronger work ethic and so are better at maths because they are used to taking a lot of time to solve problems.

 

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Top sportsmen are born at the beginning of the year. As youngsters they start a little bigger, and then they are given the best training and the most practice.
• The 10,000-hour rule shows that the best in any field have exceeded this amount of practice –which means that those who start late at something do not usually achieve the very best.
• Studies show that social class has nothing to do with intelligence –until the ability to study, revise, or practice starts to disadvantage those less privileged.
• Fans of determinism will approve of this book, since it verifies that your success is determined by where you come from and what happens on the way.

 

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• This is not an academic book. It is more a series of interesting anecdotes that make a general point.
• Although it challenges you to make the most of your own potential, in practice the reader cannot change their circumstances, time of birth, where they come from, or any other major factors other than pure hard work.
• The first half of the book (Opportunity) explains the origin of outliers. The second half (Legacy) seems barely related to it – it is more an explanation of cultural differences.