The Tipping Point is a wonderfully written book by Malcolm Gladwell, attempting to illustrate the importance of focusing on the little things in life to assist in leading to personal and business success—the problem with that spin, however, is that the author doesn’t quite tell you what a little thing truly is and how it differs from a big thing. There are so many little things that happen to you in a given day-- stating you should ‘focus’ on the little things to assist in making you more successful in business and in your personal life is pretty much a useless pursuit. In other words, which little things does one focus on? What makes something little enough to throw red flags around it to make it a big thing? You cannot read any of the examples in the book and feel as if you are suddenly equipped with a larger set of tools to help you make the proper decisions. Yes, Malcolm Gladwell is a good writer, but is it a good point? Not really. The main problem I have with these pop-business books is that they do not so much give you a set of guidelines to follow that you can use as it does provide a narrative of events in hindsight, which makes me feel as if I am listening to a backseat driver ramble on about what road I should have taken once traffic hits. In that light, these books are just as useful as fiction. Filled with ideas in a nice package, fun, providing a larger pool of analogies to draw upon in conversation, yet unable to help us predict anything. Yet I still read them. Why?
Entertainment. And this is the very reason why I would recommend reading this book-- it’s entertaining. I read the 260 page paperback in about 6 hours. I usually cannot do this; in an hour my back gets sore and I have to move. For some reason, while reading this book, my back didn’t get sore at all. However, I cannot recommend this book as a way to cure back pain, can I? This “little thing” of picking up this particular business book and reading it on a Sunday certainly contributed to an alleviation of back pain, but as a prescription? Hell no. You cannot use any of the examples in the book as a prescription to cure your problems or make you successful in alleviating your pain either, personal or otherwise. Have I missed the point? Perhaps. But then again…
To illustrate, let’s take the example he uses in the book concerning the creation of Sesame Street. The producers were trying to record minute details concerning child attention levels which would help indicate retention of knowledge upon viewing the episodes. The creators of the show consistently tweaked various elements of each episode based on responses from the children. Some of these responses involved the recording of eye movement which was obtained using special infrared equipment that helped determine if they were paying attention to the right elements being shown on the screen. Gladwell’s “little thing” was this explicit attention to detail—but if you think about it long enough, you will realize that this little thing had many elements to it, turning it into quite a big thing. For instance, think of all the children the producers would have to bring on in order to obtain an adequate sample of the effectiveness of a given show. Think of the equipment they had to setup to register a child’s eye movement, which experts they would have had to consult just to know the importance of this eye movement, and how to use the data reliably. Think of the staffing involved, the money---Gladwell’s little thing ends up become a fairly massive expense on the part of the show’s producers. As a result, the case study is more supportive of testing an hypothesis than it is towards defining the importance of paying attention to some minute detail.
In addition, he brought in another example of the benefits of paying attention to detail: Blue’s Clues. It is so effective, it actually trumped the stickiness factor of Sesame Street. Yet the question remains, if you were to create an almost exact duplicate of Blue’s Clues but changed the format slightly, maybe replace the dog with a cat and use a woman instead of a man, could you then predict with absolute certainty that the Blue’s Clues knockoff would be successful at all? No. Again, the argument in the book is written in hindsight, and as a result, suffers from a narrative fallacy which better serves Gladwell’s ability to write a chapter than it does to guide people into effective ways to make decisions.
In yet another chapter, he speaks of the dramatic crime rate drop in New York City and how the reason for the drop was debated by criminologists for years. He then settles, for some apparent reason (possibly because it supports his theme?) that the drop in crime in New York City was the result of discovering the connection between people’s psychological propensity to commit crimes and broken windows—people were more willing to partake in crime when they felt that no one was watching. If a broken window is observed in an area, like on a subway train, then people are more willing to partake in criminal acts. So a major repair job (not a little thing, by any measure) was begun on the subway, cleaning out these elements, replacing windows, repainting graffiti, until suddenly, inexplicably, crime rates dropped.
To illustrate this fallacy, after reading this, can you then look at your own city and say that the answer to your problem with crime can be solved by the replacement of broken windows and graffiti in the subways? No. I found it rather telling when, out of a fluke, the next day I read a few chapters in another pop-business book called Freakonomics who used the same example -- the drop in crime in New York City (and across the US at the same time)-- but states that the drop in crime rates resulted from the legalization of abortion! Still a little thing, for sure, but reiterating, which little thing deserves the attention? All little things? Then it really isn’t a little thing we are looking at if it encompasses several elements. This told me one thing, and it definitely is not what the author intended—we cannot predict effectively, but we definitely can write and make it appear as if we have the ability to predict. And since the selection of little things upon which one should focus is unpredictable, there is no point to give little things any more weight than the big things since they are too interrelated and we see them both, naturally.
In summary, buy the book! It’s a fun ride, but when you finish, you’ll realize it is just that—a ride.
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