Another great book, Cydcor reviews The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.

Description of this book: Gladwell, a journalist and writer for The New Yorker magazine, is known for his comprehensive examinations of how change or success happens.  The Tipping Point is an in depth look at how ideas get made into wildly popular companies, books or trends.  Everything from television shows to teen smoking, popularity of ideas is modeled like an epidemic.  There are carriers, those that evangelize the idea and get people excited about it.  Malcolm Gladwell explains that there are three types of people involved in spreading an idea: connectors, mavens and salespeople.  Connectors are people with a wide social network that are good at creating communities to rally for the concept.  Mavens are knowledgeable experts that enjoy educating the public on their area of expertise.  Salespeople are gifted at drumming up excitement for new things.

Cydcor recommends this book to future leaders and business people because: Gladwell has a talent for identifying key factors in how to make something popular.  The biggest difference in an idea that fails and one that succeeds is knowing the right people to hand your idea to.  Networking, knocking on the right doors and finding the people who will think the idea is “cool” is the best way to become a viral sensation.  However, Gladwell also explains that ideas need to have “stickiness” factor that will help the important people spread it to others.  Both of those factors also have to an in an environment where the idea and the people are relevant to current sentiment.

Our favorite part: "The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts."

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This is the ninth installment of our book reviews project designed to introduce you to books that Cydcor team members find especially valuable.  This review is by Megan, Cydcor technology consultant, and is the first review she has done for us.

Title: The Tipping Point; How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Description of the book: The Tipping Point is a succinct look at that moment where a marketing campaign becomes a success. What does it take to make something viral on the web? According to Gladwell, it's very much like how a disease becomes an epidemic. All it takes is one person, a small and targeted push, to make a campaign a success.

Why should you read this? I highly recommend the Tipping Point to anyone in sales, but it's also just an incredibly enjoyable look at human nature and how we function as a society. One gets the feeling that Malcolm Gladwell is one of those people who just really enjoys diving into data and research, and he definitely brings the reader along for the ride.

My favorite part: My favorite part of the Tipping Point was his description of the 1967 small world experiment by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. Basically, Milgram distributed almost 200 letters to students in Nebraska and asked them to try to get them to a stockbroker in Boston by passing it to people that they knew and asking them to do the same.

The study found that it took an average of six people to deliver each letter. But, more interesting, of the letters that came through to the stockbroker a vast majority passed through a single person, a travelling salesman.

This illustrated one of Gladwell's points, that success of any social epidemic is dependent on a few important types of people. That salesman was one of those types of people, a connector.

We all know connectors in our lives. They are people who know large numbers of people and who are in the habit of making connections, a sort of hub in the middle of social wheels. But the reason why this resonated with me so much is that my mother is clearly one a connector, and reading the Tipping Point helped me understand why she has been so successful, and some of the struggles that she has experienced.