I received The Tipping Point as a present from my friend Mark back in 2005. I almost finished reading it that year then put it back on my unread bookshelf as part of some ill-advised cleaning effort. Turned out I only had two pages of the Afterword remaining. So nine years later I am officially done. The Tipping Point talks about why some behaviors and purchase trends spread wildly while others do not. Topics discussed include the spread of disease, crime rates, and shoe purchases. The one that stuck in my mind was the case of Hush Puppy dress shoes. They had drifted out of fashion and the company was on the verge of discontinuing the product. Then they started to make a comeback and became wildly popular again. Gladwell discusses how this came about, wrapped in some terminology he developed. The author creates the idea of Connectors, Mavens, and Salespeople. Basically Connectors are people who communicate with lots of other people. My friend Paul P. would be this kind of person. Mavens are folks who try new things and share information about them. Salespeople are persuasive people, ones who are often emulated out of sheer charisma. Like any sociology-related text, there is a theory, and then anecdotal stories to support that theory. Gladwell did cite a study that involved having random people transfer letters to an unknown individual in a far off city. The catch was you could only give them to someone else you already knew. The letters tracked all of the people along the way. The average number of hops was six. [The idea of six degrees of separation between any two people isn't fiction]. Malcolm also noted that just three people passed half of the letters to the final destination. This helped bring about his theory of Connectors. In the intervening years, I've run into other research that tried to reproduce his results on a larger scale. They came up with the same number of average hops but didn't find magic people that lots of messages ran through. That isn't to dismiss the book by any means, just a suggestion to adjust the weight you put on his conclusions. Long ago I learned that hard work is merely a pre-requisite for success. The Tipping Point made me think that if I wanted to sell a product, I need to think very carefully not about how to spread the word, but to get people to spread the word for me. If nothing else, the book did encourage me to buy a pair of Hush Puppies. Though now long in the tooth, I've been using the same pair as my "dress shoes" ever since.