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

A few years ago, my kids and many others were enthusiastically bidding up the price of certain Pokemon cards. More recently, the rage was Harry Potter books. And among older humans, of course, it's wireless phones, the Palm Pilot, and E-Bay. The recent history of American business is filled with remarkable cases of products and ideas that suddenly became enormously popular and profitable. But what causes an idea to emerge from obscurity into commercial success? According to author Malcolm Gladwell, such products or services reach the "tipping point" - the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point, where they then spread at geometric, epidemic rates. These business epidemics are driven by contagious ideas, generally ripple out from a small base of customers, and appear almost overnight after the tipping point is reached. In this eye-opening summary, you'll:

• Discover how to use the "The Law of the Few" to recruit the three types of people - Connectors, Mavens and Salespeople -who influence others and drive huge sales.
• Learn how "The Stickiness Factor" drives sales epidemics with messages so memorable and catchy, you can't get them out of your mind. Remember, "Where's the Beef?"
• Grasp how "The Power of Context, " including the location, season, and group size, affects whether an idea will be embraced or ignored.
• Understand how to apply Gladwell's lessons, such as the need for disciplined concentration of resources on the relative few influencers who can determine whether an epidemic spreads or not.

If your business touches consumers in any way, you'll want to make this summary a part of your downtime listening very soon.