Malcom Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point is thought-provoking without being a great book. This isn’t easy to pull off, but Gladwell did it.
I read Gladwell’s original Tipping Point back in 2012. In the introduction to Revenge, Gladwell mentions that he meant to revisit the ideas in Tipping Point. Because of the long time that had passed since I read the first book, I didn’t remember any of them. I then consulted my notes and they remined me of insights like, Weak connections the most powerful because they give us info outside our usual circle of friends. They also reminded me that Gladwell knows how to tell compelling stories, like his treatment of the Muppets in the first Tipping Point.
Revenge has those stories too. The most interesting, to me, were about the opioid crisis, bank robberies in Los Angeles, remembrance of the Holocaust, the acceptance of gay marriage in the United States, and college admissions. Gladwell lays out patches of beautiful tapestry, but then he fails to weave them together into a coherent whole. The stories stand on their own, but Revenge isn’t more than the sum of its parts.
That’s not to say that there aren’t any general takeaways, but their connection to the stories is tenuous. One such takeaway is that a lot of the evil in the world is done by just a few people. So is a lot of the good. I wonder how often they’re the same people.
Something else that made me think is the importance of minorities hitting a certain threshold in a place or an organization before they have an impact. A token minority hire isn’t going to do it. For a minority, or a minority view, to be seen and feel welcome, they need to pass a tipping point, and often that tipping point seems to be around 25%. What’s frustrating about Gladwell is that he stops there. Is the 25% threshold the same for different kinds of minority? Does it apply to minorities feeling welcome, about not being perceived as a minority any more, about the majority behaving differently or about the majority feeling insecure? Gladwell doesn’t discuss any of those questions.
Two posts I wrote while reading the book: Network Television | Anthroposophy
Nehaveigur 