Malcolm Gladwell, Meet Mark Zuckerberg

The writer’ insistence on ignoring the web is an even bigger blind spot today than it was when The Tipping Point came out.

- Gal Beckerman

Not long after Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point was published, in the winter of 2000, it had a tipping point of its own. His first book took up residence on the New York Times best-seller list for an unbelievable eight years. More than 5 million copies were sold in North America alone, an epidemic that spread to the carry-on bags of many actual and aspiring CEOs.

Gladwell offered three “rules” for how any social contagion happens—how, say, a crime wave builds (and can be reversed), but also how a new kind of sneaker takes over the market. The rules turned out to explain his own book’s success as well. According to his “Law of the Few,” only a small number of Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are needed to discover and promote a new trend. (If this taxonomy sounds familiar, that’s just another sign of how deep this book has burrowed into the culture.) In the case of The Tipping Point, word of the book spread through corporate boardrooms and among the start-up denizens of Silicon Valley.

As for the second rule, “The Stickiness Factor”—the somewhat self-evident notion that a fad needs to be particularly accessible or addictive to really catch on—Gladwell’s storytelling was the necessary glue. Many readers and fellow writers over the years have correctly noted, out of jealousy or respect, that he is a master at extracting vibrant social science research and then arranging his tidbits in a pleasurably digestible way.

Gladwell’s third Tipping Point rule, “The Power of Context,” may have been the most crucial to his breaking out: the (again rather self-evident) notion that the environment into which an idea emerges affects its reception. He emphasizes this in the author’s note of his new book,