A major reworking of most of it. Completely re-edited with a focus on flow, tweaked/added transitions and moved a few things around to that end. The introduction was rewritten again. I tried to be sharper on the idea that Gladwell seemed to be stepping out of his journalism shoes and pretending to be a scientist, but wasn't actually providing evidence like a scientist needed to. Somewhat clarified my paragraph on Nate as a Maven. Lots and lots of editing grammar, sentence structure, and picking better words. Overall... I'm a lot happier with this.
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There exists an academic definition of smart. It indicates that an individual has a good grasp of studied concepts and is able to correctly answer questions about those concepts. Institutions measure this idea through the use of evaluations such as tests or grades. This is a simple, objective way to measure 'intelligence.' Those who score well are deemed 'smart,' and smart individuals are subject to different treatment. I qualified as one of these students growing up. I was placed in honors classes and still got straight A's in all of my classes. I was a good student. I did very well as far as my school was concerned. This did not, however, mean I was a good person or otherwise 'good' in a general sense. In particular, I had problems with people.
People did not take to me naturally. I was a loner. I wasn't a leader of any groups nor was I otherwise considered popular. I was definitively not a "people person." From elementary school through even high school, there was rarely more than a couple people that I actually considered friends. This was not from a lack of people in my environment, nor because I was particularly uninteresting or awkward. I just didn't really stick to any of the people, and they didn't stick to me.
The concept of me being so without friends would be downright laughable to my current friends. Not only is working with people part of my job, it’s also something I do easily and willingly. I am also no longer a straight-A student. I sometimes get C’s in classes these days, but I’m a leader in a number of student organizations. I’d still consider myself successful at school, but I’ve lost a lot of the traditional markings of being an academically “smart” kid. For a different definition of the word though, I’m a lot smarter than I ever was growing up. Smart isn’t a one-dimensional concept. Smart, as it turns out, can also refer to being smart at people and understanding relationships and dynamics that can’t be tested in the traditional sense.
The large change in my life probably came from coming to college. And it came quickly, though not a lot else seemed to change. I became subtly more interesting, gained a tiny more experience in dealing with people, and was exposed to a few more people than I had been most of the time in previous years. I grew less concerned with grades and more concerned with experiences. There were no giant life-changing moment, but nevertheless I transformed very significantly.
A similar process is the premise of Malcom Gladwell’s bestselling book, The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell argues that many large phenomena can be explained by a few small factors. He weaves a story about the science of change around anecdotes, witty titles, a smattering of science, and incredibly persuasive writing. Gladwell names three rules in his book: “The Law of the Few,” “The Stickiness Factor,” and “The Power of Context,” and he claims that they are all that is needed to understand how social epidemics start and spread. For the most part, the Law of the Few talks about the “who”s of epidemics, The Stickiness Factor talks about the “what” of epidemics, and the “Power of Context” talks about the “where” of epidemics, including a healthy dose of how the people in those environments impact them. Gladwell makes a case for being incredibly "people smart," and his book certainly reads so, but at the same time it comes off as entirely dumb in the “traditional” sense.
Being a “people person” myself, it is people that fascinate me, and Gladwell’s chapters on people and their role in these epidemic phenomena that I found both most interesting and troubling. This is particularly true in the second and fifth chapters, on “The Law of the Few” and the second half of “The Power of Context,” respectively. Both of these chapters have a large focus on people, special people and people in groups, if I’m being specific, but I mostly just picked them because they were the two I related to most when reading the book. Each of these chapters, besides being interesting, does a good job of highlighting the general themes of Gladwell’s writing that I feel a need to comment on.
As a side note on Gladwell's writing in and of itself, I should establish that The Tipping Point wasn’t the first of Gladwell’s books that I read. It was the second, and I was incredibly excited when I picked it up, because I had loved the first. Gladwell is an incredibly entertaining journalist. The science is transparent to a non-technical audience, and the anecdotes shared are always intriguing and sometimes something more – Gladwell does a great job of telling a story that his audience will care about even without a personal connection. If he were to write a fiction novel, it would probably go on my must-read list.
But here’s my problem with Gladwell. A lot of the time it seems that he’s not writing anything more than fiction. I said that his stories were interesting, and I stand by that statement. However, sometimes they seem to be little more than padding around a supposedly important point that he doesn’t have enough evidence to actually establish. I also said that his science was transparent. I feel that too often his science is transparent because it’s incredibly flimsy. As an engineer, I respect data, and a lot of the time, Gladwell just doesn’t have it. If the context of his pieces was journalism, I wouldn’t critique. But it feels like he’s attempting to pass them off as science. Science that has hasn’t bothered to fully understand before writing about. He makes compelling observations, yes, but even observing the same thing five times in a row doesn’t make it a fact. Obviously, the study of human behavior is not the exact science that physics is, but I feel as though Gladwell takes too many liberties. That said, I finished the book with interest, and can’t help but see the themes that Gladwell points out in my own life.
Returning to the themes in the book itself, Chapter Two of Gladwell’s book, “The Law of the Few”, is a section detailing a few special people that Gladwell calls Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. There’s a few people in my life who I think illustrate these categories beautifully. Each of these people have affected my life in various ways, but past my own life, I see the traits that Gladwell identifies as impacting many other people too. Let’s tour Gladwell's main points through talking about these special people: the Connectors Laura and Peter, Maven Nate, and the great Salesman Anthony.
Peter really became apparent as a Connector shortly after I moved out to Seattle for a summer internship. A couple of my newfound friends took me out for a night on the town. We met up with some of their friends from back at school, and when I was introduced, I was met with, “Oh, you go to the University of Illinois? Do you know Peter?” In fact I did know Peter, and I wasn’t particularly surprised that these random strangers did also. I had a similar experience at school when I went to visit my boyfriend at his dorm one night and found a bunch of my friends from high school there. They were hanging out with Laura who I’d met the first week of classes. Gladwell introduces Connectors as people with incredibly large social networks, people who are masters of something he terms “the weak tie,” an ability to remain acquaintances with an incredibly large number of people across time and space. These people, Gladwell claims, are incredibly important to a social epidemic, because they have they contact with an incredibly large number of people, the number of people necessary for an idea to gain enough spread quick enough to take hold.
Of course, even if an idea reaches the critical number of people, it doesn’t go anywhere if someone doesn’t collect and process the associated information. Gladwell coins another term for the type of people who hoard information constantly, passing it out as necessary. He calls them Mavens. Upon reading his description, I couldn’t think of anyone else but my friend Nate. Nate is the guy I call pretty much anytime I have a question or one of my friends has a question, or someone poses a question online and I don’t know the answer. It doesn’t matter what it happens to be about, I’ve gotten good advice about technology, design, business, and law to name a few topics. Nate has an opinion about everything, and he can back it up with at least two distinct references. He’s also happy to go to dinner with anyone to talk about any issue more thoroughly. In fact, I can’t really imagine making any major decision these days without consulting Nate. I know that, whatever my original opinion, I’m going to receive a lot of good information to think about. People like Nate, claim Gladwell, are what gives an idea enough weight to actually mean something and succeed.
That isn't to say that Nate is always someone I agree with even after consuming his wealth of knowledge. But Anthony is. I met Anthony late one Wednesday night, after a meeting for an organization that I had just joined. He asked if I would be interested in taking on some responsibilities in the organization. I tentatively said yes. Less than twenty-four hours later, not only had my responsibilities quadrupled, I was ecstatic about it, and hoping for more. This is what Anthony did to people. He was contagious, and he could convince you of just about anything. Gladwell calls people like my friend Anthony “Salesmen” and I couldn’t agree more. For an epidemic to stick, you need more than just the spread of an issue, and more than just information about that issue. You need the issue to matter, and that is what Anthony did. He made me care about something that I had been completely unaware of an hour before and care in a way that it suddenly became the center of my life.
I can’t deny the effect that all of these people have had on my life. Have they gotten me involved in social “epidemics” because of their presence? This I’m not sure about. Certainly, Anthony was able to get me into something that I didn’t care about before, but it was mostly for his benefit (the work I was doing was, in reality, his work that he had delegated). Nate is definitely my go-to source for information, and I’m sure that I’ve learned things from him that I wouldn’t otherwise. And I know perfectly well that Laura and Peter have touched many, many more lives than I probably ever will. And yet, I can’t think of a single epidemic that I have been a part of because of their direct effects on my life. Maybe these people aren’t perfect examples of Gladwell’s special “Few,” but I guess I sense motivation issues behind the whole question. Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen certainly could start a social epidemic – if they were so inclined. Are these just the type of people that are always motivated?
Even though I generally agree with Gladwell on his subject matter, I also have a few critiques of Gladwell and some of his methods. My issue is that I see these people in my life after the topic is on my mind seemingly only because I've been reading about them. Would I otherwise? Additionally, most of the chapter is anecdotes about a few people. While stories are a very nice place to start, I feel that after introducing them, Gladwell generally doesn't switch to hard data, he just makes his conclusions off of his stories. I'm not trying to say that these three types of people are not essential in causing epidemics (after all, they have had noted effects on my life), but I feel like I could probably make up a fourth or fifth individual and get readers to agree that these people also exist in social epidemics. Journalism certainly has different standards for evidence than science, but again, I don’t feel like Gladwell is attempting to pass himself off as a journalist. I don't disagree with Gladwell, but I also don't tend to assume that we have the whole picture about a scientific concept, even a social science concept, from seven or eight data points.
There are topics I support and recognize outside of the context of the book though. Gladwell spends a later chapter of his book talking about the "Rule of 150." This was something I was familiar with before reading the book and have seen in a number of other contexts. In particular, it's one of the main topics that came up at an interview I did last year with a University alumnus who now works at a data visualization company out in California. It feels less like a cool concept that Gladwell used buzzwords to describe and more like an actually verifiable finding with data behind it.
While I liked the topic, I did have a problem with Gladwell’s placement of the chapter. He calls it part II of a study of context. He claims it is an example of how environment impacts ideas. And yes, the number of people in an environment is definitely a factor. The chapter still felt like a stretch. Group size is an incredibly well-studied phenomenon, and it definitely affects the relationships between those in said group. But I’d call it a study on group dynamics rather than environment. This maybe a subtle distinction, but it seems to be lost in Gladwell’s drive to make his ideas neat, pretty, and easy to turn into soundbites. People are messy sometimes. Ideas are messy. A book about them has to be a little messy if it wants to be correct.
Side notes aside, I totally believe that the Rule of 150 is valid. When I interviewed my alumnus friend, he talked about how his company had changed as it grew. He joined the company in its start-up phase as one of its early employees. The company has since grown to over that magic 150 number. My friend mentioned how weird the day was when he walked past someone in the hall that he didn’t know. He had always been an extroverted person and had connections all across the company. And yet, when they hit 150 employees, he just couldn’t know everyone. It was actually a bit of a minor crisis for him to realize that he was now pouring his life into a company along with some complete strangers. My friend was book-smart, people-smart, extraverted and out-going, but he couldn’t keep up with an endlessly growing social network.
Gladwell talks about this 150 number, and the effect it has on social networks. Study after study, Gladwell tells us, has shown that we, as human beings, are just not capable of maintaining social connections of the same level with a group beyond this number. They start breaking down beyond that as my friend had experienced. Gladwell talks about the effects that the breakdown and lack of communication have on a group. They are no longer cohesive; they can no longer act as a unit with unified purpose. In order to start an epidemic, Gladwell claims, groups of this 150 size are essential. Too much bigger and suddenly they’re not all talking about the same thing, the groups splinter, and the momentum dies. In another sense, groups of 150 people or less can be smart. Past that, they start getting dumber.
My own social network, depending on what source you ask, is either eight people or around one hundred twenty or almost six hundred. Even in this isolated incident, Gladwell's claims are true. I do believe that within the first two groups, I could identify the Salesmen, Mavens, and Connectors, and I could accomplish a mission. Our social ties are strong. But not the 600 person network. It’s too big and too fractured. It’s not a real social network; it’s a representation of a bunch of networks that I belong to, and the common ties are just too weak.
It’s been a number of months since I read “The Tipping Point,” and I still find that there are days when I’m thinking or talking about Gladwell’s ideas. I loved a lot of what Gladwell had to say about people. I don’t know if I loved it because it was “true” or “smart” or “correct,” but I was generally able to agree and relate it to the people in my life. A lot of what he said I was even able to relate to myself. I don’t know if it’s because I spend a lot of time studying myself or because my social network, at this point, is pretty big. At the same time, the book bothered me because it wasn’t traditional “smart” – it doesn’t follow a rigorous scientific method at pretty much any point, but it tries really hard to pretend it’s good science.
But just like people can be different types of “smart”, so can this book. Without proving most of what it says, it manages to produce ideas that generally ring true to identify types of people that we all know. Huge groups don’t work; we know that. Some people are better at people than other people. Connectors can keep properly sized groups cohesive, Mavens can spread information between them, and Salesman can get them to act. So if Gladwell’s book isn’t the straight-A student, it’s probably that kid in the back who is maybe goofing off a little, but has got real and profitable ideas. That kid is worth talking to, and overall, this book is worth reading, but only if you've got someone to sit down and think critically through it with you.
