Resenhas - The Tipping Point

RAFALE TESSER 13/03/2010

"A fascinating book that makes you see the world in a different way." - FORTUNE
Pra mim essa é a melhor definição! O livro é interessantismo e nos apresenta pontos de vista completamente surpreendentes. Dizem ser muito bom para vendedores e marketeiros, mas acho que é ótimo para qualquer pessoa. Todo mundo tem alguma ideia que gostaria de difundir, quer mudar o mundo de alguma forma. Ou seja, todos buscamos o Tipping Point. Independente da área. Entendendo melhor, ou pelo menos tentando entender, como as epidemias sociais funcionam fica mais fácil atingir os objetivos.

Definitivamente, eu recomendo!

Thiago Paiva 07/03/2013

O que faz com que uma tendência vire moda?
Tipping Point, ou o Ponto da Virada em português, foi o primeiro livro do Malcolm Gladwell, onde ele se baseou nos seus artigos publicados no The New Yorker.

O livro tem como objetivo estudar como que alguns comportamentos sociais, ideias e produtos se espalham como virus, ele tenta explicar como um grupo de hipsters de Manhattan utilizando sapatos estilo Hush Puppies se torna num fenômeno que se espalha por todo os Estados Unidos.

Para explicar isso, ele observou 3 regras que as epidemias obedecem:

- A REGRA DOS POUCOS: Onde ele explica que algumas pessoas exercem uma influência enorme nas epidemias. Ele classifica essas pessoas em 3 tipos: Conectores (pessoas curiosas que possuem conexões com diversos grupos), Mavens (especialistas em certas áreas) e os vendedores (pessoas que vendem ideias e conceitos para amigos e outras pessoas).

- FATOR DE COLA: Que é o fator crucial que determina se uma tendência vai grudar na cabeça das pessoas e influenciar mais pessoas no futuro.

- O PODER DO CONTEXTO: Alguns contextos são mais propícios para uma ideia viralizar do que outros, dessa forma o contexto se torna um fator importante para determinar se uma tendência vai virar moda ou se vai apenas ser uma tendência.

Ele fala que são esses 3 fatores que fazem uma tendência cruzar o abismo que há entre os early adopters e a early majority, explicado no livro Crossing The Chasm.

O livro é bastante leve e com bastante exemplos que tornam a leitura agradável e divertida, o conceito muito interessa e que influenciou outros livros a estudarem esse fenômeno, como por exemplo o Made to Stick (do Chip Heath e Dan Health).

Resumindo, um conceito muito interessante principalmente no contexto hiperconctado no qual vivemos hoje. É uma boa leitura, assim como todos os livros do Malcolm Gladwell, porém, para mim, o Outlier continua sendo o melhor livro dele.

#Recomendo

Moitta 20/11/2014

Tips
There are 3 rules for epidemics.
The law of the few (the power of connectors, mavens and salesman), the Stickiness factor and the Power of context.
How deep can a simple question lead you. Malcom shows beautifully how far does the rabbit role goes. To understand how does the word of mouth functions, he delves into epidemics, Micronesian suicide waves, teen smoking, shoes going mainstream and sesame street.
To tip, the message or product must be sticky, and the stickiness factor is explained in sesame street and blues clues. Preschoolers need more literal jokes, they crave for a story, they need to understand it, and they love repetition. For they, the world provides enough novelty everywhere, so to see the same episode 5 times in a row allows them to focus, and learn, something new every time.
The smoking issue, as studies show, are not sticky because people are unaware of the risks, they are sticky despite it. It is the coolness, the experimentation, the boost in brain chemicals that some people are more prone to. The antidepressant experiment shows how people smoke less or stop if they get the dopamine (and others) from another source.
On the power of context we learn that we are bias to understand peoples behaviour. We think character traits are constant, they emerge from within, but context plays a huge role. The graffiti in the subway are one example (the broken window experiment). We tend to make sense of others as being good, bad, extroverted or timid, when they can be all of those, depending on the context.

"These three agents of change I call the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of the Context."

"The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make big difference in how much of an impact it makes."

"The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem."

"An expert will talk about, say, cars because they love cars. But they don't talk about cars because they love you, and want to help you with your decision. The Market Mavens will. They are more socially motivated."

"But in the particular, unguarded way that people watch the news, a little bias can suddenly go a long way."

"Part of what it means to have a powerful or persuasive personality, then, is that you can draw others into your own rhythms and dictate the terms of the interaction."

"The creators of Sesame Street accomplished something extraordinary, and the story of how they did that is a marvelous illustration of the second of the rules of the Tipping Point, the Stickiness Factor. They discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they could overcome television's weakness as a teaching tool and make what they had to say memorable. Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky."

"If you look closely at epidemic ideas or messages, as often as not the elements that make them sticky turn out to be as small and as seemingly trivial as Wunderman's gold box".

"And once the advice became practical and personal, it became memorable."

"The Distracter was a stickiness machine."

"She would create a story to try to integrate events, actions, and feelings into one structure - a process that is a critical part of a child's mental development."

"So putting these ideas together, that kids are interested in being intellectually active when they watch TV, and give the opportunity they'll be behaviorally active, that created the philosophy for Blue's Clues."

"If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don't understand - things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it's a search for understanding and predictability."

"The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it."

"The answer lies in the third of the principles of epidemic transmission, the Power of Context. The Law of the Few looked at the kinds of people who are critical in spreading information. The chapter on Sesame Street and Blue's Clues looked at the question of Stickiness, suggesting that in order to be capable of sparking epidemics, ideas have to be memorable and move us to action. We've looked at the people who spread ideas, and we've looked at the characteristics of successful ideas. But the subject of this chapter - The Power of Context - is no less important than the first two. Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur."

"Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premisse that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment."

"The implication of those two studies go to the heart of the Law of the Few, because they suggest that what we think of as inner states - preferences and emotions - are actually powerfully and imperceptibly influenced by seemingly inconsequential personal influences, by a newscaster we watch for a few minutes a day or by someone we sit next to, in silence, in a two minute experiment.
The essence of the Power of Context is that the same thing is true for certain kinds of environments - that in ways that we don't necessarily appreciate, our inner states are the result of our outer circumstances."

"All of us, when it comes to personality, naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or is not a certain way.
But what Zimbardo and Hartshorne and May are suggesting is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we're deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behaviour."

"The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information.
Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people's behaviour, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context."

"In the end, this doesn't make much difference. There is something in all of us that makes us instinctively want to explain the world around us in terms of people's essential attributes: he's a better basketball player, that person is smarter than I am.
We do this because, like vervets, we are a lot more attuned to personal cues than to contextual cues."

"the human mind has a kind of ''reducing valve'' that 'creates and maintains the perception of continuity even in the face of perpetual observed changes in actual behaviour'."

"If you get too large, you don't have enough work in common. You don't have enough things in common, and then you start to become strangers and that close knit fellowship starts to get lost."

"in a group under 150, 'orders can be implemented and unruly behaviour controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man to man contacts."

"When each person has group acknowledge responsibility for particular tasks and facts, greater efficiency is inevitable. Each domain is handled by the fewest capable of doing so, and responsibility for the domains is a continuous over time rather than intermittently assigned by circumstance."

"Now, of course, if you have a company that is making paper towels or stamping out nuts and bolts, you might not care. Not every company needs this degree of connectedness. But in a high technology company like Gore, which relies for its market edge on its ability to innovate and react quickly to demanding and sophisticated customers, this kind of global memory system is critical. It makes the company incredibly efficient. It means that cooperation is easier."

"Stupid is as stupid does. Well, cool is as cool does. Cool brands treat people well, and we didn't. I had personally promised some of those little shops that we would give them special product, then we changed our minds. That was the beginning."

"I'm getting permission to act from someone else who is engaging in deviant act."

"The decision by someone famous to take his or her own life has the same effect" it gives other people, particularly those vulnerable to suggestion because of immaturity or mental illness, permission to engage in a deviant act as well."

"[smoking] The habit sticks. It is important to keep these two concepts - contagiousness and stickiness - separate, because they follow very different strategies.
Contagiousness is in larger part a function of the messenger. Stickiness is primarily a property of the message"



“If we are looking for Tipping Points in the war on smoking, then we need to decide which of those sides of the epidemic we will have the most success attacking. Should we try to make smoking less contagious, to stop the Salesman who spread the smoking virus? Or are we better off trying to make it less sticky, to look for ways to turn all smokers into chippers?”

“As overall smoking rates decline, in other words, the habit is becoming concentrated among the most troubled and marginal members of society.”

“It’s not enough to lift the mood, in other word; you heve to lift the mood in precisely the same way that nicotine does, and only Zyban does that.”

“We have, in short, somehow become convinced that we need to tackle the whole problem, all at once. But the truth is that we don’t. We only need to find the stickiness Tipping Points, and those are the links to depression and the nicotine threshold.”

“What we should be doing instead of fitting experimentation is making sure that experimentation doesn’t have serious consequences.”

“This is the first lesson of the Tipping Point. Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas. The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesman are responsible for starting word of mouth epidemics, which means that if you are interested in starting a word of mouth epidemic, your resources ought to be solely concentrated on those three groups.”

“The world - much as we want it to - does not accord with our intuition. This is the second lesson of the Tipping Point.
Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.”

“We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and our temperament. But if you add up the examples of Salesman and Connectors, of Paul Revere’s ride and Blue’s Clues, and the rule of 150 and the New York subway cleanup and the Fundamental Attribution Error, they amount to a very different conclusion about what it means to be human.”

“In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action.”

“It is happening because Columbine happened, and because ritualised, dramatic, self destructive behaviour among teenagers - whether it involves suicide, smoking, taking a gun to school, or fainting after drinking a harmless can of Coke - has extraordinary contagious power.”

“The cure for immunity is finding Mavens, Connectors, and Salesman.”