The Tipping Point

Gladwell’s first book borrows the language of epidemiology to explain social change. Fashions, crime waves and word-of-mouth hits, he argues, behave like contagions: they build quietly, then cross a threshold and explode. He identifies the small number of connectors, mavens and salesmen who carry an idea outward, and the stickiness that makes some messages lodge while others slide off. The book handed business a vocabulary it is still using twenty-five years later.