The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

by Malcolm Gladwell

  What Buckley is referring to here is the benefit of unity, of having everyone in a complex enterprise share a common relationship. There is a useful concept in psychology that, I think, makes it much clearer what he’s speaking about. This is what University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Wegner calls “transactive memory.” When we talk about memory, we aren’t just talking about ideas and impressions and facts stored inside our heads. An awful lot of what we remember is actually stored outside our brains. Most of us deliberately don’t memorize most of the phone numbers we need. But we do memorize where to find them—in a phone book, or in our personal Rolodex. Or we memorize the number 411, so we can call directory assistance. Nor do most of us know, say, the capital of Paraguay or some other obscure country. Why bother? It’s an awful lot easier to buy an atlas and store that kind of information there. Perhaps most important, though, we store information with other people. Couples do this automatically. A few years ago, for example, Wegner set up a memory test with 59 couples, all of whom had been dating for at least three months. Half of the couples were allowed to stay together, and half were split up, and given a new partner whom they didn’t know. Wegner then asked all the pairs to read 64 statements, each with an underlined word, like “Midori is a Japanese melon liqueur.” Five minutes after looking at all the statements, the pairs were asked to write down as many as they could remember. Sure enough, the pairs who knew each other remembered substantially more items than those who didn’t know each other. Wegner argues that when people know each other well, they create an implicit joint memory system—a transactive memory system—which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kinds of things. “Relationship development is often understood as a process of mutual self disclosure,” he writes. “Although it is probably more romantic to cast this process as one of interpersonal revelation and acceptance, it can also be appreciated as a necessary precursor to transactive memory.” Transactive memory is part of what intimacy means. In fact, Wegner argues, it is the loss of this kind of joint memory that helps to make divorce so painful. “Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems,” he writes. “They once were able to discuss their experiences to reach a shared understanding....They once could count on access to a wide range of storage in their partner, and this, too, is gone....The loss of transactive memory feels like losing a part of one’s own mind.”

  In a family, this process of memory sharing is even more pronounced. Most of us remember, at one time, only a fraction of the day to day details and histories of our family life. But we know, implicitly, where to go to find the answers to our questions—whether it is up to our spouse to remember where we put our keys or our thirteen year old to find out how to work the computer or our mother to find out details of our childhood. Perhaps more important, when new information arises, we know who should have responsibility for storing it. This is how, in a family, expertise emerges. The thirteen year old is the family expert on the computer not just because he has the greatest aptitude for electronic equipment or because he uses computers the most, but also because when new information about the family computer arises, he is the one assigned, automatically, to remember it. Expertise leads to more expertise. Why bother remembering how to install software if your son, close at hand, can do it for you? Since mental energy is limited, we concentrate on what we do best. Women tend to be the “experts” in child care, even in modern, dual career families, because their initial greater involvement in raising a baby leads them to be relied on more than the man in storing child care information, and then that initial expertise leads them to be relied on even more for child care matters, until—often unintentionally—the woman shoulders the bulk of the intellectual responsibility for the child. “When each person has group acknowledged responsibility for particular tasks and facts, greater efficiency is inevitable,” Wegner says. “Each domain is handled by the fewest capable of doing so, and responsibility for the domains is continuous over time rather than intermittently assigned by circumstance.”

  When Jim Buckley says, then, that working at Gore is a “different kind of experience,” what he is talking about, in part, is that Gore has a highly effective institutional transactive memory. Here, for example, is how one Gore associate describes the kind of “knowing” that emerges in a small plant: “It’s not just do you know somebody. It’s do you really know them well enough that you know their skills and abilities and passions. That’s what you like, what you do, what you want to do, what you are truly good at. Not, are you a nice person.” What that associate is talking about is the psychological preconditions for transactive memory: it’s knowing someone well enough to know what they know, and knowing them well enough so that you can trust them to know things in their specialty. It’s the re creation, on an organization wide level, of the kind of intimacy and trust that exists in a family.

  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. It means that you move much faster to get things done or create teams of workers or find out an answer to a problem. It means that people in one part of the company can get access to the impressions and expertise of people in a completely different part of the company. At Lucent, the 150 people in manufacturing may have their own memory network. But how much more effective would the company be if, like Gore, everyone in the plant was part of the same transactive system—if R&D was hooked into design and design into manufacturing and manufacturing into sales? “One of the immediate reactions we get when we talk to people is ‘Man, your system sounds chaotic. How in the devil can you do anything with no obvious authority?’ But it’s not chaos. It isn’t a problem,” Burt Chase said. “It’s hard to appreciate that unless you are working in it. It’s the advantage of understanding people’s strengths. It’s knowing—where can I get my best advice? And if you have some knowledge about people, you can do that.”

  What Gore has created, in short, is an organized mechanism that makes it far easier for new ideas and information moving around the organization to tip—to go from one person or one part of the group to the entire group all at once. That’s the advantage of adhering to the Rule of 150. You can exploit the bonds of memory and peer pressure. Were Gore to try to reach each employee singly, their task would have been much harder, just as Rebecca Wells’s task would have been much harder if her readers came to her readings not in groups of six and seven but by themselves. And had Gore tried to put everyone in one big room, it wouldn’t have worked either. In order to be unified—in order to spread a specific, company ideology to all of its employees—Gore had to break itself up into semi autonomous small pieces. That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first. Rebecca Wells says that what she began to realize as the Ya Ya epidemic grew was that it wasn’t really about her or even about her book: it wasn’t one epidemic focused on one thing. It was thousands of different epidemics, all focused on the groups that had grown up around Ya Ya. “I began to realize,” she said, “that these women had built their own Ya Ya relationships, not so much to the book but to each other.”

  SIX

  Case Study

  RUMORS, SNEAKERS, AND

  THE POWER OF TRANSLATION

  Airwalking is the name given to the skateboarding move in which the skater takes off from a ramp, slips his board out from under his feet, and then takes one or two long, exaggerated strides in the air before landing. It is a classic stunt, a staple of traditional skateboarding, which is why when two entrepreneurs decided in the mid 1980s to start m
anufacturing athletic shoes aimed at hard core skateboarders, they called the company Airwalk. Airwalk was based outside San Diego and rooted in the teenage beach and skate culture of the region. In the beginning, the firm made a canvas shoe in wild colors and prints that became a kind of alternative fashion statement. They also made a technical skate shoe in suede, with a thick sole and a heavily cushioned upper that—at least at first—was almost as stiff as the skateboard itself. But the skaters became so devoted to the product that they would wash the shoes over and again, then drive over them in cars to break them in. Airwalk was cool. It sponsored professional skateboarders, and developed a cult following at the skate events, and after a few years had built up a comfortable $13 million a year business.

  Companies can continue at that level indefinitely, in a state of low level equilibrium, serving a small but loyal audience. But the owners of Airwalk wanted more. They wanted to build themselves into an international brand, and in the early 1990s they changed course. They reorganized their business operations. They redesigned their shoes. They expanded their focus to include not just skateboarding but also surfing, snowboarding, mountain biking, and bicycle racing, sponsoring riders in all of those sports and making Airwalk synonymous with the active, alternative lifestyle. They embarked on an aggressive grassroots campaign to meet the buyers for youth oriented shoe stores. They persuaded Foot Locker to try them out on an experimental basis. They worked to get alternative rock bands to wear their shoes on stage and, perhaps most important, they decided to hire a small advertising agency named Lambesis to rethink their marketing campaign. Under Lambesis’s direction, Airwalk exploded. In 1993, it had been a $16 million company. In 1994, it had sales of $44 million. In 1995, sales jumped to $150 million, and the year after that they hit $175 million. At its peak, Airwalk was ranked by one major marketing research company as the thirteenth “coolest” brand among teenagers in the world, and the number three footwear brand, behind Nike and Adidas. Somehow, within the space of a year or two, Airwalk was jolted out of its quiet equilibrium on the beaches of southern California. In the mid 1990s, Airwalk tipped.

  The Tipping Point has been concerned so far with defining epidemics and explaining the principles of epidemic transmission. The experiences of Paul Revere and Sesame Street and crime in New York City and Gore Associates each illustrate one of the rules of Tipping Points. In everyday life, however, the problems and situations we face don’t always embody the principles of epidemics so neatly. In this section of the book, I’d like to look at less straightforward problems, and see how the idea of Mavens and Connectors and Stickiness and Context—either singly or in combination—helps to explain them.

  Why, for example, did Airwalk tip? The short answer is that Lambesis came up with an inspired advertising campaign. At the start, working with only a small budget, the creative director of Lambesis, Chad Farmer, came up with a series of dramatic images—single photographs showing the Airwalk user relating to his shoes in some weird way. In one, a young man is wearing an Airwalk shoe on his head, with the laces hanging down like braids, as his laces are being cut by a barber. In another, a leather clad girl is holding up a shiny vinyl Airwalk shoe like a mirror and using it to apply lipstick. The ads were put on billboards and in “wild postings” on construction site walls and in alternative magazines. As Airwalk grew, Lambesis went into television. In one of the early Airwalk commercials, the camera pans across a bedroom floor littered with discarded clothing. It then settles under the bed, as the air is filled with grunting and puffing and noise of the bedsprings going up and down. Finally the camera comes out from under the bed and we see a young, slightly dazed looking youth, holding an Airwalk shoe in his hand, jumping up and down on his bed as he tries unsuccessfully to kill a spider on the ceiling. The ads were entirely visual, designed to appeal to youth all over the world. They were rich in detail and visually arresting. They all featured a truculent, slightly geeky anti hero. And they were funny, in a sophisticated way. This was great advertising; in the years since the first Airwalk ads appeared, the look and feel of that campaign has been copied again and again by other companies trying to be “cool.” The strength of the Lambesis campaign was in more than the look of their work, though. Airwalk tipped because its advertising was founded very explicitly on the principles of epidemic transmission.

  1.

  Perhaps the best way to understand what Lambesis did is to go back to what sociologists call the diffusion model, which is a detailed, academic way of looking at how a contagious idea or product or innovation moves through a population. One of the most famous diffusion studies is Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross’s analysis of the spread of hybrid seed corn in Greene County, Iowa, in the 1930s. The new corn seed was introduced in Iowa in 1928, and it was superior in every respect to the seed that had been used by farmers for decades before. But it wasn’t adopted all at once. Of the 259 farmers studied by Ryan and Gross, only a handful had started planting the new seed by 1932 and 1933. In 1934, 16 took the plunge. In 1935, 21 followed, then 36, and the year after that a whopping 61 and then 46, 36, 14, and 3, until by 1941, all but two of the 259 farmers studied were using the new seeds. In the language of diffusion research, the handful of farmers who started trying hybrid seed at the very beginning of the 1930s were the Innovators, the adventurous ones. The slightly larger group who were infected by them were the Early Adopters. They were the opinion leaders in the community, the respected, thoughtful people who watched and analyzed what those wild Innovators were doing and then followed suit. Then came the big bulge of farmers in 1936, 1937, and 1938, the Early Majority and the Late Majority, the deliberate and the skeptical mass, who would never try anything until the most respected of farmers had tried it first. They caught the seed virus and passed it on, finally, to the Laggards, the most traditional of all, who see no urgent reason to change. If you plot that progression on a graph, it forms a perfect epidemic curve— starting slowly, tipping just as the Early Adopters start using the seed, then rising sharply as the Majority catches on, and falling away at the end when the Laggards come straggling in.

  The message here—new seeds—was highly contagious and powerfully sticky. A farmer, after all, could see with his own eyes, from spring planting to fall harvest, how much better the new seeds were than the old. It’s hard to imagine how that particular innovation couldn’t have tipped. But in many cases the contagious spread of a new idea is actually quite tricky.

  The business consultant Geoffrey Moore, for example, uses the example of high technology to argue that there is a substantial difference between the people who originate trends and ideas and the people in the Majority who eventually take them up. These two groups may be next to each other on the word of mouth continuum. But they don’t communicate particularly well. The first two groups—the Innovators and Early Adopters—are visionaries. They want revolutionary change, something that sets them apart qualitatively from their competitors. They are the people who buy brand new technology, before it’s been perfected or proved or before the price has come down. They have small companies. They are just starting out. They are willing to take enormous risks. The Early Majority, by contrast, are big companies. They have to worry about any change fitting into their complex arrangement of suppliers and distributors. “If the goal of visionaries is to make a quantum leap forward, the goal of pragmatists is to make a percentage improvement—incremental, measurable, predictable progress,” Moore writes. “If they are installing a new product, they want to know how other people have fared with it. The word risk is a negative word in their vocabulary—it does not connote opportunity or excitement but rather the chance to waste money and time. They will undertake risks when required, but they first will put in place safety nets and manage the risks very closely.”