Review of Gladwell's Books - Tipping Point, Blink

1.       I finished “The tipping Point” and “Blink” over the weekend. He’s got good narrative structures for what is essentially heave collection of research and academic papers in social science, but repackaged them into layman’s terms, interwoven into a storyline which provokes thoughts. Freakonomics was written in a similar vein, and again, there are items which we could dig and raise as gold findings – such as the message that we can offer bettermwnet to the world, but overall there’s a cynical part of me that thinks we do need to sort out the simplification and exaggerations out, and reconnect and understand the context of our situation better before jumping headlong into some of the shared findings and narratives from the books. Although it can be argues that this was the assertion that the Tipping Point was making.

2.       My comments are that there’s only so much we can absorb from what is fundamentally a biased narrative, even if the messaging and the writing is solid and convincing. It is at the end of the day, still the opinions of Gladwell. Note: I bought the books with my money, and I have the right to comment on it the way I like.. J

3.       I remember Aznir’s attempt to list out the mavens, connectors and salesmen in TNB from his position as Chief Skunkworks (sorry, cant remember the name of the Unit / Dept, but that is the role – and the position has very positive connotation in the realm of change management in the US, although Malaysians not familiar to the language may take offence). I remember the fact that he tried to keep the message sticky by having the T7 messages everywhere (even behind toilet doors) except on the toilet seats. But messaging is everything and context failure was evident. In the end, measured from the perspective of the T7 initiative, it was unclear if it achieved its intended success.

4.       The point is that in the context of stickiness, it worked in the initial stages. But it failed in the context of getting thinking and commitment going hand-in-hand to get the transformation going. There was a lack of getting people into the right places, giving support to people capable of getting things going, and in he end it was a missed opportunity. Change management is always a people business to get to the tipping point. In the end, there was just too little to get the stickiness. The tipping point opportunity was lost. It was lost because CMU thought getting enough people scented with the idea of change was enough. It wasn’t because there were still huge efforts required to get change happening on a secondary, tertiary level for the stickiness to endure. Context was absent.

5.       In a way, the above seemed to vindicate Gladwell. But I would think also that this wasn’t the application that it was meant to be. Say we wanted to address the baby dumping issue. Where do we start using Gladwell’s model? It doesn’t appear to be a PR problem alone, and he seemed to address the issue also with the evidence on the needle distribution program, even though he tried to offset the weakness of that example with some side benefits. Again, asking the question as before, how effective is the needle distribution program in combating AIDS?

6.       We all want a simplified model where our version of truth lies victorious, and that model helps us to achieve our objectives. I guess that the dakwah approach, of studying our relationship to God and society, organizing our society according to the tenets as ordained by the Almighty, gives a more powerful model for change and stickiness to grow. How did Islam grow within such a short period of time after the first revelations? Growth of the empire after the Prophet’s Death? Growth of Islam in Europe and US? It is a combination of funding, power of communication, and above all strength of the message. I’m prevaricating, and again I suppose this vindicates Gladwell. It’s just that as a matter of preference, I don’t like simplifying models of huge issues, like Freakonomics and Tipping Point. I also fell asleep more that a few times while trying to finish the latter.

7.       I like Blink. It makes no recommendations. It was just a roundtrip of what our intuitions tell us and the need to be careful, to cultivate the right positive thoughts about people and first impressions. Above all, be careful of what others think of you is perhaps the message I take the most.

8.       Good writer. Blink better than Tipping Point. Having said that, I’ll come back to reexamine some of the things in there at some point in the future hopefully.