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

Abridged
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Narrator: Malcolm Gladwell
Genres: Business, Marketing, Science & Technology, Psychology
Publisher: Time Warner Audio Books
Date: January 2005
Length: 3 hours
Ratings:
  • Book Rating: 3.5/5
Formats:
  • CD

Overview

N/A

Reviews (41)

Good as far as it goes

Written by Listener from Thousand Oaks, CA on September 18th, 2008

  • Book Rating: 3/5

I judge a book's worth by how much I quote it. Therefore, 3/5. Author provide's an interesting perspective. But thesis can be hard to apply, so usefulness of the new perspective for me is a little limited. It's one thing to recognize the existence of tipping points, but a long leap to being able to facilitate them. I'd like this book to have been "chapter one". Where's the rest?

Very Dissapointing

Written by Anonymous on August 20th, 2008

  • Book Rating: 0/5

I actually got a chance to listen to the unabridged version and after nearly falling asleep during the 1st CD and fast forwarding through most of the 2nd and 3rd, I wish I would have grabbed the unabridged version. Nothing in the book seemed especially enlightening or insightful. Gladwell just takes situations and types of people that we are already familiar with and gives them clever names and then provides 3 exhaustive examples. If you were ever to just sit down and critically think about these situations, common sense would get you to exactly where he gets you. If you want to think about society and its trends in a way that is actually interesting and unique, yes, read Freakonomics, that is a great book that helps the reader see things in a way s/he wouldn't think to look at them. This book just says: You know how you have that friend that seems to know everybody? Well, he does and if you tell him something he'll tell a lot of different people. (Shocking!)

Tip on Tipping

Written by Anonymous on July 19th, 2008

  • Book Rating: 2/5

This book was good. It lasted through a long drive. However, Freakonomics did this topic much better.

What's all tthe hype about?

Written by Anonymous from Wilmington, DE on March 25th, 2008

  • Book Rating: 3/5

I kept hearing how great this book was. I listened, and kept waiting and waiting for it to be something great. It was just okay.

Interesting

Written by Anonymous from Front Royal, VA on March 12th, 2008

  • Book Rating: 4/5

I wish I listened to the unabridged version. It does seem as though it was missing something. Very interesting once you get into it and past the author's monotone reading of his book. I think he missed his calling as a hypnotist.

Not As Good As "Blink"

Written by Anonymous on January 8th, 2008

  • Book Rating: 3/5

This is not as good as the other available Malcolm Gladwell book . I think it contains too few ideas reported to the number of pages/CDs to fill. Anyway, it's quite entertaining to listen it.

The Tipping Point

Written by Anonymous from Arlington, MA on December 19th, 2007

  • Book Rating: 2/5

Book had excellent points. but the narration was so boring and monotonous that I couldn't focus my attention on them.

Great read!

Written by Angela Brown from Madison, AL on September 26th, 2007

  • Book Rating: 4/5

I thoroughly enjoyed this read. It was informative, and engaging. I have been a fan of the author's writing in his New Yorker Articles. it was well researched and greatly detailed. I highly recommend it.

Read the Unabridged Book too!

Written by Lauralie on September 11th, 2007

  • Book Rating: 4/5

This is a fantastic book. I strongly recommend investing extra time to read or listen to the full version. The Tipping Point is not telling you how to do something, it's merely telling you historically, and statistically, how a tipping point is reached. Best Wishes to all!

Too Short

Written by Dwyn Tomlinson on July 25th, 2007

  • Book Rating: 4/5

Disappointing that this is abridged. Good stuff here about how things work. Particularly like the connectors versus mavens theory. Would have loved more details. Totally worth listening to.

Author Details

Author Details

Gladwell, Malcolm

Malcolm Gladwell has the uncanny ability to generate value by interpreting groundbreaking research in psychology, sociology and neurology. He is the author of two New York Times #1 best-sellers - The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference (published in 2000), and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (published in 2005). With his first book Malcolm embedded the concept of the tipping point in our everyday vocabulary and gave organizations new tools for understanding how and why change happens, and how to create positive epidemics of ideas and behavior. Blink analyzes intuition –the kinds of judgments that are made unconsciously and instinctively –and explores how we can learn to be better at mastering the kind of instantaneous thinking that lies at the heart of successful decision making.

Gladwell, whose mother is Jamaican, was born in England on September 3, 1963. He was raised in Canada, and graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto in 1984. From 1987 to 1996, he was a science writer, and later the New York bureau chief for the Washington Post. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. Gladwell currently lives in New York City.

In the Blink of an eye, the unconscious mind decides lots of (often very important) things for us without our even knowing what we know or how we know it. In his groundbreaking book Blink, Malcolm describes how we make these intuitive decisions-both the good ones and the bad - and why some people are so much better at it than others. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, he shows how good decision making depends on the few particular details we focus on and explains how we can improve our intuitive instincts for interpreting these details correctly.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm describes how trends work. He helps organizations identify the people who are crucial to the trend process and deploy their talents strategically. Gladwell says: “It’s a book about change. In particular, it’s a book that presents a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us.” The ideas in The Tipping Point have kept the book on various bestseller lists for three years, including over two years on the BusinessWeek paperback bestseller list.