Tag Archives: The Tipping Point
The Parable of The Great Networker – Paul Revere (and a little bit of Walter Cronkite)
Listen my children and you shall hear
of the midnight ride of Paul Revere…
So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm…
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
——–
We all know the story. Here’s the account from Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point:
In two hours, Paul Revere covered thirteen miles. In every town he passed through along the way – Charlestown, Medford, North Cambridge, Menotomy – he knocked on doors and spread the word, telling local colonial leaders of the oncoming British, and telling them to spread the word to others. Church bells started ringing. Drums started beating. The news spread like a virus as those informed by Paul Revere sent out riders of their own, until alarms were going off throughout the entire region.
Paul Revere’s ride is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-to mouth epidemic.
Gladwell goes on to describe that one reason Revere’s ride worked so well was that it was Paul Revere who made that ride, and not someone else. Paul Revere was a world-class networker. People knew him – he knew people. When Paul Revere spread the news, it was not a stranger spreading that news – but a person they knew, recognized, trusted. He had credibility.
Walter Cronkite in Vietnam
It reminds me a little about the time when Walter Cronkite, out of character for him, injected his opinion into a broadcast. He stated, simply, that Vietnam was not winnable – a stalemate was the best we could hope for. He stated it directly to the American people, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson famously responded:
“For it seems now more certain than ever,” Cronkite said, “that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.” After watching Cronkite’s broadcast, LBJ was quoted as saying. “That’s it. If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”*
The common thread here is this: when a person speaks, the more known/connected that person is, the more trusted, the more credible…then the more people will respond.
It takes a while (a lifetime?) of networking, of building a reputation of reliability, of building true credibility, to have that kind of impact.
So – make every connection you can. Make those connections “strong ties” (Gladwell again). Because, one of these days, you are going to need people to listen to what you have to say.
——-
* Yes, I am aware that there is some element of myth to the Cronkite story and LBJ’s response. But, a myth is powerful — whether it gets details right or wrong. I tell my students that “a myth is a story that is true, whether it is true or not.”
“Nobody Knows Anything” – Malcolm Gladwell sweeps through a large swath of the 20th century of American Business in a Tour de Force
Malcolm Gladwell
If you read this blog, you know that I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell. And as much as I like his books, I equally like his essays (all but the very most recent archived here).
Here are some excerpts from his essay entitled The Risk Pool. (I re-read this essay after it was linked to in this article by Timothy Noah at Slate.com). It’s about – everything. Pensions, health care, technological advances, Peter Drucker… reading this feels like en education in 20th century business.
Excerpt number one – the dominance of Bethlehem Steel:
“In 1956, Eugene Grace, the head of Bethlehem Steel, was the country’s best- paid executive. Eleven of the country’s eighteen top-earning executives that year, in fact, worked for Bethlehem Steel. In 1955, when the American Iron and Steel Institute had its annual meeting, at the Waldorf-Astoria, in New York, the No. 2 at Bethlehem Steel, Arthur Homer, made a bold forecast: domestic demand for steel, he said, would increase by fifty per cent over the next fifteen years. “As someone has said, the American people are wanters,” he told the audience of twelve hundred industry executives. “Their wants are going to require a great deal of steel.”
Excerpt number two — GM’s President makes a lot of money – and pays a lot in taxes:
The president of General Motors at the time was Charles E. Wilson, known as Engine Charlie. Wilson was one of the highest-paid corporate executives in America, earning $586,100 (and paying, incidentally, $430,350 in taxes).
Excerpt number three — Peter Drucker rightly observes/predicts, confirming Taleb’s (The Black Swan) truism — “nobody knows anything” (except maybe Drucker):
The most influential management theorist of the twentieth century was Peter Drucker, who, in 1950, wrote an extraordinarily prescient article for Harper’s entitled “The Mirage of Pensions.” It ought to be reprinted for every steelworker, airline mechanic, and autoworker who is worried about his retirement. Drucker simply couldn’t see how the pension plans on the table at companies like G.M. could ever work. “For such a plan to give real security, the financial strength of the company and its economic success must be reasonably secure for the next forty years,” Drucker wrote. “But is there any one company or any one industry whose future can be predicted with certainty for even ten years ahead?” He concluded, “The recent pension plans thus offer no more security against the big bad wolf of old age than the little piggy’s house of straw.”
Here are some “lessons” one might draw from this essay:
1. There was a time when the rich really did pay higher taxes. And this is from a period when America really flourished. There may be a connection.
2. Technology really does endanger worker’s jobs, and change really does endanger the long-term health of companies. Both Bethlehem Steel, and ultimately General Motors, went bankrupt. There was a time when no one (except Drucker) could have imagined that these behemoths might someday face the end of their reign.
3. No company is really big enough to take care of the pensions and the health care of all of its workers and retired workers. Because, tomorrow, as is now quite obvious, a company (if it has survived) will likely have a smaller pool of workers. Here’s another excerpt:
When Bethlehem Steel filed for bankruptcy (in 2001), it owed about four billion dollars to its pension plan, and had another three billion dollars in unmet health-care obligations. Two years later, in 2003, the pension fund was terminated and handed over to the federal government’s Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. The assets of the company—Sparrows Point and a handful of other steel mills in the Midwest—were sold to the New York-based investor Wilbur Ross…
4. The more we know, the more we will be prepared for the next surprise. I have long felt that this simple saying is important to remember: “the more you know, the more you know.”
And tomorrow will be different from today. And then the next tomorrow will be even more different. So, knowing the vast sweep of business struggles and change helps us not be as surprised by the next surprise.
Let me encourage you to read the Gladwell essay. It will make you think.
——————-
(To purchase my synopses of Gladwell’s books The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, with audio + handout, go to our companion site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com).
There are Best Sellers, and then there are Best Sellers
I’ve been feeling, and saying, that there is too much to know. The more we discover, the more data we accumulate, the more we are supposed to master — the more we have to know.
This weekend, I discovered that Guy Kawasaki tweeted Bob’s blog post about his, Kawasaki’s, terrific book. It was great to find out that Kawasaki tweeted about our blog on his Twitter account. But now, I feel like I have to follow Twitter as well as what is on blogs, and in the magazines, and in the newspapers, and in…. It really is information-buffet overload.
And it is ever more sliced and diced, even in the best-seller lists.
Consider this: in the current New York Times Hardcover Business Best Sellers list, Gladwell’s Outliers is still number one. (We presented Outliers at the January, 09 First Friday Book Synopsis, and here it is still number 1 eight months later. Amazing! But, it is that good.) By the way, Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is number one on the NY Times Paperback Business Best Sellers list, and it came out originally in 2000.
So how does a new book, without a “superstar” like Malcolm Gladwell or a Thomas Friedman as author, ever break though? One way is the Amazon.com way. They have created all sorts of categories and sub-categories, so that we can find the best-selling books in ever-more narrow slices of interest. Consider two upcoming selections for the First Friday Book Synopsis. Here is their current ranking (as of this writing — it is updated every hour on Amazon):
For September:
Womenomics: Write Your Own Rules for Success by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay
|
#3 in |
Books > Business & Investing > Women & Business |
|
#10 in |
Books > Nonfiction > Women’s Studies |
|
#11 in |
Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Gender Studies |
And for August:
The Future Arrived Yesterday: The Rise of the Protean Corporation and What It Means for You by Michael Malone
|
#6 in |
Books > Science > Technology > Innovations |
Neither of these are in the top 20 in the simple “Business” category. (Yes, Outliers is #1 and 2; the Kindle version is #1, the Hardcover version is #2 – at the time of this writing). Yet, these books are worth reading, have received good and encouraging reviews, and because of Amazon’s creative best-selling listing, they can legitimately be called best-sellers — in “narrower” lists of best sellers.
We try to select good, substantive books that have a chance of making it to best-seller status for the First Friday Book Synopsis. These books fit – but partly because of the creativity found in the Amazon approach.
Malcolm Gladwell has a New Article (on the Financial Meltdown) — and People are Already Disagreeing
“It is a great principle in psychiatry that ‘all symptoms are overdetermined.’ This means that they have more than one cause….
I want to scream this from the rooftops: ‘All symptoms are overdetermined.’” M. Scott Peck, In Search of Stones
Malcolm Gladwell has a new article out. Gladwell fans wait for these with great anticipation. And, as usual, it does not disappoint. This time, he tackles the financial crisis, and the problems of Wall Street. His title reveals his view: COCKSURE: Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence. Here’s his take:
“Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn’t know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street’s crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological.”
Gladwell wrestles with the problems of overconfidence:
“Of course, one reason that over-confidence is so difficult to eradicate from expert fields like finance is that, at least some of the time, it’s useful to be overconfident—or, more precisely, sometimes the only way to get out of the problems caused by overconfidence is to be even more overconfident.”
It is a complex issue!
Critics are weighing in quickly. Conor Friedersdorf, for a vacationing Andrew Sullivan on The Daily Dish (where I was first tipped off to the article), states his opinion in his title: A Cocksure Malcolm Gladwell Gets It Wrong. He argues that the structural explanation has great merit, and Gladwell fails to see such merit.
Elsewhere, the Gawker argues that Gladwell should not reduce it to the psychological explanation only.
I say, they are all right. Because, there is no one explanation – the causes are overdetermined. There are multiple causes, all feeding on and reinforcing each other. And since there are multiple causes, there is no one simple solution. The simple, easy solutions only work in Hollywood – especially in your typical 30 second commercial (young man, just spray your body with AXE and the beautiful women will all chase you…) But in a world as complex as ours, with problems as big as ours, we need all the possible diagnoses, and all the possible cures, we can get.
There have been some pretty good minds at work on this question, so why haven’t they solved it by now? What did go wrong? They are seaching for an answer – no, they are searching for the answer. From the disagreements, we should learn that there is no the answer. And we should grasp, and understand, and acknowledge our “ignorance.” It might keep us humble, and help us not be so cocksure to the point of disaster.
There’s a line in the movie Live Free or Die Hard. The young computer wiz Matt Farrell is astonished at the arrogant ignorance of Bowman, the FBI “expert,” “The things he does not know,” Farrell says to John McClane.
So it is for all of us – the things we do not know.
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• For a terrific article on why Malcolm Gladwell is so good, so valuable, check out: Why do book clubs love Malcolm Gladwell? He reads deeply and writes clearly, in plain English by Shelley Blanton-Stroud.
• You can order synopses of my presentations for all three Gladwell books, The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, at our companion web site, 15 Minute Business Books.
Everyone is Reading it – Are You?
Here’s an interesting little piece of insight — a lot of people claim to have read books that they have not actually read.
Why? Because, to stay in the “admired/with it” group, they have to appear as with it. And reading the current hot books, in some circles, especially some business circles, is a way to be and stay with it.
Seth Godin recently captured this in one of his short and tremendously insightful blog posts. Here’s a brief excerpt:
The reason the New York Times matters isn’t about the delivery of news (it’s old by the time it arrives) or even the analysis (which is often spotty or wrong or banal or biased or boring). No, the reason it matters is because everyone else reads it…. You can change the definition of “everyone” and customize it for your industry or passion, but the fact is, we need to read what everyone else is reading in order to have a sense of being in sync. If it’s in there, it matters, because everyone else read it.
This fact — that we all need to read what everybody is reading in order to keep up with the buzz, “to have a sense of being in sync” — partially explains why the First Friday Book Synopsis (and other book summary entities — there are many!) is so valuable. We identify most of the “hot” books, and then provide enough of the content to help our participants appear to be with it. I think Godin is onto something here. We have to read, or at least be very familiar with, the book — you know, the book everybody is talking about. In the last few years, that book has been:
The World is Flat
and/or
Hot, Flat, and Crowded,
and/or
Good to Great
and/or
Wikinomics
and/or
Freakonomics
and/or
Blink
and/or
The Tipping Point
and/or
The Black Swan
and/or
Never Eat Alone
and/or
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
and/or
Outliers
and… (Yes, I know I’ve missed some…)
What will be next on the “with it” list? I don’t know, but this I do know — we will choose the next “with it” book for a presentation at the First Friday Book Synopsis. (We haven’t missed many over the last 11+ years!)
Are you feeling like one of the with it group?
(And, by the way – most of these books are worth reading and knowing about for the useful content in the books, and not just for your reputation).
{To purchase our synopses of most of these books, with handout + audio, go to our 15 Minute Business Book site}.
Build Your Own Strategic Reading Plan — or, How Should You Pick Which Business Book(s) to Read?
So, I’m sitting in front of my television set. “Nothing” is on, and I simply spend some time “surfing” in hopes of finding something that will grab my interest. I don’t do this often, but to unwind, I do it occasionally. I much prefer my “appointment” television — you know, when I want to watch television with a plan in mind, like — when I want to watch House, or a football game.
I wonder if my purposeless surfing has a parallel in our reading habits. How do you pick business books to read? Do you just grab the latest title you’ve heard of: if there is buzz about a specific book, do you say to yourself, “I want to be in on the know about that book?” I can understand that. If everyone seems to be talking about Outliers, or The Black Swan, or Good to Great, we all want to be in on the conversation. But I have a hunch that even then, the books we choose may not always be dealing with the issues we are dealing with at the moment. Or the skills we need to develop. Or the information gaps we need to fill.
Yes, it is true that reading almost any book will help us in our never-ending pursuit of excellence and success. “The more you know, the more you know.” But if our hours are precious, and already full of things to do, not only do we need to read to learn and grow — we need to read the best books, the right books for us, for us to learn and grow.
So, I have a suggestion — why not develop your own “strategic” business book reading plan. You can still read those popular books, but maybe you could always keep one book going that fits your needs, fills your gaps, deals with issues that you are actually dealing with. Just a few minutes a day, or one focused block of time during the week, will help you knock off that book that can genuinely help you with what you need the most.
So – how do you find which books will meet your needs? One way (forgive the self-serving comment here) is to read this blog. Bob Morris, and our entire blogging team, will help you filter out books that don’t fit the bill, and help identify the books that would be most useful. I warn you – reading Bob’s posts will make you wish you had time to read all of the books he refers us to. Few of us would have the time to do so. But use his posts as a filter, to help identify the books that would be most useful. Another way would be to attend the First Friday Book Synopsis (if you live near DFW). We present two synopses every month of best-selling business books. Our synopses can give you enough content to know the key themes and ideas of a book, help you filter out what does not fit your needs, and whet your appetite for a deeper dive into those books that you would find most valuable.
But to help you get started with your own strategic business book reading plan, I have started a chart. This is my first draft, and it includes, primarily, books that I have presented at the First Friday Book Synopsis. My colleague Karl Krayer would include different titles, and maybe all of us could help identify additional and different titles and business issues. So — here it is. I can say, with certainly, that each of these books was worth my time. Maybe this could help you start a strategic business reading regimen of your own.
A Strategic Business Book Reading Plan
|
If you need to: |
Then you might want to read: |
| Aim higher – personally | The Other 90% |
| Think/work like an athlete in training | Outliers
Talent is Overrated |
| Think like an innovator | The Creative Habit
The Art of Innovation |
| Get better at time management | Getting Things Done
The Power of Full Engagement |
| Become a better servant leader | Servant Leadership |
| Nurture and build your people | Encouraging the Heart |
| Market more effectively | Waiting For Your Cat to Bark
The Tipping Point The Long Tail |
| Get better connected | Wikinomics
Groundswell |
| Network more effectively | Never Eat Alone |
| Communicate more effectively | Words that Work
Made to Stick |
| Be a (very good) generalist | Reality Check |
| Negotiate more effectively | Women Don’t Ask
Ask for It |
| Play well with others | The Five Dysfunctions of a Team |
| Learn to learn | The Opposable Mind |
| Learn to tell the truth | Crucial Conversations
Winning |
You can try this list, or develop your own. You can start slow – with one book a month. In a year, you will have made great progress working through your strategic reading plan, and, more importantly, you will have learned more, you will know more, and I suspect you will be able to do more.
{To purchase my synopses of many of these titles, with handout + audio, go to our 15 Minute Business Book site}.
