Book Review - The Tipping Point

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Book Summary

This book is a study of how epidemics are started. The title “The Tipping Point” comes from the idea of what causes something to “tip” from being a localized phenomenon to a large-scale movement. The focus of the book was to discover how epidemics (disease, social, ideological, behavioral, etc.) are spread in hopes of gaining insight into the ability to purposefully start your own epidemic for your product, idea, etc.

The discovery was that word-of-mouth epidemics are highly dependent upon just a few critical types of people: connectors, mavens, salesmen. Word-of-mouth epidemics are not initially about how many people you can tell, but about who you can tell. A connector is a person who has relationships with large numbers of people (“that person knows everybody”). A maven is a person who collects large amounts of information and wants to pass it on to others because he or she likes to be helpful (think about the person who loves to tell you about good shopping deals). A salesman is a person who has the ability to persuade others to certain action. These three groups of people are key in starting word-of-mouth epidemics. You want to get your message into their hands.

Book Review

I had seen this book recommended by several pastors and thought it might be a good read. I like to mix some business books in with my other reading because all truth is God’s truth. Many business books have excellent application for ministry leadership.

I was not, however, particularly impressed with this book’s usefulness for general ministry purposes. I loved the stories and data and examples and research…all very interesting. The idea of the book is that we need to find the few who will start a word-of-mouth epidemic. For the Christian church we are not looking for the few who can spread the word, but we want everybody to be spreading the word.

That said, it could be useful for ministry if we were desiring to have a large event or start some huge ministry and wanted to spread the news by word-of-mouth. It was a good read but not so useful for day-in and day-out ministry.