Malcolm Gladwell’s New Take on Tipping Points

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There was a time when business leaders and managers didn't worry so much about psychology or other social science research. Malcolm Gladwell's writing played a big role in changing that. His popular exploration of tipping points — the phenomenon where small, incremental actions can suddenly fuse into a full-blown social behavior — brought research insights to life and made them mainstream. Now he's revisiting tipping points, this time looking at how they can be used for damaging results. In this episode, HBR editor in chief Adi Ignatius speaks to Gladwell about how the author’s ideas have changed, the importance of social science and journalism in today's world of virality, and the unexpected ways leaders should consider human behavior. Gladwell is the author of the new book Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.

Transcript

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0:37.0	Thank you. You're going to. Welcome to the HPR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Audie Ignatius, editor-in-chief of
1:00.0	HPR. HBO.
1:03.6	My guest today is someone who thinks hard about ideas that matter and who's done more than anyone
1:12.4	I can think of to popularize certain complex concepts to take academic research and fashion it into something both interesting and actionable.
1:21.0	That person is Malcolm Gladwell, author of best-selling books like The Tipping Point,
1:25.3	Blink and Outliers, and co-founder of the Pushkin Industries Podcast Network.
1:31.1	Twenty-five years ago, Malcolm wrote a book called The Tipping Point. It was published with modest expectations but surprised everyone by becoming a huge sensation.
1:39.0	The book described how sometimes little things small incremental actions can make a huge difference
1:44.4	moving in emerging behavior or trend into becoming a viral full-fledged social
1:50.0	phenomenon. The promise of the book was that if you understood how things can build
1:54.6	momentum you can harness it to promote change, even positive change, by reducing crime
2:00.4	rates curtailing tobacco consumption, and so on.
2:04.1	Malcolm has a brand new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point,
	...

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