Who would have thought teen smoking, Sesame Street, sneakers, and New York subways were all connected somehow? Only Malcolm Gladwell. With insights gleaned from slicing and cross-slicing social behavior, Gladwell strings together seemingly unrelated bits of information like pearls on a strand; like squares in a patchwork quilt.

Having read Tipping Point, you will examine family and friends looking for connectors, mavens and salemen; all necessary characters to cause social change. And change is what Tipping Point is all about. Who and what cause trends? How and why do they occur?

Tipping Point is a fascinating look at American culture throught the unconventional eyes of a brilliant economist.

How does word-of-mouth works? That's the question, Malcolm Gladwell, a New Yorker journalist, tries to answer. Gladwell treats trends as epidemics, which have three rules: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and The Power of Context. First, we find the trendsetters, which Gladwell calls the Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. Then, we must tweak the product or the idea so it would stick with people. Finally, the messengers and the message are not enough: they all must be in the right place in the right time. In 2000, Tipping Point explained the spread of the Internet and our attitude to emails. But as the latest riots in the clustered ghettos of France demonstrated, Tipping Points exist everywhere: little things can make a big difference.

Gladwell stumbled into a growing academic interest in the demand side of free markets. Currently, the two primary theories of free markets focus either on the supply-side (capitalism is effective due to the competitiveness of suppliers) or on the Keynesians (how government influences demand). Yet, Gladwell is not a scientist, and the book suffers a bit from a pop-psychology syndrome. But the book is well written, it touched a nerve, and it passed the test of any theory: Tipping Point became a common phrase.