The following contains excerpts from the book, The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell).
At our music school in Midland, Texas we believe that music is more than sound, it is relationships. Relationships and the subject of leadership work hand in hand, and the principles in this book are critical for successful leadership, both personally and organizationally.
The author equates principles that cause diseases to spread with how social movements are caused. Using key ingredients, 1) The law of the few, 2) The stickiness factor, and 3) The power of context, Gladwell shows how social influences can take on massive proportions.
“The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do…The Tipping Point is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.”
“The stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes…Epidemics…are strongly influenced by their situation- by the circumstances and conditions and particulars of the environments in which they operate…The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.”
One of the most profound factors for students who are studying at our music school in Midland, Texas is that music enables and fosters community. Music creates an environment and context for our relationships.
Case Studies
There are differences between people who are Innovators, who take enormous risks, versus the Early Majority. “If the goal of visionaries is to make a quantum leap forward, the goal of pragmatists is to make a percentage improvement- incremental, measurable, predictable progress…The word risk is a negative word in their vocabulary…They will undertake risks when required, but they first will put in place safety nets and manage the risks very closely….This is where, I think, Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen play their most important role…They are translators: they take ideas and information from a highly specialized world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand…The Innovators try something new. Then…a Maven or a Connector or a Salesman- sees it and adopts it…They make it more usable.”
As teachers at our music school in Midland, Texas we endeavor to give our students the values of new ideas being adopted in ways that can be applied to their process of learning.
Analyzing how rumors work, Gordon Allport discovered that first of all, a story is leveled, then sharpened, and finally a process of assimilation takes place.
We try to help students assimilate the ideas we give them in ways that relate to their own internal story, at our music school in Midland, Texas.
“What Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning. If anyone wants to start an epidemic, then…he has to employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen in this very way: he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand.”
This is the value of what we offer at our music school in Midland, Texas: to take complex ideas and make them simple and applicable to our students.
“When something fails to make it out of the trendsetter community into the mainstream, it’s usually because the idea doesn’t root itself broadly enough in the culture: ‘There aren’t enough cues. You didn’t see it in music and film and art and fashion. Usually, if something’s going to make it, you’ll see that thread running throughout everything- through what they like on TV, what they want to invent, what they want to listen to, even the materials they want to wear. It’s everywhere. But if something doesn’t make it, you’ll only see it in one of those areas.”
Conclusion
“Starting epidemics requires concentrating resources on a few key areas. The Law of the Few says that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are responsible for starting word-of-mouth epidemics, which means that if you are interested in starting a word-or-mouth epidemic, your resources ought to be solely concentrated on those three groups…Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.”
“What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.”
“Merely by manipulating the size of a group, we can dramatically improve its receptivity to new ideas. By tinkering with the presentation of information, we can significantly improve its stickiness. Simply by finding and reaching those few special people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics. In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push- in just the right place- it can be tipped.”
The ideas shared above can be used to influence the lives of people for good, or for manipulation. At our music school in Midland, Texas we desire to partner with the desires of the student and find ways to motivate them, by adding value to their lives, making it possible for them to be able to pursue and achieve those dreams and goals.