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.
The Law of the Few
There are three kinds of people, although few in number, who can make the biggest difference.
“It is safe to say that word of mouth is- even in this age of mass communications and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns- still the most important form of human communication…people critical to social epidemics…I call them Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.”
Connectors
“Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few…Sprinkled among every walk of life, in other words, are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances. They are Connectors.”
People like this have mastered what sociologists call the ‘weak tie,’ a friendly yet casual social connection.
“Connectors, their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy…Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.”
There is an aspect of music-making that fosters these kinds of ties between people. At our music school in Midland, Texas we value the relationships that are formed through our musical activities.
“It isn’t just the case that the closer someone is to a Connector, the more powerful or the wealthier or the more opportunities he or she gets. It’s also the case that the closer and idea or a product comes to a Connector, the more power and opportunity is has as well.”
Mavens
“There are also people we rely upon to connect us with new information. There are people specialists, and there are information specialists.”
“The word Maven comes from the Yiddish, and it means one who accumulates knowledge…These are the people who keep the marketplace honest…The critical thing about Mavens, though, is that they aren’t passive collectors of information…What sets them apart is that once they figure out how to get that deal, they want to tell you about it too. A Maven is a person who has information on a lot of different products or prices or places. This person likes to initiate discussions with consumers and respond to requests…They like to be helpers in the marketplace.”
“The one thing that a Maven is not is a persuader…To be a Maven is to be a teacher. But it is also, even more emphatically, to be a student. Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know. For a social epidemic to start, though, some people are actually going to have to be persuaded to do something.”
Teachers at our music school in Midland, Texas are also lifelong learners, and we encourage our students to grow to a place where they are autonomous in their own pursuit of knowledge.
“Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people- Salesmen- with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.”
Salesmen
This kind of person can build a level of trust and rapport in five to ten minutes that most people will take half an hour to do.
“Emotion is contagious. In a way, this is perfectly intuitive. If we think about emotion this way- as outside-in, not inside-out- it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others.”
When participating in musical studies at our music school in Midland, Texas our students learn the value of what is known as ‘stage presence’ and communication skills. These attributes are not generally taught in traditional school environments, yet they are picked up easily through participation in music and the arts.
Studies show that “non-verbal cues are as or more important than verbal cues. The subtle circumstances surrounding how we say things may matter more than what we say…Simple physical movements and observations can have a profound effect on how we feel and think…persuasion often works in ways that we do not appreciate. It’s not that smiles and nods are subliminal messages. They are straightforward and on the surface. It’s just that they are incredibly subtle.”
Students at our music school in Midland, Texas grow in their ability to convey thoughts and feelings through their music-making, many times these moments are very subtle and nuanced, which is another value of studying music that most people are not aware of.