Tipping Point Week 5

This past week, I finished The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. This reading was all about how the context of the situation is very important in order for a trend to tip. One example he references is crime rates in New York City. Crime in New York City was at an all time high during the 1980’s with the about 2,000 murders a year and about 600,000 felonies but in during the 1990’s the murders per year was one third of what it was during the 1980’s and the number of felonies per year were cut in half. Gladwell believes this sudden shift in crime rates was due to the Broken Window Theory. The Broken Window Theory states that if a window is broken, people will see it and think that nobody cares or is in charge. This leads to more broken windows. This basically means that the little things can have a big impact. In the late 1980’s, there was a new person in charge of the New York Transit Authority. While the subway had many problems, such as bad tracks which caused trains to derail frequently, he decided to spend a majority of their resources on getting rid of all the graffiti on trains. This was a large project since every train was covered in graffiti. He thought that “The Graffiti was symbolic of the collapse of the system”. Subsequently, the crime rates on the train decreased significantly.

I enjoyed this book a lot. I have always found statistics fascinating and I thought it was very interesting how Gladwell narrowed what determines if a trend will tip into three simple theories; The Law of Few, The Stickiness Factor and The Power of Context. I definitely plan on recommending this book because these theories would be very helpful to entrepreneurs and other people in business .