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ADI IGNATIUS: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m, Adi Ignatius, Editor in Chief of HBR.
My guest today is someone who thinks hard about ideas that matter and who has done more than anyone I can think of to popularize certain complex concepts, to take academic research and fashion it into something both interesting and actionable.
That person is, Malcolm Gladwell, author of bestselling books like The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers and cofounder of the Pushkin Industries Podcast Network. 25 years ago, Malcolm wrote a book called The Tipping Point. It was published with modest expectations but surprised everyone by becoming a huge sensation. The book described how sometimes little things, small, incremental actions can make a huge difference moving an emerging behavior or trend into becoming a viral, full-fledged social phenomenon.
The promise of the book was that if you understood how things can build momentum, you can harness it to promote change, even positive change by reducing crime rates, curtailing tobacco consumption and so on. Malcolm has a brand new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.
He wrote this one, he says, to look at the underside of the Tipping Point and at the actors, sometimes bad actors, who’ve come to comprehend the phenomenon and who deliberately engineer Tipping Points. I’m not usually the host of this podcast, but for this episode I wanted to jump in to have this conversation. So with that, welcome Malcolm to HBR IdeaCast.
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Thank you, Adi.
ADI IGNATIUS: There are a lot of books out there about behavioral science. Yours tend to be mega bestsellers. Talk a little bit about why you think Tipping Point did so well 25 years ago.
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, I think what happened in the ’90s was that the kinds of people who went into business were much better educated, much more intellectually curious, and more than that had become convinced that one of the keys to being successful in business was to be engaged in the world outside of business.
And I think my book was part of a number of books that were addressing that shift. Tipping Point was largely bought and consumed by a business audience, and it was people who might’ve come out of business school or whatever, or marketing background, and who realize actually you need to know something about psychology if you’re going to succeed in this field. You talk to a business executive in 1955, they would not have said that.
ADI IGNATIUS: Now you’re coming back to the Tipping Point. What are you trying to say that’s new with the latest book?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, what I wanted to do, first of all it’s been 25 years and I feel like we just know a lot more. There’s been a huge field that has been studying social contagion. And my own views on some things had evolved as well. This book is much more concerned with the ways in which the principles of epidemics are used in problematic ways.
ADI IGNATIUS: The whole phenomenon of a Tipping Point, of ideas, of behavioral patterns going viral has probably changed a lot since the book came out. It was published before the spread of smartphones, before social media, before TikTok, before the dawn of algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves. This book doesn’t deal a lot with the new technology, but-
MALCOLM GLADWELL: I think what you mean to say is I don’t think it deals at all.
ADI IGNATIUS: Okay. Well, but still, you’re living in this world and thinking about this world. Does this new form of virality change the concept of the phenomenon? Do you think technology gives more people more opportunities to engineer Tipping Points to their advantage, partly because we have the data or because we have the connection through technology and social?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah, I think obviously that’s true. I begin and end the book with my account of how Purdue manipulated doctors and the public to create the opioid crisis. And one of the key things that allows them to create a social contagion around Oxycontin was access to data that previously in the pharmaceutical industry had been very, very difficult to get. What Purdue does is to aggressively exploit the asymmetry in the physician community.
They realized that they didn’t need to convince the overwhelming majority of doctors to prescribe Oxycontin for Oxycontin to become a massive multi-billion dollar drug. They realized that there was a tiny, tiny fraction of doctors who were so susceptible to the manipulation of sales reps and who were so indifferent to the problems with the drug that if all they did was focus on that select few, they could make this drug into a multi-billion dollar success.
Their ability to pinpoint those doctors is a function of the fact that the data available to pharma companies today is just infinitely better than it was 25 years ago. So in that sense, yes. There’s no question there has been this revolution that has affected people’s ability to enact epidemic principles in the marketplace.
ADI IGNATIUS: There’s a really interesting analysis that starts with looking at why some states in the U.S. suffered far more than others in the opioid epidemic, and I won’t give it away, but it’s not about education or economic opportunity that you might think. So that’s the first part of what’s going on.
And then along comes a consulting firm, McKinsey, that applies cold strategic theory to a market that would see a far to lethal for classic segmentation analysis, but that’s what it was. It leads to a question, the nefarious application of Tipping Point type thinking is your sense that that’s prevalent in the business world that is the definition of competitive advantage in the business world or that Purdue and its alliance with McKinsey was somehow an outlier?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: I think they were an outlier. You’re quite right that if we were not talking about a dangerous opioid, what McKinsey and Purdue were hatching in their strategy for selling Oxycontin is not unusual. It is classic segmentation applied to an extraordinary degree, but it is classic segmentation. The difference is that this was a drug that if it was prescribed carelessly could lead people to lose their lives.
And so to apply segmentation theory to a product that was as potentially lethal as Oxycontin is a moral lapse, to put it mildly. And that’s the difference. I think that there was a level of indifference to the fact that this product was different from they’re not selling detergent. But yes, the basic strategy was one that would be familiar to anyone who’s in the world of marketing.
ADI IGNATIUS: The first Tipping Point book, my memory of it is that your argument was these ideas that they built solely over time, and then there is this Tipping Point and suddenly boom, it’s out there. The second book seems to be a little bit more about how people understand that phenomenon and try to take advantage of it for better or worse.
MALCOLM GLADWELL: I think that’s fair.
ADI IGNATIUS: Can one truly anticipate and move the needle on these significant, consequential Tipping Point moments or at the end of the day, is it like a viral article? They’re going to happen, you don’t know which ones they’re going to be? What do you think about that?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah, I have a chapter on this place that is referred to as Poplar Grove, which is not its real name, but the researchers who studied it dubbed it that. It’s a wealthy enclave, a small town that is populated entirely by professionals. It is beautiful. It is a close-knit community. It has no apparent social problems. It’s got one of the best high schools in the state.
And over the last 10 or 15 years, the high school has had a suicide epidemic on its hands. And the researchers who go there try to answer the question, “Why would a place that seemingly has every advantage suffer from a suicide crisis?” You usually think of suicide epidemics at high schools, happening at places where the students are disconnected and isolated and elginated, and this was the opposite. This was the kind of high school if you walked in, you’d want to send your kid there in five minutes.
And their answer was that part of the problem with this community was that it was a monoculture that unlike normal high schools, which have a fair degree of diversity in offering students who go there multiple identities that they can adopt, this was a school with a single identity. To go to that high school meant that you had to be high achieving, college-focused, athletically gifted student, and anything short of that was considered a failure.
The reason that’s important for epidemics is that one of the principles we know about epidemics is that they thrive in monocultures. When there is very little diversity in a group, an infectious contagious agent can race through the entire group without encountering any kind of barriers. You observe the story of this situation in this small town and you’re asking, “Is there something actionable out of that?”
And the answer is, there is. And that is that we should take pains not to create monocultures; break up the monoculture, don’t send your kid to one of those schools. But that’s a very hard thing to act on because it is the very fact that this school was perfect and had a high achievement ethos that made it so incredibly appealing to our middle-class parents. There are two separate issues here. One is, are there clear things we can do to fight epidemics? The answer is yes. The second much harder question is, do we want to do those things? And the answer is usually no. There is this difficult gap between what we should do and what we’re capable of doing.
ADI IGNATIUS: Your ideas, they’ve consistently proven to be really influential, but they often involve, I’d say, a detailed look at data or research and then a certain leap, and I would say a common sense personal interpretation or explanation by you of a phenomenon.
I ask this partly because in some ways I feel like social sciences are not at risk, but under fire. It feels like more and more researchers are being accused of fabricating data or being sloppy with it. And I feel that because the self-appointed research police are consistently trying to poke holes at what we and others publish. In some ways what you write is taken as authoritatively as what academic publications put out. So how do you think about that? Where does your thinking fit on the spectrum, and how do you feel about your responsibility on that spectrum?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: I’m in the position of the journalist, not the researcher. The journalist is someone who stands between the academic or the original source and the public. And our job is quite different from that of the academic because our job is to translate for a wider audience, and we are a necessary part of the kind of intellectual ecosystem.
If social science were only done for other social scientists, it would be pointless, not entirely pointless, the world would be, I suppose, moving forward in some positive way. But there is no point to having thousands of academics around America doing extraordinary work if no one is trying to bring some of that work to the public eye.
But you’re right, the set of expectations and limitations on what we do are different from the academic. We have to simplify ideas, make sense of them, translate them. We have to attach them to stories. We have to help people put them in context. We have to do a whole range of tasks that the academic doesn’t have to do, that we don’t want the academic to do.
ADI IGNATIUS: So given the passage of time though, are there aspects of the first book that don’t add up any longer that seem wrong or dated or that make you cringe?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Absolutely. The crime chapter. So the centerpiece of the first book was a chapter on why did crime fall in New York City? And the general observation of that chapter that violent crime has epidemic properties, it’s a contagious behavior, is something that is now accepted and taken for granted among social scientists.
But my particular conclusion in that chapter was I thought that broken windows policing as practiced by the New York City Police Department was the single most important fact in bringing down the New York City murder rate. So that was this idea that was endorsed by Mayor Giuliani Rudy Giuliani, who was then the mayor of New York, and his Police Chief, Bill Bratton.
And it was based on an academic observation that had been made a generation earlier, which said that small signs of social disorder lead to general social disorder and ultimately violent crime. That when would-be criminals see around them evidence that nobody cares and no one’s in charge they feel free to shoot people and do all kinds of things.
And that was an idea that drove the New York City Police Department’s policy of Stop and Frisk, which was, they said, “If that’s the case, then we need to systematically go out and stop suspicious looking people, frisk them for weapons, arrest them if they engage in any kind of socially deviant behavior, that will be how we can conquer homicide in New York City.”
That was an idea which I believed, other people believed at the time, and which we subsequently realized is 100% wrong because New York City stopped Stop and Frisk in 2012, and then the crime rate, not just continued to fell, but fell another 50%. So clearly whatever was being done by the police in those early years was not what was driving down the crime rate.
It was a case about writing about a phenomenon in the middle of a phenomenon without knowing how it was going to end. And that’s always a very dangerous thing to do. And in looking back, I should have had far less certainty in my explanation for what was happening. This had never happened in America before, that a city had gone from being incredibly dangerous to absurdly safe in the span of five years.
What I should have said is, “I have no idea whether this crime decline is over. Here are what criminologists say, and they’re all over the map. I’m voting for this explanation and let’s wait and see which is the most convincing.” And then by 2015, 15 years later, when we realized that it wasn’t Stop and Frisk and broken windows at all, I think I should have been quicker raise my hand and say, “I got it wrong, and here’s what we now believe.”
ADI IGNATIUS: Well, there aren’t a lot of people who raise their hand at any point and say, “I got it wrong.”
MALCOLM GLADWELL: I think it should be fine. I think when you talk about how you think there’s a crisis in social science, I think the crisis is in part caused by that very thing. It should be fine to raise your hand and say, “We thought this for years and years and years, and now we’ve learned something new. And the reason we’ve changed our mind is that the nature of what we do is conditional. At any given time in science, all we can tell you is what we think we know right now, and we need to remind you that this could change tomorrow.
And it is just a failure to keep reminding audiences that science is not a process of handing down the 10 Commandments to Moses. It’s a process of trying to measure some of the hardest things on earth to measure. And necessarily over time, the conclusions we draw are going to change. And if we were much more open about that, both academics and journalists, I don’t think we would have the crisis that we’re having right now.
ADI IGNATIUS: So I want to talk about another luring idea in the new book, and that is The Magic Third, that simplifying but when the number of, for example, minority people on a board, in a neighborhood, on a campus, rise to more than a third interesting things can happen. Can you talk about the phenomenon a little bit? I want to explore that.
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, since I’m talking on a Harvard Business Review podcast, I should shout out to the Harvard Business School. A lot of this thinking, if not all of it, begins with this legendary paper by Rosabeth Kanter.
ADI IGNATIUS: Rosabeth!
MALCOLM GLADWELL: And by the way, I should say that I probably have read that paper of hers on group proportions from the, I guess, is it the seventies? I must have read it 10 times. I find it endlessly fascinating. I think you could teach an entire college course just on this paper. But she makes this observation, famous observation, that is she was brought in on a consulting job to a company that had just hired its first group of women in their sales team.
And the women weren’t doing well, and they wanted to know why. And so they bring in Rosabeth to do an analysis. Her first thing is she says, “The women are talented. You didn’t hire people who aren’t good.” Her second observation is, “There’s nothing wrong with your company culture. This isn’t a hostile workplace, it’s not a dysfunctional organization.”
She said, “Your problem is you didn’t hire enough women.” And her observation, which is as brilliant as it is simple, was that group proportions matter. That being one woman in a group of 10 men is a very different situation than being one of three women in a group of 10. When the numbers of outsiders or newcomers reach a certain threshold, the newcomer is allowed to be themselves.
They’re heard, they’re comfortable, they’re listened to. They’re no longer tokens. And when they’re below that threshold, they’re not themselves. They’re under enormous amount of pressure. No one’s seen them for who they really are. And so when you think about creating diversity, it is not enough simply to symbolically break the grip of a dominant group. If you want to achieve real diversity, the newcomers have to rise to a certain level.
And then she asked, “So what’s the level?” And she hints in the original paper that she thinks it’s somewhere around a quarter or a third. And subsequently, there has been all kinds of really interesting research that has played with this idea and all of them tend to coalesce around this general notion. That critical mass for newcomers is somewhere between a quarter and a third.
I find that really, really interesting. And what they’re describing, of course, is an epidemic process. What they’re saying is that group identity tips at a certain point, and the newcomers go from being isolated tokens to being real participants, and they change the character of the group they’ve joined when they’re at critical mass.
Most famously Kantor’s work has been applied to the thinking about women on boards; that if you’ve got a board of nine people and you have one woman “That’s not enough,” she would say, “If you actually want to benefit from having a different perspective on your board, you should have three women on your board.”
And as a kind of fun exercise in the book, I just called up a lot of women who were pioneers on corporate boards and ask them what it was like when they were the only woman on the board. And then what it was like when there was three of them on the board, and they all get the same answer, which is, as weird as it sounds, “When I became one of three, the way I was treated and the way I behaved just fundamentally changed in a way that defied expectation and being the only woman on a board was really, really hard.”
And I think that is an incredibly important principle, and it’s a principle. Now I have fun and call it a law in the book, I just calling things laws, it’s fun. But as a principal for thinking about, for example, intellectual diversity in groups, I think it’s really important that if you’re building a team in the workforce and intellectual diversity is extremely important to the success of that team, and now I’ve described virtually every cognitively complex task a team could have, that you need to be very mindful of this fact when you’re creating your team.
If you want to have four different kinds of voices, then you have to make sure that these divergent groups are each represented in sufficient numbers, that they can be themselves, they can have a real impact on the group. I was rereading the historical accounts of the great foreign policy fiasco of the Kennedy administration, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, which is where the famous Urban Janis book Groupthink, is written about The Bay of Pigs.
Janis’s point was to the extent that we’re dissenting voices in the inner circle around JFK, they were in insufficient numbers, so they got drowned out. So you had the lone guy in the room who raised his hand and said, “Wait a minute, are we sure this is a good idea?” But it was just one guy. And because he was only one guy, he couched what he said. He didn’t say, “This is nuts.” He asked tentatively.
You could read Janis writing in the seventies and Kantor, you could put them together and you’d have this really interesting perspective on what it means to create real intellectual diversity. It also applies, I think, to ethnic diversity. But I feel we get so obsessed sometimes with ethnic diversity that we forget that what we’re really interested in is intellectual diversity. We think the reason we want people from different backgrounds is we want the benefit of their difference. And Kantor’s saying, “Okay, if you want the benefit of their difference, you’ve got to think about how many of them there are.”
ADI IGNATIUS: Malcolm, you talk in the book a lot about overstories. I’d love to have you give the listeners a brief translation of what that term means to you and more pertinently, overstories, how does that apply to leadership?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: So overstories is this idea that I was trying to make sense of what is known in the healthcare world as small area of variation, this kind of very robust observation, that there are dramatic differences in the way that doctors practice from one community to the next. An observation that was first made over 50 years ago and has since been shown to be true on numerous occasions, and it’s something of a mystery as to why this would be the case.
If you have a heart attack in Buffalo, you are treated very differently than if you have a heart attack in Boulder, even though in both cases you would be going to world-class hospitals with people who are educated at the finest and most sophisticated medical schools. And the answer has something to do with the fact that there are these contagious community norms in different professions that govern the way people behave.
And I think this is a very powerful idea that clearly applies well beyond healthcare, that I think there are norms that apply to cities, and to towns, and to companies, and to professions. And what they are is a kind of what I call the overstory, that they’re the sum total of these shared stories, values, narratives that kind of coalesce into a set of loose principles. And they affect the behavior of those beneath the overstory, beneath the cloud, in ways that we may not be aware of.
And I think that the takeaway for someone who’s in charge of a company is that creating and maintaining and changing those overstories is crucially important, much more important than we may realize. That paying attention to what the shared stories of a company or institution are is crucially important for governing the behavior of those within the institution. So it appears that medicine does this naturally, and that’s why we’ve seen this pattern of small area variation. And I’m wondering whether more organizations need to take a page from what appears to be quite powerful and commonplace in the world of healthcare.
ADI IGNATIUS: You know, what would you want leaders, let’s say, of people, of institutions to take away about the phenomenon, the Tipping Point phenomenon, everything you’ve studied that will make them better at their jobs, help them build better organizations, have better ideas?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Building in an expectation about epidemic change – when we do scenario planning, when we think about what the future holds, I think we need to be mindful about including these seemingly implausible scenarios where there was a major nonlinear event. There’s so many examples of change happening all at once in a mysterious way, that maybe we ought to set up our expectations to account for this kind of change. For some reason we’re hardwired to expect that change is orderly and linear and it just rarely is.
And then the real diversity in teams would be useful. But also how much the content of the stories we tell each other, that groups tell each other matter. And I think paying more attention to the kind of construction of these stories about shared values is… what I’m making now is not a new observation, but I was very, very impressed in writing this book once again by how extraordinarily important those kinds of shared narratives are. They are definitive of how groups behave and handle different situations.
ADI IGNATIUS: Your books obviously are looking at past phenomena and trying to explain what happened. We live in a world of weak signals where it’s not yet apparent, you’re talking about how we should think about these positive and negative scenarios and run them and be prepared for them. But as you say, it’s hard. It’s really hard to figure out what is a weak signal that matters and what is just noise. From these couple of books, from your research, were you impressed by any individual or any approach that truly can help identify weak signals that matter in your lives, in your business? Or is it just you know it later when it’s a full-blown post-Tipping Point phenomenon?
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, this is why I’m not working for McKinsey. I don’t presume to be able to do that kind of effective forecasting. It would be a violation of the theme of this book if I were to tell you that I had a clear idea of what was going to happen next or how we should write.
In a certain sense, what this book is about is about the importance of humility in making sense of the world around us. It’s that there’s a lot of things we pretend to know that we don’t. There are a lot of processes that are pretty counterintuitive. It did not occur to anyone, to use the Covid example, we went through almost the entire pandemic without realizing that transmission was powerfully asymmetric. We just assumed from the get-go, it was assumed that everyone who was infected posed an equal risk to somebody else.
And then three years in, we’re like, “Wait a second. No. Turns out it’s a small fraction who were doing all the damage.” That’s a powerfully humbling observation that we could have, with all of the extraordinary firepower that we have, that it took us three years to get one of the core principles behind the spread of that virus. So the last thing I’d want to do is to put myself in a position to be proven wrong tomorrow.
ADI IGNATIUS: Fair enough. Malcolm, I want to thank you for joining us.
MALCOLM GLADWELL: Thank you, Adi.
ADI IGNATIUS: That was, Malcolm Gladwell, author of the new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. He’s also the host of the podcast, Revisionist History. We hope you enjoyed the conversation.
We have nearly 1000 episodes plus other podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at HBR.org/podcast or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
I want to thank our team, Senior Producer Mary Dooe, Associate Producer Hannah Bates, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Specialist, Rob Eckhardt. Thank you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We will be back on Tuesday with our next episode. I’m Adi Ignatius.