How do small, targeted actions create massive ripple effects in business and society? Malcolm Gladwell joined host Brett Hendrie to discuss his latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, unpacking the hidden forces behind epidemics, the power of overlooked metrics, and the stories that shape our world.
How do small, targeted actions create massive ripple effects in business and society? Malcolm Gladwell joined host Brett Hendrie to discuss his latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, unpacking the hidden forces behind epidemics, the power of overlooked metrics, and the stories that shape our world.
Head over to our YouTube channel to watch this conversation as well!
Brett Hendrie: A quick note for our listeners: In October, we invited Malcolm Gladwell to Rotman to talk about his new book - Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering. In a departure from our usual format, we filmed this interview and posted the entire conversation online. The audio-only version you’re listening to now has been shortened slightly, so if you’re keen to hear the whole conversation, head to our YouTube channel at YouTube.com/rotmanschool.
What does it take to shape the dominant ideas in society, culture and business?
Twenty five years ago Malcolm Gladwell explored how nascent ideas and behaviours can explode and become full-fledged phenomenon.
In his bestselling book The Tipping Point, he described how trends can build momentum, and why they can spread like a virus until they reach a point of critical mass.
The idea that little changes can make a big difference and then multiply was eye-opening – remember his was pre-internet and pre-social media. The concept of "going viral" wasn’t in our popular vocabulary.
In 2000, The Tipping Point was an optimistic lens on virality – that it could be used to effect positive change.
A quarter century later, we’ve experienced massive social and technological disruptions, and lived through an actual pandemic.
What’s changed about how tipping points impact our lives – and is there a darker side to social engineering that we need to better understand?
Welcome to Visiting Experts, a Rotman School podcast for lifelong learners, exploring transformative ideas about business and society with the influential scholars, thinkers and leaders featured in our acclaimed Speaker Series.
I'm your host, Brett Hendrie.
Through his many bestselling books, like The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and others, Malcolm’s storytelling turns complex research into insightful stories and frameworks. He helps us understand the trends and forces shaping our society.
Malcolm is also the co-founder of the Pushkin Industries podcast network, has been named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People list and, we’re proud to say, he’s a graduate of the University of Toronto.
Malcolm’s latest book is Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.
Welcome back to Rotman and the University of Toronto. I'm excited to talk about your new book, which is fantastic, but I wanted to set the stage for our audience a little bit by going back almost 25 years to the original Tipping Point, which was, of course, hugely successful, but especially so with professionals and leaders and executives. When you look back on that book, what were the ideas in it that resonated with professional audiences and what, why did business the business community, gravitate towards it so much?
Malcolm Gladwell: It's a really good question. It's hard to know, you know, with kind of perfect hindsight. But I think the thing about epidemics that was and remains really interesting and somewhat unintuitive is how asymmetrical they are, that they are sustained by very, very small groups of people who are kind of outside the norm. in my current book, I return to that idea and talk about that in the context of COVID, how COVID was a epidemic sustained by a very, very small group people. But you know, when that book came out, when the first book came out, the Tipping Point. It was just in the kind of at the beginning of the rise of the idea of segmentation, and you know the idea that marketing could be way more precise in how it addressed audiences. And I think my book kind of rode that energy and gave and gave a kind of a broader theoretical explanation for why that would be a useful strategy, right?
BH: And of course, that would be something that business leaders would want to grapple on to in terms of understanding how to shape those forces. So here we are almost 25 years later. What compelled you to revisit this topic? Obviously, there's been a lot of social change and technological change. Is it that the world's changed, or your outlook has changed or...
MG: A little bit of both. I was originally just going to do an anniversary edition, a kind of update, and then got halfway through and realized that so much had changed, and there were so many things I wanted to address in more detail that it would make more sense to write a new book. And in particular two of the greatest public health crises of the last 100 years have happened in the last 10 years — the opioid crisis and COVID. And so I wanted to give a kind of full accounting of those two epidemics, and our understanding of how epidemics work as a result, in large part of those two epidemics has really kind of deepened. I feel like opioid crisis in particular has kind of, I mean, it's why the book begins and ends with that story. I was going
BH: To say your book is fantastic because there's so many fascinating stories, from Medicare fraud in Miami to the biased admission practices of the Ivy League. But as you mentioned, you bookend the book with the story of Purdue Pharma and the rise of OxyContin and the opioid epidemic. And that's a business story. What did that story reveal to you about how social epidemics can be engineered?
MG: You know, what's interesting about that is that Purdue Pharma is an extraordinary innovator when it comes to marketing drugs in a way that is quite sort of diabolical. Were they not dealing with a with a dangerous and deadly narcotic, we would consider them kind of heroic marketing practitioners. They understand that normally in drug marketing, you have an assumption of a kind of bell curve distribution — a normal distribution of your sales targets, and you target the big fat middle and send out an army of marketers to reach a broad spectrum of doctors. And they were really one of the first to say, actually, no, if epidemics are started by a very small group of people at the margins, then it must follow that if we want to make an epidemic out of our drug that we can safely ignore 95 per cent of doctors. I think people underestimate the extent to which they ruthlessly applied this kind of principle to the promotion of OxyContin. In the United States, they realized in the universe of doctors who were in the business of prescribing painkillers was 160,000 they were really only interested in about 1,500 of them. You know, find me another company that identifies its target market as being 160,000 customers and decides to spend all of its time on 1,500 of them? Like that is ruthless segmentation. That proved to be, again within a Machiavellian diabolical context, a brilliant strategy. That's all they needed. In fact, by the by the time OxyContin gets shut down, one per cent of American doctors are prescribing half of all the OxyContin consumed in the United States. So they realize you can move an entire marketplace by focusing on the smallest, smallest fraction of your consumers.
BH: Is the lesson of Purdue Pharma and what they did with OxyContin that we necessarily need to fear this type of social engineering? Or can their strategies and tactics be used for more positive purposes?
MG: They can absolutely be used for positive purposes. But I would say that what is useful about understanding the nature of their marketing effort is that it helps us to diagnose what the problem is that we need to fix. Because I think there there was a real feeling after the opioid crisis — or we're still in the middle of it — that the beginnings were kind of diagnostic of some structural problem with the medical community, that the medical community did not know how to handle a dangerous narcotic. And when you look at what Purdue did, you realize that is exactly the wrong conclusion. There was nothing wrong with the medical community as a whole. The medical community as a whole completely understood how dangerous this drug was and didn't prescribe it. But a tiny, tiny group of people who were on the very fringes of their profession, violated professional norms. And so you realize that what you have is a bad apples problem and not a structural problem. And I think that the inability of us to distinguish between those two very different kinds of problems, bad apple problems and structural problems is itself a real problem.
BH: Of course, the medical community probably didn't realize in the moment the adversarial forces that were being engineered behind the scenes.
MG: Yeah. They were taken by surprise, I think.
BH: One of the great takeaways from your books in general and this book in particular, are these takeaway structures and ideas and frameworks that are really useful for leaders. And in this book, you introduce the idea of the over story. Explain to us what you mean by an over story.
MG: I've always been very interested in the extent to which context and environment shape individual behavior. And for some reason, I keep coming back to it, because I feel like it's very hard to get this message through. We always default to this notion that what matters is our own internal motivations, and of much sort of less importance, is the way in which external forces operate on us. And I think that's exactly backwards. That the principal forces that motivate people are external, but understanding the nature of those external influences is, to my mind, the kind of true task of any student of human behavior. And in this book, I got very interested in the regional specificity of behavior. How much behavior, whether we're talking about professional behavior within a given domain, or just everyday kind of consumer behavior or individual behavior seems to be very, very powerfully influenced a community level.
And that struck me as something as an observation that was first made in the medical community talking about the way doctors practice, but it struck me as being kind of broadly true of any number of different things. And you need to come up with some kind of theory to explain what's going on. If you observe that cardiologists in Buffalo are behaving very differently from cardiologists in Boulder, Colorado. They're trained at the same schools. They're coming out of the same intellectual discipline. They're reading the same scientific papers. They are seeing patients with the same problems, and yet they are behaving in a way that's fundamentally different. You have to have some explanation for that, right? So that's what led me into this whole idea of the overstory, that which is a very kind of vague and seemingly kind of whimsical concept,
So my use of the term over story, I borrowed it froma term that that biologists use to describe the upper canopy of a forest. And everything on the forest floor is shaped by this canopy up above. But it's not like the world on the forest floor is actively engaged with what's going on way, way, way up in the sky. So it's sort of this kind of hidden influencer that casts a shadow on everything underneath. And I thought that was a lovely metaphor to describe the ways in which common narratives kind of hover above human society.
BH: So if you're a leader trying to create a culture of excellence on your teams, or a culture of innovation, what advice or what stories come to mind in terms of how they can use the idea of the overstory to create that that culture, that environment that fosters excellence?
MG: Well, it's a super interesting question. We have with the overstory idea — I think the beginning of an of an understanding of something that has been kind of widely observed about peer businesses in a given marketplace, which is we see companies that appear otherwise identical, that have wildly different performances, right? Two restaurants selling the same food, one of which is a huge success, one of which is a failure. And so the questions has always been, why? And we were always left with this kind of either we look for some kind of structural reason that's sort of hidden, or we say it has to be culture. And what I'm doing is validating the kind of cultural interpretation and saying these cultural variables are real and dramatic, and they clearly come from somewhere and can be sustained under certain circumstances. They're a set of stories, a set of narratives that groups have about who they are and why they do what they do, and what the purpose of their endeavor is. And paying attention to those, the nature of those stories, I think, is a kind of under appreciated part of what it means to build a successful organization.
BH: That really comes through in the book and that, it's important for leaders to, as you say, be deliberate in crafting what those stories are and, setting the tone and the culture for their organizations.
MG: Another narrative — for a 60-year stretch, Canada had a narrative about accepting outsiders. Right now, maybe the narrative is undergoing a little bit of stressed at the moment. But what's amazing to me is very few countries in the world have a 60- or 70-year history of opening their doors to everybody, right? For years and years and years, Canadians, and Australia to some extent, were basically the only two countries in the world, where the majority of the country thought that immigration was a net plus for the for the nation. That's really unusual. And that's because of an overstory that was promoted by actively promoted and sustained by the leadership and the cultural institutions of this country.
BH: And really, the overstory of Canada as being strength through multiculturalism, yeah. And I
MG: Yeah, and I remember as a kid growing up here in the '70s, being aware of that kind of messaging, which was an obsession in the Trudeau years, thinking that it was kind of excessive. And now I realize, no, no, it was like brilliant. It was the single one of the great accomplishments of an otherwise mixed set of results for that for that administration, for that government. But it was extraordinary thing.
BH: One of the other ideas in the book that I wanted to explore was the idea of the magic third and how group proportions can be determinative and influential in terms of outcomes. Can you explain to us what the magic third is in your conceptualization of it?
MG: So this comes from a very, very famous paper written by Rosabeth Cantor, famous professor at Harvard Business School, early in her career, when she is called into to consult for a Fortune 500 company that had, for the first time, hired women on its sales teams. And the women were doing very badly, and they wanted to know why. And they bring her in, and she interviews them all, and she comes to the conclusion that there's nothing wrong with the women. They were extraordinarily well equipped for the job. There's nothing wrong with a company. The company culture is not toxic. What's wrong is they didn't hire enough women. And she sort of takes the whole debate about diversity and reorients it towards numbers, towards group proportions. Her point is there's a world of difference between being the only woman in a group of 10 men and being one of four women in a group of 10 men or three women in a group of 10 men. Her point was for outsiders to be themselves and fully contribute to a group, and not to be tokens, they need to have a certain critical mass. And so she reorders just to think about where is critical mass in group life. And her suggestion was that group that critical mass lay somewhere between a quarter and a third , and I sort of pick up on various strands of research that suggests that there does seem to be something remarkable that happens to a group of outsiders when their numbers reach that threshold that is the point at which the outsider, the group of outsiders changes the culture of the majority group.
BH: And indeed, you did some anecdotal research, speaking to female executives who had been on boards of directors, and they had provided their own experience of what it was like being one woman on a board, and then two.
MG: It was really fun interviews, actually. I called up all these women who were kind of pioneers on corporate boards, and said, "Okay, when you were you, when you were the only woman. What was it like?" "Terrible. I was ignored. I'd say stuff, and then a man would say the same thing, and everyone would say, 'That's a great point.'" Like, as if she didn't exist. One woman told me,a group came in to brief the board, and everyone on the board lines up in a row, and the consultants coming in shake everyone's hand, and just like, walk right by her, like she doesn't exist. And I said, "So did things change when there were two of you?" Because she'd been on boards where a second woman would join, she goes, "Not really. I mean, it was a little better. But no." "What happens when the third woman joins?" She goes, "Boom. It just changed." It was like all of a sudden she was seen for who she was. Women couldn't be ignored when she when they said something, people listened to them, they felt they could be themselves. There is some kind of experimental research in sort of psychology to suggest this is a real phenomenon, that there is a point at which there is this critical mass in group dynamics when a group becomes impossible to ignore. And what's interesting is it's not at a half. And what's also interesting is it's not at one right, not when one outsider joins. there is some point in the middle.
BH: In the case of seeking diversity, it's almost like at the point of a third, they become validated in a way that it's not just difference for different sake, that their intellectual diversity as a team or a group has reached, as you said, a point of a point of critical mass.
MG: Yeah.
BH: One of the other laws or principles that you revisit in the book is the law of a few, and how a small number of people can have an outsize influence on the outcome or the result. How has your thinking evolved or changed in terms of that idea from your original book?
MG: In the case of COVID, we learned by the end of the of the pandemic that the percentage of the infected population that was responsible for passing the virus along was tiny. It was like it's basically two or three out of every 100 people are really the ones who are doing the work of contagion. In the business world, we're used to the notion of 80-20.
We're talking now about in both those cases, OxyContin and COVID, a much more extreme version of that we're talking about 95-five, not 80-20. So it's not just an asymmetrical distribution, it's a radically asymmetrical distribution. And it's made me wonder, in how many instances there are radically asymmetrical distributions. I had a conversation with a criminologist. It's not in my book, but afterwards, who studied homicide in the west side of Chicago, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in North America, a neighborhood of 50,000 people. And he's created these network maps of people who are implicated in gun violence. And his point was, at any given time, there are only 400 people who are really at risk for gun violence on the west side of Chicago. It's a community of 50,000. Our assumption, when we hear about the west side of Chicago is like the whole neighborhood is rotten and dangerous. His point, no, no, no, no. It's a radically asymmetrical distribution, like 400 people are the focal point of the violence at any given time, and that means 49,600 are outside of that kind of that's that is just so different from our intuitive sense of what it means for a neighborhood to be dangerous that it forces a real reconsideration of what do we mean by we use those terms? Should we even be using that terms? Should we stop calling the west side of Chicago dangerous?
BH: It's fascinating example. And I think you know, as you said, people are so used to the idea of 80-20. But in terms of where we are now, in terms of big data and segmentation, the idea to really zero in on micro, micro, micro target a few influential people or people who can spread things. Is fascinating. We're close to having to wrap up our time, but I wanted to end with a question of advice that you would give leaders. So for people who are leading organizations and want to protect their communities or their businesses from malign influence in an age of social engineering, what advice would you have for those leaders?
MG: To pick up on what we just been talking about, is understanding the kind of understanding how to model change or phenomenon is really important. So the question of radically asymmetrical distributions, it's a modeling question. Is the problem that we're dealing with a normal distribution, a bell curve, or is it this kind of hockey stick, where all the activities happening at one end of the distribution? That's a really, really important question to ask. The other thing I'll point is, I mean you said, AI and are these sort of much richer reservoirs of data that we can now work with, will allow us to pinpoint far more precisely the kinds of people were interested in and why. There's many, number of implications of that, but one of them is that it's a very disruptive observation to the way that organizations operate. It's like in the analogy I was given, basketball started going down this route, and you realize very quickly if you do advanced analytics in basketball, that the very best basketball player, LeBron James or Steph Curry, is not worth 10X what the average player is worth. He's worth like 100X what the average player is worth. In fact, you have two people who are in the 90th percentile, you almost doesn't matter who else you have on the team. That, you know, goes against everything we understand about a team. So the team isn't really a team, is it? It's two superstars and everyone else doesn't really matter. So, like, these are disruptive notions, and I think if we're going to get into a world where we can actually very precisely quantify the contribution of various players in an organization, and we can recognize how radically asymmetrical their contribution is, we have to rethink what being a member of a group means, or a member of a team means.
BH: Thank you for sharing that. I think the key word really is disruption, and so for so many of the people who come to Rotman and listen to this podcast, understanding how to navigate disruption, both good and bad, is real challenge for them, but those are great thoughts for them to take away. Thank you so much for being here, Malcolm. congratulations on the book. It's full of fascinating stories, and you're typically fantastic. Writing the book again is Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Super Spreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.
This has been Rotman visiting experts, backstage discussions with world class thinkers and leaders from our acclaimed speaker series to find out about upcoming speakers and events visiting us here at Canada's leading business school, please visit rotman.utoronto.ca/events this episode was produced by Megan Haynes, recorded by Dan Mazzotta and edited by Damien Kerns. For more innovative thinking, head over to the Rotman Insights Hub, and please subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for tuning in.