Tipping Over the Point

I'm not too thrilled with the style of Malcolm Gladwell's writing. It reminds me too much of the style of writing of Stephen Covey and "the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". That book used examples like Gladwell did, though not as pointless as Covey's were. I think a better example instead of the Hush Puppies fad would be the Ugg Boots fad that's going on right now.

My freshman year of high school, it seemed that a lot of teenage girls were wearing Ugg Boots. Uggs are made from an Australian company and I hear they are quite comfy. While I do not own a pair, I hear that not only are they comfy they're good for year-round use. They're warm in the winter and they don't over heat your feet in the winter. Keep in mind that I don't actually know if this is true or not.

Why are these boots coming back in an even greater number? Maybe it's because some girls think they're stylish, or that they're good for the weather around hear. I don't know, but it seems like they've come back and are twice as popular.

One concept I found interesting in this book was the 80/20 concept. It's basically this concept that out of every kind of epidemics twenty percent of the population do eighty percent of the work. The thought is is that these are the people who are at fault for doing most of the spreading of an epidemic. Say a guy who has AIDs spreads it to most of his partners while another guy who has it either spreads it to another person before he finds out or he finds out before he can spread it to someone else. This means the first guy who gives mos of his partners AIDs has done more work than the second guy who gave away to at least one person. Therefore, the first guy did eighty percent of the work while the second guy did twenty percent of the work.

All in all, even though I don't like his style of writing. I think "The Tipping Point" will be a very interesting read.