The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,71

into design and design into manufacturing and manufacturing into sales? “One of the immediate reactions we get when we talk to people is ‘Man, your system sounds chaotic. How in the devil can you do anything with no obvious authority?’ But it’s not chaos. It isn’t a problem,” Burt Chase said. “It’s hard to appreciate that unless you are working in it. It’s the advantage of understanding people’s strengths. It’s knowing—where can I get my best advice? And if you have some knowledge about people, you can do that.”

What Gore has created, in short, is an organized mechanism that makes it far easier for new ideas and information moving around the organization to tip—to go from one person or one part of the group to the entire group all at once. That’s the advantage of adhering to the Rule of 150. You can exploit the bonds of memory and peer pressure. Were Gore to try to reach each employee singly, their task would have been much harder, just as Rebecca Wells’s task would have been much harder if her readers came to her readings not in groups of six and seven but by themselves. And had Gore tried to put everyone in one big room, it wouldn’t have worked either. In order to be unified—in order to spread a specific, company ideology to all of its employees—Gore had to break itself up into semi autonomous small pieces. That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first. Rebecca Wells says that what she began to realize as the Ya Ya epidemic grew was that it wasn’t really about her or even about her book: it wasn’t one epidemic focused on one thing. It was thousands of different epidemics, all focused on the groups that had grown up around Ya Ya. “I began to realize,” she said, “that these women had built their own Ya Ya relationships, not so much to the book but to each other.”

SIX

Case Study

RUMORS, SNEAKERS, AND

THE POWER OF TRANSLATION

Airwalking is the name given to the skateboarding move in which the skater takes off from a ramp, slips his board out from under his feet, and then takes one or two long, exaggerated strides in the air before landing. It is a classic stunt, a staple of traditional skateboarding, which is why when two entrepreneurs decided in the mid 1980s to start manufacturing athletic shoes aimed at hard core skateboarders, they called the company Airwalk. Airwalk was based outside San Diego and rooted in the teenage beach and skate culture of the region. In the beginning, the firm made a canvas shoe in wild colors and prints that became a kind of alternative fashion statement. They also made a technical skate shoe in suede, with a thick sole and a heavily cushioned upper that—at least at first—was almost as stiff as the skateboard itself. But the skaters became so devoted to the product that they would wash the shoes over and again, then drive over them in cars to break them in. Airwalk was cool. It sponsored professional skateboarders, and developed a cult following at the skate events, and after a few years had built up a comfortable $13 million a year business.

Companies can continue at that level indefinitely, in a state of low level equilibrium, serving a small but loyal audience. But the owners of Airwalk wanted more. They wanted to build themselves into an international brand, and in the early 1990s they changed course. They reorganized their business operations. They redesigned their shoes. They expanded their focus to include not just skateboarding but also surfing, snowboarding, mountain biking, and bicycle racing, sponsoring riders in all of those sports and making Airwalk synonymous with the active, alternative lifestyle. They embarked on an aggressive grassroots campaign to meet the buyers for youth oriented shoe stores. They persuaded Foot Locker to try them out on an experimental basis. They worked to get alternative rock bands to wear their shoes on stage and, perhaps most important, they decided to hire a small advertising agency named Lambesis to rethink their marketing campaign. Under Lambesis’s direction, Airwalk exploded. In 1993, it had been a $16 million company. In 1994, it had sales of $44 million. In 1995, sales jumped to $150 million, and the year after that they hit $175 million. At its peak, Airwalk was ranked by one major marketing research company as the thirteenth “coolest” brand