The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,96

a social phenomenon. It spreads because of the beliefs and social structures and poverty and prejudices and personalities of a community, and sometimes getting caught up in the precise biological characteristics of a virus merely serves as a distraction; we might have halted the spread of AIDS far more effectively just by focusing on those beliefs and social structures and poverty and prejudices and personalities. And when he said that, a lightbulb went on inside my head: that’s what I was trying to say in The Tipping Point!

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading. But I never quite believed that until I wrote The Tipping Point. I wrote my book without any clear expectation of who would read it, or what, if anything, it would be useful for. It seemed presumptuous to think otherwise. But in the year since its publication, I have been inundated with the comments of readers. I have received thousands of e-mails through my Web site (www.gladwell.com). I have spoken at conferences and retreats and sales meetings and chatted with Internet entrepreneurs and shoe designers and community activists and movie executives and countless others — and each time I have learned something new about my book, and about why it seems to have touched such a chord.

In New Jersey, the philanthropist Sharon Karmazin bought three hundred copies of The Tipping Point and sent one to every public library in the state, promising to fund any ideas they could come up with that were inspired by my book. “Use the thinking in the book to create something new,” Karmazin told librarians. “Don’t just give us something you wanted to do anyway.” Within a few months, “Tipping Point” grants totaling close to $100,000 had been given out to twenty one different libraries. In Roselle, the public library is on a side street, hidden away behind shrubbery, and so the library got a grant to put up signs around town to direct people to the library. Another library used its grant to teach the Connectors among the group of seniors who use the library to surf the Net — betting they will draw in other patrons. Still another library bought Spanish language books and materials, hoping to create a draw for an underserved community in their town. None of the grants was more than a few thousand dollars, nor were the ideas themselves more than modest — but that was the point.

In California, Ken Futernick, a professor of education at California State University at Sacramento, says he was inspired by The Tipping Point to come up with an idea for attracting teachers to troubled schools. “There is an interesting stalemate,” Futernick told me. “Good principals say, ‘I can’t go off to a hard school unless I have good teachers,’ and good teachers say, ‘I won’t go off to a hard school unless there is a good principal.’ There have been a lot of efforts, like forgivable loans, that thrash around and don’t ever go anywhere.” In some schools in low income parts of Oakland where Futernick has been focusing his efforts, he says that 40 percent of the teachers may lack credentials, working only on an “emergency” two year basis. “I ask teachers, ‘What would it take for you to go to one of these schools, in a very low income area, lots of single parents, not a safe part of town?’” He went on. “Salary incentives? They say maybe. Lower class size? They say yeah, maybe. All the things I listed were sort of attractive, but I didn’t get the sense that any one of them would be enough to get people to take the assignment.” It would be easy to conclude, from all of that, that teachers are undedicated and selfish, not willing to work in those places where they are most needed. But what would happen, Futernick wondered, if he changed the context of the request? His new idea, which he hopes to put in place over the next year in Oakland, is for principals to be recruited for difficult schools and then given a year to put together a team of qualified teachers drawn from good schools for their new assignment — a team that would go into the new school together. On playing fields and battlegrounds, challenges that would be daunting and impossible if faced alone are suddenly possible when tackled in a close knit group. The people