Not long after Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point was published, in the winter of 2000, it had a tipping point of its own. His first book took up residence on The New York Times’ bestseller list for an unbelievable eight years. More than 5 million copies were sold in North America alone, an epidemic that spread to the carry-on bags of many actual and aspiring CEOs.

Gladwell offered three “rules” for how any social contagion happens – how, say, a crime wave builds (and can be reversed), but also how a new kind of sneaker takes over the market. The rules turned out to explain his own book’s success as well. According to his “Law of the Few”, only a small number of Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen are needed to discover and promote a new trend. (If this taxonomy sounds familiar, that’s just another sign of how deep this book has burrowed into the culture.)

Atlantic