Copy link Copied Copy link Copied Subscribe to gift this article Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Already a subscriber? Login 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 Copy link Copied Copy link Copied Subscribe to gift this article Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.

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