BIOGRAPHY

In his international bestseller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell describes how ideas and trends start and spread, and offers tools for giving them direction. The message is eloquent, intuitively convincing, and relevant to a broad range of audiences.

Gladwell's goal is to show people how to ignite, steer and/or sustain their own change or trend, whether it's a business trend, or social, political or technological transformation. Understanding trends is valuable to any audience that has a stake in shaping the future or influencing human behavior, from educators trying to reach students, to businesses trying to spread the word about their product-anyone who's trying to create a change with limited resources.

The Tipping Point lays out the rules that govern trends, the roles people play in spreading them, the power of context in giving them shape. The 'tipping point' itself is the moment when these factors all converge and the change or trend takes off. Gladwell engages audiences by applying these ideas to their own field. He has brought this 'applied sociology' approach to subjects ranging from medicine and technology to marketing, management, consumer products and financial services.

His follow up Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, explains how in the Blink of an eye, the unconscious mind decides lots of (often very important) things for us without our even knowing what we know or how we know it. Malcolm describes how we make these decisions-both the good ones and the bad-why some people are so much better at it than others, and how we can improve our skill at interpreting these details correctly to become better decision makers-in our homes, in our offices, and in everyday life.

Blink examines the smallest components of our experience, the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that bubble up whenever we meet a new person, or confront a complex situation, or have to make a decision under conditions of stress. If we paid more attention to these fleeting moments, it would change how we do a lot of things. If you combined all these little changes together, you'd end up with a different and happier world.

Gladwell has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and is a former bureau chief for The Washington Post and staff writer for The New Yorker. He has spoken to dozens of businesses on how they can use The Tipping Point in their own organisations.

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