Malcolm Gladwell’s seventh bestseller, Revenge of the Tipping Point, wasn’t supposed to be a full volume of new material.
His publisher wanted to reissue his breakthrough debut, The Tipping Point, on its 25th anniversary, so Gladwell was tasked with writing an updated prologue. But for a storyteller who’s considered one of the world’s most influential thinkers, a few pages of prose seemed inadequate to capture all the changes of the last quarter-century. The first book explored the science behind viral trends in business, marketing, and behavior; the second reframes those lessons through the lens of social engineering.
“There were things about COVID, and particularly the opioid crisis, that I really, really wanted to talk about, and I couldn’t see a way to fit those two things in a simple revise of the original book,” he said to Wharton management professor Adam Grant during an interview for the lecture series, Authors@Wharton.
