The Tipping Point

We have seen, in this book, how a number of relatively minor changes in our external environment can have a dramatic effect on how we behave and who we are. Clean up graffiti and all of a sudden people who would otherwise commit crimes suddenly don't. Tell a seminarian that he has to hurry and all of a sudden he starts to ignores bystanders in obvious distress. The Rule of 150 suggests that the size of a group is another one of those subtle contextual factors that can make a big difference. In the case of the Hutterites, people who are willing to go along with the group, who can be easily infected with the community ethos below the level of 150, somehow, suddenly — with just the smallest change in the size of the community — become divided and alienated. Once that line, that Tipping Point, is crossed, they begin to behave very differently.

If we want groups to serve as incubators for contagious messages, then, as they did in the case of DivineSecrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or the early Methodist church, we have to keep groups below the 150 Tipping Point. Above that point, there begin to be structural impediments to the ability of the group to agree and act with one voice. If we want to, say, develop schools in disadvantaged communities that can successfully counteract the poisonous atmosphere of their surrounding neighborhoods, this tells us that we're probably better off building lots of little schools than one or two big ones. The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference.

Perhaps the best example of an organization that has successfully navigated this problem is Gore Associates, a privately held, multimillion-dollar high-tech firm based in Newark, Delaware. Gore is the company that makes the water-resistant Gore-Tex fabric, as well as Glide dental floss, special insulating coatings for computer cables, and a variety of sophisticated specialty cartridges, filter bags, and tubes for the automobile, semiconductor, pharmaceutical, and medical industries. At Gore there are no titles. If you ask people who work there for their card, it will just say their name and underneath it the word "Associate," regardless of how much money they make or how much responsibility they have or how long they have been at the company. People don't have bosses, they have sponsors — mentors — who watch out for their interests. There are no organization charts, no budgets, no elaborate strategic plans. Salaries are determined collectively. Headquarters for the company is a low-slung, unpretentious red brick building. The "executive" offices are small, plainly furnished rooms, along a narrow corridor. The corners of Gore buildings tend to be conference rooms or free space, so that no one can be said to have a more prestigious office. When I visited a Gore associate named Bob Hen, at one of the company's plants in Delaware, I tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to tell me what his position was. I suspected, from the fact that he had been recommended to me, that he was one of the top executives. But his office wasn't any bigger than anyone else's. His card just called him an "associate." He didn't seem to have a secretary, one that I could see anyway. He wasn't dressed any differently from anyone else, and when I kept asking the question again and again, all he finally said, with a big grin, was, "I'm a meddler."

Gore is, in short, a very unusual company with a clear and well-articulated philosophy. It is a big established company attempting to behave like a small entrepreneurial start-up. By all accounts, that attempt has been wildly successful. Whenever business experts make lists of the best American companies to work for, or whenever consultants give speeches on the best-managed American companies, Gore is on the list. It has a rate of employee turnover that is about a third the industry average. It has been profitable for thirty-five consecutive years and has growth rates and an i

Wilbert "Bill" Gore — the late founder of the company — was no more influenced, of course, by the ideas of Robin Dunbar than the Hutterites were. Like them, he seems to have stumbled on the principle by trial and error. "We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty," he told an interviewer some years ago, so 150 employees per plant became the company goal. In the electronics division of the company, that means that no plant was built larger than 50,000 square feet, since there was almost no way to put many more than 150 people in a building that size. "People used to ask me, how do you do your long-term pla

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