Malcolm Gladwell introduced us to the concept of the Tipping Point – the point when a virus spreads, with its analogy that a tiny number of super-influential types can provide the spark behind any successful trend. The Heath brothers expanded this concept in Ideas That Stick. Now some interesting new research has emerged about the spread of ideas. Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger and Universitat Pompeu Fabra professor Gael Le Mens claim that there are plenty of examples of ideas catching on and spreading like wildfire, but we know less about why once-popular things become unpopular. According to conventional wisdom, if a message diffused through a population quickly, more potential adopters would be reached, improving the prospects for widespread adoption. Gladwell compared the spread of viruses to the spread of ideas. The findings of the new research are based on an a comparison of the popularity of ideas with the popularity of children’s names. By tracking the popularity of names given by parents to their children over 100 years in France and the United States, the study concluded that names – and therefore products - that spread too quickly may end up being less successful overall. In the music business, for example, new artists who bolt to the top of sales charts often realize lower overall sales than those whose popularity grows more slowly. Faster adoption is linked to faster abandonment.

Well, maybe not the Blair you thought. Not Tony, but Eric Arthur Blair, aka George Orwell. And the leadership I refer to is the leadership displayed by the pig elite in Animal Farm. "Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure. On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility,” says management expert Squealer. He goes on to claim that the farm’s leader, Napoleon, “would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?" On another occasion, Squealer explains to the other animals why only the pigs are fed with apples and milk: "We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare.”

Learning to speak is so complicated that by rights babies shouldn’t be able to master it at all. By the time they are 18 months old, they have a core vocabulary of 50 words they can pronounce and 100 more they understand. By their sixth birthday, children have a working vocabulary of 6,000 words—meaning they've learned, on average, three new words every day since birth. And because babies have no say in where they'll be born, they actually start life able to learn any of the world's nearly 7,000 tongues. What makes this all possible, says Jeffrey Kluger in Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple), is processing speed.

I am always interested to discover links between the authors of the business books that I read. Chris (Long Tail) Anderson has just published Free: The Future of a Radical Price. In what Mitch Ratcliffe (booksahead.com) describes as a guru slap-down, (and which Anderson himself calls an intellectual debate between corporate cousins), Malcolm (Outliers, Blink, Tipping Point) Gladwell attacked the book in The New Yorker. This prompted Seth (All Marketers are Liars, Purple Cow) Godin to enter the fray on Anderson’s side. I wait with baited breath to see what Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Tom Friedman and other journo-gurus have to say on the matter.

Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, makes frequent appearances in my writing. He is best known as a prominent journo-guru and author of two recent best sellers: The World is Flat: A Brief History of The Twenty-first Century; and Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America. These two books were not Friedman’s first on globalization. He also wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization in 1999.