In his 2006 book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson popularized the notion that some distributions have "long tails". In these distributions, one can focus on the "tails" of the distribution, the less common stuff, benefiting from a large number of low volume things.
However, in many situations, the "long tail" is a vestigial organ. These situations involve distributions that have instead Tall Bodies, and one should instead focus on the huge impact that can result from a very small number of things.
Like the Long Tail, the Tall Body doesn't apply to all things, but understanding when it does and how to build a winning strategy around it will make the difference between success and failure.
As a motivating example, consider this. Election day is coming up, and there is going to be a proposition on the ballot, Prop X, that could enable your business to offer a profitable new service. Voter turn-out will be high because of some other big ticket item on the ballot, but most voters will not have even heard about Prop X when they show up at the polls.
Prop X could add a lot to your bottom line, but reaching any non-trivial percentage of the voters is also incredibly expensive. Is it worth it? How can you make an intelligent business decision about the effectiveness of campaigning for the proposition?
Let's start by supposing there are going to be 100,000 votes on your proposition, all from voters who turned out to vote for other issues, and are essentially voting randomly with equal probability on Prop X. So without any influence, the probability of the proposition passing is 50%. This assumption, that the majority of voters vote randomly on this issue, is the key assumption here.
Now, suppose you and 9 friends would definitely vote for the proposition. How much of a difference could these 10 people make? Can the voice of 10 votes be heard over the noise of 100,000? Put in mathematical terms, what's the new likelihood of the proposition winning?
What if you could reach 0.1% of voters, or 100 people?
What if you could reach 0.5% of voters, or 500 people?
Write down your guesses for each of these three things, and then throw them away because they are wrong.
We can go through the math later, but this is definitely a case where the Tall Body applies. Those first ten voters, who make up 0.01% of the population, increase the chances of winning from 50% to 53%. Not bad, but not great. Another 90 votes and we have 0.1% of the voters, yet our odds have jumped to 74%. By the time we've reach just 500 people out of the 100,000, the case is closed. The proposition has over a 99.9% chance of winning, because of the actions of 0.5% of the population.
As I mentioned, this relies on the assumption that most voters are acting randomly. That's certainly not the case in a lot of elections, but it is for some, and it certainly holds for many other aspects of human behavior. In my forthcoming book, The Tall Body: Little Changes that Make a Big Difference, I'll explore this concept in more detail, and readers will put down the book with an understanding of how to identify, and reason, about these situations. Small and easy changes in your personal and professional life can create new lifestyles, sway million dollar decisions, and create positive social change on a global scale.
