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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Hardcover)
by Chip Heath , Dan Heath
| Category:
Management, Business & investing |
| Market price: ¥ 278.00
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¥ 258.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Wouldn't that be great if people remembered what you said and acted on it? What if people not only remembered and acted, but told hundreds of others who also acted and told? With this masterpiece, now you're really getting somewhere! |
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Author: Chip Heath , Dan Heath
Publisher: Random House
Pub. in: January, 2007
ISBN: 1400064287
Pages: 304
Measurements: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00746
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-1400064281
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- Awards & Credential -
This book ranks #109 in Books out of millions on Amazon.com as of May 15, 2007. |
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- MSL Picks -
With an entertaining blend of case studies and startling research, the Heath brothers lay out the critical elements of a sticky idea. They are:
- Simple: They're totally focused around the core of the idea. Everything else is virtually irrelevant. But the real challenge is finding that core!
- Unexpected: They break patterns, create gaps and capture our attention without any gimmickry. Savvy marketers will search for the counterintuitive aspects of their core message.
- Concrete: Ideas that stick easily understandable. No buzz words, abstract concepts or anything associated with the dreaded "Curse of Knowledge" are allowed.
- Credible: Trusted authorities, believable details, specific examples and analogies help make ideas more readily accepted and increase their stick factor.
- Emotional: People "care" about sticky ideas. In this section you'll learn many strategies on how to create this emotional connection.
- Story: With sticky ideas, people often remember how the problem arose, how it was dealt with. The story matters.
Although these six elements seem like common sense, they are woefully underapplied in business communication. As the author states: "Business managers seem to believe that, once they've clicked through a PowerPoint presentation showcasing their conclusions, they've successfully communicated their ideas. What they've done is share data."
This management masterpiece has following lightspots:
1. The ideas are evidence-based. Note that Chip Heath is a world class social psychologist. In fact, his dissertation adviser was Amos Tversky, who would have won a Nobel Prize had he lived. As such, their recommendations are all grounded in some of the most rigorous and well-grounded principles in the behavioral science literature. In a world where anyone can be a management expert - including Tony Soprano - it is essential to have ideas that are valid, yet rare.
2. The book is completely readable and understandable. The reason there are so many stories to go along with the evidence is that - as the best evidence shows - people remember stories, not statistics.
3. The final and most important thing about this book is that the ideas are quickly and readily applied.
- From quoting Jill Konrath and Brad Shorr
Target readers:
Business people
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Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He lives in Los Gatos, California.
Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education. A former researcher at Harvard Business School, he is a co-founder of Thinkwell, an innovative new-media textbook company. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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From the publisher
Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas–business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others – struggle to make their ideas "stick."
Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the "human scale principle," using the "Velcro Theory of Memory," and creating "curiosity gaps."
In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds –from the infamous "kidney theft ring" hoax to a coach's lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony - draw their power from the same six traits.
Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It's a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures) – the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of "he Mother Teresa Effect"; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice. Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas – and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.
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Introduction
WHAT STICKS?
A friend of a friend of ours is a frequent business traveler. Let's call him Dave. Dave was recently in Atlantic City for an important meeting with clients. Afterward, he had some time to kill before his flight, so he went to a local bar for a drink.
He’d just finished one drink when an attractive woman approached and asked if she could buy him another. He was surprised but flattered. Sure, he said. The woman walked to the bar and brought back two more drinks — one for her and one for him. He thanked her and took a sip. And that was the last thing he remembered.
Rather, that was the last thing he remembered until he woke up, disoriented, lying in a hotel bathtub, his body submerged in ice.
He looked around frantically, trying to figure out where he was and how he got there. Then he spotted the note: don’t move. call 911.
A cell phone rested on a small table beside the bathtub. He picked it up and called 911, his fingers numb and clumsy from the ice. The operator seemed oddly familiar with his situation. She said, "Sir, I want you to reach behind you, slowly and carefully. Is there a tube protruding from your lower back?"
Anxious, he felt around behind him. Sure enough, there was a tube.
The operator said, "Sir, don't panic, but one of your kidneys has been harvested. There's a ring of organ thieves operating in this city, and they got to you. Paramedics are on their way. Don't move until they arrive."
You've just read one of the most successful urban legends of the past fifteen years. The first clue is the classic urban-legend opening: "A friend of a friend..." Have you ever noticed that our friends’ friends have much more interesting lives than our friends themselves?
You've probably heard the Kidney Heist tale before. There are hundreds of versions in circulation, and all of them share a core of three elements: (1) the drugged drink, (2) the ice-filled bathtub, and (3) the kidney-theft punch line. One version features a married man who receives the drugged drink from a prostitute he has invited to his room in Las Vegas. It's a morality play with kidneys.
Imagine that you closed the book right now, took an hourlong break, then called a friend and told the story, without rereading it. Chances are you could tell it almost perfectly. You might forget that the traveler was in Atlantic City for "an important meeting with clients" — who cares about that? But you’d remember all the important stuff.
The Kidney Heist is a story that sticks. We understand it, we remember it, and we can retell it later. And if we believe it's true, it might change our behavior permanently — at least in terms of accepting drinks from attractive strangers.
Contrast the Kidney Heist story with this passage, drawn from a paper distributed by a nonprofit organization. "Comprehensive community building naturally lends itself to a return-on-investment rationale that can be modeled, drawing on existing practice," it begins, going on to argue that "[a] factor constraining the flow of resources to CCIs is that funders must often resort to targeting or categorical requirements in grant making to ensure accountability."
Imagine that you closed the book right now and took an hourlong break. In fact, don't even take a break; just call up a friend and retell that passage without rereading it. Good luck.
Is this a fair comparison — an urban legend to a cherry-picked bad passage? Of course not. But here's where things get interesting: Think of our two examples as two poles on a spectrum of memorability. Which sounds closer to the communications you encounter at work? If you're like most people, your workplace gravitates toward the nonprofit pole as though it were the North Star.
Maybe this is perfectly natural; some ideas are inherently interesting and some are inherently uninteresting. A gang of organ thieves — inherently interesting! Nonprofit financial strategy — inherently uninteresting! It’s the nature versus nurture debate applied to ideas: Are ideas born interesting or made interesting?
Well, this is a nurture book.
So how do we nurture our ideas so they'll succeed in the world? Many of us struggle with how to communicate ideas effectively, how to get our ideas to make a difference. A biology teacher spends an hour explaining mitosis, and a week later only three kids remember what it is. A manager makes a speech unveiling a new strategy as the staffers nod their heads enthusiastically, and the next day the frontline employees are observed cheerfully implementing the old one.
Good ideas often have a hard time succeeding in the world. Yet the ridiculous Kidney Heist tale keeps circulating, with no resources whatsoever to support it.
Why? Is it simply because hijacked kidneys sell better than other topics? Or is it possible to make a true, worthwhile idea circulate as effectively as this false idea?
The Truth About Movie Popcorn
Art Silverman stared at a bag of movie popcorn. It looked out of place sitting on his desk. His office had long since filled up with fake-butter fumes. Silverman knew, because of his organization’s research, that the popcorn on his desk was unhealthy. Shockingly unhealthy, in fact. His job was to figure out a way to communicate this message to the unsuspecting moviegoers of America.
Silverman worked for the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a nonprofit group that educates the public about nutrition. The CSPI sent bags of movie popcorn from a dozen theaters in three major cities to a lab for nutritional analysis. The results surprised everyone.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommends that a normal diet contain no more than 20 grams of saturated fat each day. According to the lab results, the typical bag of popcorn had 37 grams.
The culprit was coconut oil, which theaters used to pop their popcorn. Coconut oil had some big advantages over other oils. It gave the popcorn a nice, silky texture, and released a more pleasant and natural aroma than the alternative oils. Unfortunately, as the lab results showed, coconut oil was also brimming with saturated fat.
The single serving of popcorn on Silverman's desk — a snack someone might scarf down between meals — had nearly two days' worth of saturated fat. And those 37 grams of saturated fat were packed into a medium-sized serving of popcorn. No doubt a decentsized bucket could have cleared triple digits.
The challenge, Silverman realized, was that few people know what "37 grams of saturated fat" means. Most of us don't memorize the USDA's daily nutrition recommendations. Is 37 grams good or bad? And even if we have an intuition that it’s bad, we’d wonder if it was "bad bad" (like cigarettes) or "normal bad" (like a cookie or a milk shake).
Even the phrase "37 grams of saturated fat" by itself was enough to cause most people’s eyes to glaze over. "Saturated fat has zero appeal," Silverman says. "It's dry, it's academic, who cares?"
Silverman could have created some kind of visual comparison — perhaps an advertisement comparing the amount of saturated fat in the popcorn with the USDA's recommended daily allowance. Think of a bar graph, with one of the bars stretching twice as high as the other.
But that was too scientific somehow. Too rational. The amount of fat in this popcorn was, in some sense, not rational. It was ludicrous. The CSPI needed a way to shape the message in a way that fully communicated this ludicrousness.
Silverman came up with a solution.
CSPI called a press conference on September 27, 1992. Here's the message it presented: "A medium-sized 'butter' popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings — combined!"
The folks at CSPI didn’t neglect the visuals — they laid out the full buffet of greasy food for the television cameras. An entire day’s worth of unhealthy eating, displayed on a table. All that saturated fat— stuffed into a single bag of popcorn.
The story was an immediate sensation, featured on CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN. It made the front pages of USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post's Style section. Leno and Letterman cracked jokes about fat-soaked popcorn, and headline writers trotted out some doozies: "Popcorn Gets an 'R' Rating," "Lights, Action, Cholesterol!" "Theater Popcorn is Double Feature of Fat."
The idea stuck. Moviegoers, repulsed by these findings, avoided popcorn in droves. Sales plunged. The service staff at movie houses grew accustomed to fielding questions about whether the popcorn was popped in the “bad” oil. Soon after, most of the nation’s biggest theater chains — including United Artists, AMC, and Loews — announced that they would stop using coconut oil.
On Stickiness
This is an idea success story. Even better, it's a truthful idea success story. The people at CSPI knew something about the world that they needed to share. They figured out a way to communicate the idea so that people would listen and care. And the idea stuck — just like the Kidney Heist tale.
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| View all 8 comments |
Howard Aldrich (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-14 00:00>
Although aimed at a business audience, I found the authors' suggestions for effective communication equally applicable in classrooms and writing projects. Success in helping students learn or persuading readers follows from applying the "SUCCESs" formula: keep your message Simple but profound; spark interest by opening with the Unexpected; use Concrete examples rather than abstract formulations; make your message Credible by reporting from direct experience; draw people in with Emotional impact; and use Stories to make your message memorable and of human interest. The authors base their arguments on well-validated social-psychological principles but never let the science get in the way of their well-written recommendations. I highly recommend this book for teachers at every level of instruction and for authors who want to increase the impact of their written words. |
Mark C. Howell (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-14 00:00>
Made to Stick is a great read and more! Taking the idea of stickiness introduced by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, authors Heath and Heath have produced more than a great read. They've developed a workshop approach that helps the reader understand what makes things stick and then begin to see how to craft their own stickiness! Packed with captivating stories that make the point, Made to Stick is a very engaging read with plenty to chew on. |
Arline Curtiss (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-14 00:00>
The ideas in this book are terrific. We kind of know some of Heath's principles: simplicity (well, we've heard about KISS forever), unexpectedness (there should be something shocking or at least edgy to make it dynamic,) concreteness (it can't be "mystery meat" you have be able to connect with the essence right away,) credibility (one has to get an initial feeling of "worthiness"), it has to excite, to have emotional as well as rational appeal, and stories help (well, we've heard about testimonials, and parables too). But here in this book Heath puts it all into focus so you have a concrete measuring scale to work with.
He illustrates his points with some good examples. How do you get big, bad truckers to stop littering the State of Texas? "Give a hoot, don't pollute" is too tame for these macho guys. So state officials came up with the slogan "Don't mess with Texas" and did TV spots with such consummate Texans as Ed Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and country music's Willie Nelson.
"Business managers seem to believe that, once they've clocked through a PowerPoint presentation showcasing their conclusions, they've successfully communicated their ideas," Heath writes. "What they've done is share data" Sticky ideas shock, move and convince us. "If you want your ideas to be stickier, you've got to break someone's guessing machine and then fix it."
I had read about Heath's research in Cognitive Psychology, Psychology Today, and Scientific American. Unfortunately not before I made two big mistakes. But, thanks to what I have since learned, I think I have been able to correct them.
I'm a board certified cognitive behavioral therapist who has had great success training people to re-wire their brains to quickly get out of the pain of depression by using simple mind exercises to switch their neural activity from the feeling part of the brain (the subcortex) to the thinking part of the brain (the neocortex). These exercises are based on neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to re-wire itself as a result of changes in one's thinking and behavior. So far, so good.
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Pedro Prestel (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-14 00:00>
This is an amazing book, very interesting, with clear explanations, real cases and very instructive, very well structured and the type of book that you start to read and don't finish till almost the end. |
View all 8 comments |
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