Book Summary Preview : Made to Stick

The Big Idea

What sticks?

Whether you’re a CEO or a full-time mom, you’ve got ideas that you need to communicate: a new product coming to market, a strategy you want to sell your boss, values you are trying to instil in your children. But it’s hard – fiendishly so – to transform the way people think and act.

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 – businesspeople, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others – struggle to

Why You Need This Book

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 the “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 how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.

In this book, you’ll learn the six key qualities of an idea that is made to stick: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotional, and Stories – the SUCCESs framework.

Principle 1: Simplicity

How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.”

To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission – sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

“Finding the core” means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence. To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. But that’s the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea.

The Army Commander’s Intent forces its officers to highlight the most important goal of an operation. The value of the Intent comes from its singularity. You can’t have five North Stars, you can’t have five “most important goals,” and you can’t have five Commander’s Intents.

Finding the core is analogous to writing the Commander’s Intent – it’s about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine. The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once offered a definition of engineering elegance: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal: knowing how much can be wrung out of an idea before it begins to lose its essence.

Principle 2: Unexpectedness

How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We can use surprise – an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus – to grab people’s attention. And for our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.

Nordstrom is a department store known for outstanding customer service. That extra service comes at a price: Nordstrom can be an expensive place to shop. Yet many people are willing to pay higher prices precisely because Nordstrom makes shopping so much more pleasant.

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, in their book Built to Last, describe stories told at Nordstrom about unexpected service by employees, who are known within the firm as “Nordies”:

The Nordie who ironed a new shirt for a customer who needed it for a meeting that afternoon;

The Nordie who cheerfully gift wrapped products a customer bought at Macy’s;

The Nordie who warmed customers’ cars in winter while they finished shopping;

The Nordie who made a last-minute delivery of party clothes to a frantic hostess;

And even the Nordie who refunded money for a set of tire chains – although Nordstrom doesn’t sell tire chains.

Principle 3: Concreteness

Jane Elliot, an elementary-school teacher in Iowa, found herself trying to explain Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death to her classroom of third-graders. She aimed to make prejudice tangible to her students. At the start of class, she divided the students into two groups: brown-eyed kids and blue-eyed kids.  The groups were separated. She made a shocking announcement that the brown-eyed kids were superior to blue-eyed kids.

Elliot was shocked at how quickly the class was transformed. She watched those kids turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating third-graders. Even their performance on academic tasks changed.

Elliot’s simulation made prejudice concrete – brutally concrete. It also had an enduring impact on the students’ lives. She turned prejudice into an experience.

How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions – they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images, because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.

Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

 

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