Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

This book tells you how to craft ideas that stick in your head like some alien worm borrowing through your brain laying eggs.

EUW!

That idea sticks on your head because it follows the book's recipe: a simple, unexpected (alien?), concrete (my brain? ARGH!), credible (ok, you probably WON'T meet any actual brain-borrowing aliens, but you understand the mechanical concept), emotional (ICK and EUW!) story adheres to your head better than any long, scholarly, erudite disquisition on the neurological basis on persistence memetic structures (zzzzzzzz!)

Read the book, find out how you can make brain worms too! It's fun and useful!

Wow! This book may well be your favorite book of the year. It's absolutely jam-packed with memorable pack-a-punch stories to liven up your weekly staff meetings.

After more than a dozen leaders raved about Made to Stick, I reluctantly succumbed. If it's that popular, I reasoned incorrectly, how good could it be? News flash: It's very good! So would you invest $16.50 to learn how to nurture your great ideas--so they'll succeed in the world? It's a bargain. Your team members will not stop talking about the book.

Commenting on the urban legend about kidney harvesting, the Heath brothers begin, "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." Their insight is ingenious--and they've combined six big ingredients and cooked up a mouth-watering management stew.

Apologizing for the hokey acronym, SUCCESs, they deliver a checklist for creating a successful idea: Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. Each chapter has an "Idea Clinic" with a six-point scorecard for evaluating Message 1 versus Message 2. And yikes--they take a couple of well-earned shots at nonprofit mediocrity.

In my book, Mastering The Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Non-profit, I mention that I'm a great believer in moving team members from "I don't know what I don't know" to "I know what I don't know." So the section on the gap theory in the "Unexpected" chapter sold me.

"Curiosity," says George Loewenstein, "happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge." The authors use two internal fundraising presentations as the clinic for this chapter. Their punch line, "To hold people's interest, we can use the gap theory of curiosity to our advantage. A little bit of mystery goes a long way." It's brilliant.

"To make a message stick," write the Heaths, "you've got to push it beyond common sense to uncommon sense." When you buy the book, read why the "Journalism 101" story rates Sticky Hall of Fame honors. The lesson learned is worth the price of the book times 1,000.

Finally, when President John F. Kennedy was ready to announce a big idea, which statement was stickier? A) "Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives." Or...B) "We will put a man on the moon and return him safely by 1970."

This book will impact your boring mission statements, vision statements and BHAGs. The big question: how can we make them as sticky as the Kidney Heist story?

First, I must say the team that came up with the cover did a brilliant job. As a corporate director of human resources, I am continually engaged in sharing data with the field and also with my superiors. The techniques and tips in this book have been successfully deployed in my recent presentations. The improved feedback and real world observations prove that I am doing a better job at communicating our ideas.

I highly recommend this book to anyone that is engaged in a dynamic field such as human resources where the guide posts seem to move each week. When you have to get it right - EEOC, ADA, FMLA, etc., you want to ensure it sticks. Michael L. Gooch, SPHR - Author of Wingtips with Spurs

I found this book to be valuable to me as a school teacher. If the material I present doesn't "stick" with the students, then I haven't done my job. This book will help you do a better job!

Made to Stick is a great book designed to help you made your ideas more memorable. It is not designed to give you the power to come up with new ideas, but to make the most of what's available to you. The authors use a wide variety of examples of "sticky" and non "sticky" concepts to show you what works and what does not.

The epitome of their framework is the "Jared" marketing campaign that Subway used several years ago. This campaigned contained all of their features for a "sticky" idea: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotion, and a Story. As you can see, they even tried to make their framework sticky by having it spell out SUCCES.

The book itself stays true to its word, in that the examples and framework they provide are sufficiently memorable that I feel the knowledge I have gained from reading this will "stick" with me for many years to come.

Highly recommended.