Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

I love, love, love this book! The authors, Chip and Dan Heath, are brothers who explored the idea of “stickiness” put forth by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point They’ve co-written a book which lays out six characteristics necessary to make your presentation, recommendation or idea “stick” in the minds of those you’re targeting. Thos characteristics are:

Success – find the core of any idea
Unexpected – grab the people’s attention by surprising them
Concrete – make sure the idea can be grasped and remembered later
Credibility – give an idea believability
Emotion – help the people see the importance of the idea
Stories – empower people to use an idea through narrative

One of my teammates, Ben, is a master at making things sticky. He has a double major in philosophy and economics from Yale and is responsible for the heavy duty analytics on our broader team. He was trying to explain how the use of recursive partitioning (a method for multivariable analysis using decision trees to classify dichotomous, dependent variable… don’t ask) could help us figure out which buildings and people were performing best and why.

He found a blog where a guy described sorting socks (I guess there truly IS a blog for everything) and turned that into a simple analogy to describe the analytical technique. He then went on to engage the audience in a series of questions to fill in the blanks on a tool he built and – voila! – we had our best performers. Not only did we feel great about understanding our buildings and people, we also felt vaguely superior for understanding recursive partitioning. Sticky.

If you haven’t read the book please follow this link [link] and check it out on Amazon. The Heaths also write for Fast Company and have a blog here. [link]