Chip Heath & Dan Heath: Made to Stick. Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

About the book

This is a great book that keeps you hooked like any other world-class business book.

How was the actual reading of the book?

“Made to Stick” is about ideas and how to design ideas. It’s a handbook of ideas. Chip and Dan Heath are showing how to design an idea that sticks. And it all starts right from the first pages when they start with a surprisingly bold story. Which will stick.

What are the key learnings of the book? 

In a nutshell Chip and Dan Heath have two solutions for designing sticky ideas – SUCCESS and repetition. There are six principles of sticky ideas or SUCCES as they call it – Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions and Stories. 

Simple

·      Simple includes core and compact. To make simple ideas you should formulate short sentences (compact) drawn from long experience (core).

·      Use proverbs. Proverbs offer rules of thumbs. 

·      Proverbs are helpful in guiding individual decisions in environments with shared standards.

Unexpected 

·      How to get and keep attention? Here is the formula: Identify central message + make it counterintuitive + break the guessing machine = surprise gets and interest keeps. 

·      Start by getting peoples attention. You should break a pattern.

·      Next thing you have to do is to break the guessing machine and fix it.

Concrete 

·      Concrete ideas are easy to remember.

·      Chip and Dan Heath tells a story about Boeing 727. The executives of Boeing ordered a new passenger plane and they gave very detailed specifications. It should take 131 passengers, it should fly from Miami to NYC and land into a certain LaGuardia runway. Compare these specifications to ”build us the world’s best airplane.”

·      Concreteness is a way to mobilize and focus brains. It creates a shared turf.

Credible

·      What makes people to believe? Because others believe also. We trust recommendations.

·      Don’t fight against lifetime of learnings and social relationships. There is a strong similarity to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Tipping point” book .

·      We also trust interesting details. Statistics helps people to believe.

·      A bonus thought is the testable credentials which was deployed by Ronald Regan while he was competing against Jimmy Carter. Reagan asked from the voters “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”. Wasn’t that a sticky idea?

Emotional

·      Feelings inspires people to act. You should make people to care and act. Make association between something that people don’t care yet and something that they do care about.

·      Three strategies of making people care – using association, appealing to self-interest and appealing to identity. We create empathy, we show association to the things that people already care about and we appeal to their self-interest (and also to the people that they want to be). WIIFY – what’s in it for you?

·      Another way is to use self-interest. To make your message sticky suggest to receivers that there is something they want. WIIFY. 

·      About decision making. There are two models of making decisions. First model is calculating consequences. Second is when people make decisions based on identity.

·      Mother Teresa summarized emotions that “one individual trumps the masses.”  

Stories

·      Stories are told, because those contain wisdom. Stories are good on the mental simulation, it helps us manage emotions and most importantly it provides context. 

·      Stories illustrate casual relationships and those show ways how to solve different unexpected circumstances.  

·      Stories contains knowledge about how to act, motivation to act and putting knowledge into a framework that is true in our day-to-day life.

After SUCCES you need repetition, repetition and repetition. Tell them what you are going to tell. Tell them again. Then tell them again what you already told them.

How should we change according to the book?

For example we should start by making our strategy stick.

Why? Strategy is a guide to behavior. And a good strategy drives action. It differentiates the company and produce financial success. Those are the words of Chip and Dan Heat.

How should we make our strategy stick?

·      Firstly be concrete like the Boening executives.

·      Secondly say something unexpected like suggest that the customer service of a department store should do everything to help customer. Even by wrapping gifts from another department store.

·      Last but not least. Tell stories.  

What should I personally do? 

Start using SUCCES.

Summary

The book in six words – Stickyness adds value to ideas & beyond.