Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
Published: 2007 / 291 pp.

Synopsis: (from back cover) “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 instill in your children.  But it’s hard — fiendishly so — to transform the way people think and act.”

 Review: I have no idea where I heard about this book, but I loved it.  What distinguished this sociology book from others I have read lately (The Tipping Point, Blink, Freakonomics) is how action-oriented it is. I wish it had been written in 1992 when I first started teaching — boy, would it have helped me reach reluctant adolescents!

The authors (who are brothers) purport that for any idea to be useful and lasting (“stick”), it must make the audience:

1. Pay attention
2. Understand and remember it
3. Agree/Believe
4. Care
5. Be able to act on it

How do we do this?  By using six primary elements crucial in delivering ideas that stick:

• Simple – They emphasize identifying the intent and therefore core of any idea, and then making it as compact as possible. Interesting examples included military campaigns and lesson plans (which both work fine until confronted by the target audience!), and the Golden Rule.

• Unexpected — Here the authors explore the power of a good mystery and how humans are compelled to fill gaps in our knowledge (the source of curiosity): “Unexpected ideas are more likely to stick because surprise makes us pay attention and think. That extra attention and thinking sears unexpected events into our memories. Surprise gets our attention.” (68)

• Concrete — This section was pretty self-explanatory, but very important. Effective examples included proverbs (specifically “sour grapes”) and how effective organizations imagine a theoretical customer or student and keeps the “Curse of Knowledge” in mind at all times.

• Credible — Since people tend to believe their past experiences, family, faith, or other people they know, effective advertisers utilize anti-authority and testable credentials. In other words, if you can’t be an example to someone, then serve as a warning.

• Emotion – The “stickiest” ideas address our emotions — not surprising. But what was interesting is how often we act in the best interest of our group, and not just for ourselves.  “…people make decisions based on identity.  They ask themselves three questions:  Who am I?  What kind of situation is this?  And what do people like me do in this kind of situation?” (190)  Also, empathy emerges from the particular rather than the pattern — once people take off their analytical hats regarding a situation (like world hunger), they are better able to concentrate on the individuals actually affected (and help a child). 

• Storytelling –Ah, who doesn’t love a good story!  But the interesting dynamic in storytelling is how our brains “can’t imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity” (212).  In fact, one study found that “mental practice alone produced about two thirds of the benefits of actual physical practice.” (213)  The Heaths compare our memory to velcro — the more hooks, the better — and a good story provides the most sensory hooks. 
• The authors identify three primary story plots: the Challenge plot (David vs. Goliath), the Connection plot (The Good Samaritan), and the Creativity plot (McGyver).
• The point of this section is that “the way you deliver a message to [people] is a cue to how they should react.  If you make an argument, you’re implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument — judge it, debate it, criticize it — and then argue back, at least in their own minds.  But with a story…you engage the audience — you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.” (234)  Teachers and parents of the world, listen up!!

Beyond the interesting, common-sensical content, the organization is very effective and user-friendly with summaries of each concept at the beginning and at the end of the book.  The epilogue includes common scenarios of when it is hard to get people to pay attention to a message, and then provides clear solutions.  Throughout the book, the examples were wonderful — the authors truly follow their own precepts and it works! 

And this is not a book to help disreputable advertisers convince us to buy things we really don’t need.  They assume that whatever your idea is, you must believe it is worth “sticking” to someone else.  I wish this had been required reading in my entry-level education classes and I strongly recommend it to parents, too (if you have time to read it! ).  I checked this book out from the library, but am actually planning on buying a copy for future reference in many areas of my life.

Now, instead of offering a free copy of the book… this week I want to try something different.

The past few months I’ve been working on a series of book club kits  (basically reading guides).  After teaching complex literature to very reluctant readers for fifteen years — and being consistently disappointed in the discussion questions normally available to book clubs — I decided to spend a year creating guides for book clubs who wanted to take their book clubs to the next level. 

My original intention was to only tackle the classics, Pulitzer winners, and other complex literature since I figured this was the sort of reading that might benefit from a little extra background and context.  Well, the initial orders that came in were for the “hot” book club books (like A Thousand Splendid Suns) — which was fine, honestly, since I enjoy reading just about anything…

So my free giveaway this week is one of my book club kits — your choice!  If you’re interested, simply pick one of the 31 titles from this page, and then leave me a comment telling me which kit you want.  I will email it out to you before I leave for the weekend.  Feel free to pick a title your book club might be interested in — or a title you are simply curious about!

Everyone who leaves a comment gets a free kit until I close the giveaway on Friday afternoon (since we’re heading out of town for the holiday weekend). 

I would LOVE feedback on the kits, too!!

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