What makes Made to Stick so memorable is that it offers heaps of soundbites and stories and avoids the dry ‘leadership-manual’ style that Denning employs.īecause, as the net amount of communication increases and attentions spans shrink, the need to drill ideas home in a memorable way is greater than ever. Once you’ve read this you don’t need to readĪny of Stephen Denning’s many books on organisational communication. Together, they’ve written three bestselling business books: Switch, Made to Stick and Decisive. Chip is Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Stanford while Dan spent ten years researching entrepreneurship for Harvard Business School. Worms cost six dollars a pound versus beef at one dollar fifty!” Kroc’s counter argument (using two sticky qualities - unexpectedness and credibility) makes a powerful point: it’s better to fight sticky on its own terms rather than with rationality.īoth Heath brothers have impressive academic credentials in the field of stickiness. McDonald’s CEO Ray Kroc halted over a decade of rumours about earthworm-filled beef patties with a press release stating: “We can’t afford to grind worms into meat. Although the authors’ final advice - ‘fight sticky with sticky’ - is worth noting.

The epilogue, which elaborates on the anecdotal evidence in the rest of the book. By referring to their theme park employees as ‘cast members’, Disney implies a vast set of staff behaviours and values without ever having to explicitly outline them. Simplicity works through ‘generative metaphor’ - a simple statement that yields a whole raft of guiding principles. Sticky ideas work around the Curse of Knowledge, the authors argue, by creating then filling a knowledge gap in the listener’s mind.Ĭhapter One, which is about the first of the six traits: simplicity. The enemy of sticky is “The Curse of Knowledge” - the difficulty of imagining what exactly your listeners knows about what you have to say. That sticky ideas have at least one of six traits: simplicity, unexpectedness, credibility, concreteness, emotion, or storytelling. Finding a way to make your ideas stick - perhaps by dropping stats in favour of stories, or opting for simplicity over breadth - is the key to giving your messages a fighting chance in a world saturated with communication. Made to Stick analyses why we remember bogus stories and myths like “we only use 10 per cent of our brain capacity” yet struggle to recall important messages and facts. Because being right isn’t as powerful as being remembered.

Heath brothers made to stick