## Made to Stick ### Made to Stick  #### Metadata * Author: [[Heath, Dan]] * Full Title: Made to Stick * Category: #books #### Highlights * 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. (Location 82) * Why? Is it simply because hijacked kidneys sell better than other topics? Or is it possible to make a true, worthwhile idea circulate as effectively as this false idea? (Location 83) * CSPI called a press conference on September 27, 1992. Here's the message it presented: "A medium-sized 'butter' popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings—combined!" (Location 107) * The Kidney Heist, too, shares many of these traits. A highly unexpected outcome: a guy who stops for a drink and ends up one kidney short of a pair. A lot of concrete details: the ice-filled bathtub, the weird tube protruding from (Location 236) * In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: "Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago." (Location 276) * The surprising lesson of this story: Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It's like Tolstoy's quote: "All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way. (Location 359) * group but no more creative. The final group was trained for two hours on how to use the six creative templates. Once again, the fifteen best ads were selected by the creative director and tested with consumers. Suddenly these novices sprouted creativity. Their ads were rated as 50 percent more creative and produced a 55 percent more positive attitude toward the products advertised. This is a stunning improvement for a two-hour investment in learning a few basic templates! It appears that there are indeed systematic ways to produce creative ideas. (Location 374) * Colonel Kolditz says, "Over time we've come to understand more and more about what makes people successful in complex operations." He believes that plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, Kolditz says, "They just don't work on the battlefield." So, in the 1980s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander's Intent (CI). (Location 406) * Note: as step by step plans fail due to enemys countermeasures. * Yet somehow Southwest has pulled it off. Let's think about the ideas driving Southwest Airlines as concentric circles. The central circle, the core, is "THE low-fare airline." But the very next circle might be "Have fun at work." Southwest's employees know that it's okay to have fun so long as it doesn't jeopardize the company's status as THE low-fare airline. (Location 462) * A warning: In the future, months after you've put down this book, you're going to recall the word "Simple" as an element of the SUCCESs checklist. And your mental thesaurus will faithfully go digging for the meaning of "Simple," and it's going to come back with associations like dumbing down, shooting for the lowest common denominator, making things easy, and so on. At that moment, you've got to remind your thesaurus of the examples we've explored. "THE low-fare airline" and the other stories in this chapter aren't simple because they're full of easy words. They're simple because they reflect the Commander's Intent. It's about elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down. (Location 469) * The process of writing a lead—and avoiding the temptation to bury it—is a helpful metaphor for the process of finding the core. Finding the core and writing the lead both involve forced prioritization. Suppose you're a wartime reporter and you can telegraph only one thing before the line gets cut, what would it be? There's only one lead, and there's only one core. You must choose. (Location 503) * Note: Finding the lead before the telegraph gets cut. * "It's the economy, stupid" was the lead of the Clinton story—and it was a good one, because in 1992 the U.S. economy was mired in a recession. But if "It's the economy, stupid" is the lead, then the need for a balanced budget can't also be the lead. Carville had to stop Clinton from burying the lead. (Location 528) * Adams's Commander's Intent is clear: "Names, names, and names." Adams can't be everywhere. But (Location 694) * The "bird in hand" proverb, then, is an astoundingly sticky idea. It has survived for more than 2,500 years. It has spread across continents, cultures, and languages. Keep in mind that nobody funded a "bird in hand" advertising campaign. It spreads on its own. Many other proverbs share this longevity. In fact, a repertoire of proverbs has been found in almost every documented culture. Why? What is their purpose? (Location 724) * The secret, of course, is that we're not "lifting" JFK. All the remembering work related to JFK has already been done. We've already built those muscles—the concept of JFK, and all its associations, is already embedded in our memories. What we're remembering is simply a pointer to this information—we're posting a little flag on the terrain of our memory. With the raw letters, we're posting three separate flags. In the end, it's one bit of information (or one flag) versus three, and it's no surprise that one is easier to remember. (Location 787) * EXPLANATION 2: A pomelo is basically a supersized grapefruit with a very thick and soft rind. Explanation 2 sticks a flag on a concept that you already know: a grapefruit. When we tell you that a pomelo is like a grapefruit, you call up a mental image of a grapefruit. Then we tell you what to change about it: It's "supersized." Your visualized grapefruit grows accordingly. (Location 807) * Then your boss tells you that the vision for the movie is "Jaws on a spaceship." That changes everything. Jaws was not cool or immaculate. Richard Dreyfus navigated around on a rickety old boat. Decisions were rushed, slapdash, claustrophobic, anxiety-ridden. The environment was sweaty. As you think about what made Jaws tick, your ideas start to take shape: The ship will be underdeveloped, dingy, and oppressive. The crew members will not wear bright Lycra uniforms. The rooms will not be well lit and lintless. (Location 891) * If high-concept pitches can have this power in the movie world—an environment filled with forty times the normal density of egos—we should feel confident that we can harness the same power in our own environments. (Location 900) * There is no Enclave minivan. This ad was created by the Ad Council. (The Enclave spot was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation.) The Ad Council, founded in 1942, has launched many successful campaigns, from the World War II—era "Loose Lips Sink Ships" to the more recent "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk." The Enclave ad, like many other Council ads, capitalizes on the second characteristic of sticky ideas: Unexpectedness. (Location 991) * But because the surprise was utterly nongermane to the message that needed to be communicated, it was worthless. If the product being advertised had been "mauling-proof band uniforms," on the other hand, the ad could have been an award winner. In this sense, the wolves ad is the opposite of the Enclave ad. Both ads contain powerful surprises, but only the Enclave ad uses that surprise to reinforce its core message. In Chapter 1 we discussed the importance of finding the core in your ideas. Using surprise in the service of a core message can be extremely powerful. (Location 1035) * HENSION and BARDLE provide an example of surprise without insight. So far, we've talked a lot about the power of surprise, and how surprise can make our ideas stickier. But although HENSION and BARDLE are surprising, they aren't sticky; they're just frustrating. What we see now is that surprise isn't enough. We also need insight. To be surprising, an event can't be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be "post-dictable." The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it's not something you would have seen coming. PHRAUG is post-dictable, but HENSION isn't. Contrast the feeling you get from TV shows or films, such as The Sixth Sense, that have great surprise endings—endings that unite clues that you've been exposed to all along—with the feeling you get from gimmicky, unforeseeable endings ("It was all a dream"). (Location 1048) * Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. (Location 1208) * "You've heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?" he says. "Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience." (Location 1209) * Cialdini believes that a major benefit of teaching using mysteries is that "the process of resolving mysteries is remarkably similar to the process of science." So, by using mysteries, teachers don't just heighten students' interest in the day's material; they train them to think like scientists. (Location 1218) * A schema violation is a onetime transaction. Boom, something has changed. If we were told that the rings of Saturn were made of dryer lint, a schema would be violated. We could call it "first-level" unexpectedness. But the actual "rings of Saturn mystery" is more extended and subtle. We are told that scientists do not know what Saturn's rings are made of, and we're asked to follow on a journey whose ending is unpredictable. That's second-level unexpectedness. In this way, we jump from fleeting surprise to enduring interest. (Location 1226) * con man, fare as a trader? In McKee's view, a great script is designed so that every scene is a Turning Point. "Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. The audience wonders, What will happen next? and How will it turn out? The answer to this will not arrive until the Climax of the last act, and so the audience, held by curiosity, stays put." McKee notes that the How will it turn out? question is powerful enough to keep us watching even when we know better. "Think of all the bad films you've sat through just to get the answer to that nagging question." What will happen next? How will it turn out? We want to answer these questions, and that desire keeps us interested. It keeps us watching bad movies—but it might also keep us reading long scientific articles. McKee and Cialdini have come up with similar solutions to very different problems. (Location 1244) * CLINIC An Internal Presentation on Fund-raising THE SITUATION: Imagine that you're the fund-raising manager for a local theater company. Your job is to help raise donations to support the theater. It's now the end of the year, and you're preparing a summary presentation for the theater's board of directors. • • • MESSAGE 1: (Both messages in this Clinic are made up.) This year we targeted support from theatergoers under thirty-five. Our goal is to increase donations from younger patrons, who have traditionally composed a much greater percentage of our audience than of our donor base. To reach them, we implemented a phone-based fund-raising program. Six months into the program, the response rate has been almost 20 percent, which we consider a success. COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1: This message is a classic summary approach. I know the facts. I've put the facts in a logical order and I will spoon-feed them to you. As a presentation format, it's safe and normal and thoroughly nonsticky. In improving this message, we need to think about how to elicit interest rather than force-feeding facts. We'll try to add a dash of the news-teaser approach. MESSAGE 2: This year we set out to answer a question: Why do people under thirty-five, who make up 40 percent of our audience, provide only 10 percent of our donations? Our theory was that they didn't realize how much we rely on charitable donations to do our work, so we decided to try calling them with a short overview of our business and our upcoming shows. Going into the six-month test, we thought a 10 percent response rate would be a success. Before I tell you what happened, let me remind you of how we set up the program. COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 2: This approach is inspired by the gap theory. The goal is not to summarize; it's to make you care about knowing something, and then to tell you what you want to know. Like the Saturn rings mystery, it starts with a puzzle: Why don't young people donate more? Then we present a theory and a way of testing it. The mystery engages the members of our audience, causing them to wonder what happened and whether our theory was right. The improvement here is driven by structure, not content. Let's face it, this is not a particularly interesting mystery. It would never make an episode of Law & Order. But our minds are extremely generous when it comes to mysteries—the format is inherently appealing. (Location 1279) * If curiosity arises from knowledge gaps, we might assume that when we know more, we'll become less curious because there are fewer gaps in our knowledge. But Loewenstein argues that the opposite is true. He says that as we gain information we are more and more likely to focus on what we don't know. Someone who knows the state capitals of 17 of 50 states may be proud of her knowledge. But someone who knows 47 may be more likely to think of herself as not knowing 3 capitals. (Location 1338) * The vision of a pocketable radio sustained a company through a tricky period of growth and led it to become an internationally recognized player in technology. The vision of a man on the moon sustained tens of thousands of separate individuals, in dozens of organizations, for almost a decade. These are big, powerful, sticky ideas. (Location 1450) * What the world needs is a lot more fables. On the Web, a satirical site features a "Business Buzzword Generator." Readers can produce their own business buzzwords by combining one word each from three columns, which yields phrases like "reciprocal cost-based reengineering," "customer-oriented visionary paradigm," and "strategic logistical values." (All of these sound eerily plausible as buzzwords, by the way.) Teachers have their own buzzwords: metacognitive skills, intrinsic motivation, portfolio assessment, developmentally appropriate, thematic learning. And if you've ever talked to a doctor, we don't even have to provide examples. Our favorite from medicine: "idiopathic cardiomyopathy." "Cardiomyopathy" means something is wrong with your heart, and "idiopathic" means "we have no idea why yours isn't working." (Location 1473) * Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract. Teachers teach students about battles and animals and books. Doctors repair problems with our stomachs, backs, and hearts. Companies create software, build planes, distribute newspapers; they build cars that are cheaper, faster, or fancier than last year's. (Location 1479) * subdividing it into more tangible "subgoals." For example: "We will protect a 2 percent chunk of California every year for twenty years." Others try to invoke a unit of measurement that we can understand, such as the acre. Most people can visualize an acre. But the scale is too big: 2 percent of California is about two million acres. No one can picture two million acres. The students are wisely trying to find a way to break up a big, abstract goal into smaller, more concrete subgoals. This is the right idea. But in this case the numbers are just too big. And "acreage" is not necessarily the best way to think. There are 1,500-acre plots of land that are more environmentally precious than other 90,000-acre plots. Thinking about "acreage per year" is akin to a museum curator thinking about "canvases per (Location 1513) * Here's what TNC did: Instead of talking in terms of land area, it talked about a "landscape." A landscape is a contiguous plot of land with unique, environmentally precious features. The TNC set a goal of preserving fifty landscapes—of which twenty-five were an immediate priority—over a ten-year period. Five landscapes per year sounds more realistic than 2 million acres per year, and it's much more concrete. (Location 1519) * People who live in cities tend to name and define their neighborhoods: "the Castro," "SoHo," "Lincoln Park," and so forth. These names come to define an area and its traits. Neighborhoods have personalities. The Nature Conservancy created the same effect with its landscapes. The Mount Hamilton Wilderness is not a set of acres; it's an eco-celebrity. This is not a story about land; it's a story about abstraction. TNC avoided the trap of abstraction—saving 2 million acres per year—by converting abstract blobs on a map into tangible landscapes. (Location 1536) * In the "Unexpected" chapter, we talked about Nordstrom's world-class customer service. "World-class customer service" is abstract. A Nordie ironing a customer's shirt is concrete. Concrete language helps people, (Location 1545) * Why does this happen? Because concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain. For another example of this phenomenon, consider these two statements: (1) Think of five silly things that people have done in the world in the past ten years. (2) Think about five silly things your child has done in the past ten years. Sure, this is a neat brain trick. But what value does it have? Consider a situation where an entrepreneur used this neat brain trick to earn a $4.5 million investment from a savvy and sophisticated group of investors. (Location 1775) * What transformed this meeting from a grill session—with an anxious entrepreneur in the hot seat—to a brainstorming session? The maroon portfolio. The portfolio presented a challenge to the boardroom participants—a way of focusing their thoughts and bringing their existing knowledge to bear. It changed their attitude from reactive and critical to active and creative. The presence of the portfolio made it easier for the venture capitalists to brainstorm, in the same way that focusing on "white things in our refrigerator" made it easier for us to brainstorm. When they saw the size of the portfolio, it sparked certain questions: How much memory could you fit in that thing? Which PC components will shrink in the next few years, and which won't? What new technology would have to be invented to make it feasible? This same process was sparked in Sony's Japanese engineering team by the concept of a "pocketable radio." (Location 1817) * A commercial claiming that a new shampoo makes your hair bouncier has less credibility than hearing your best friend rave about how a new shampoo made her own hair bouncier. Well, duh. The company wants to sell you shampoo. Your friend doesn't, so she gets more trust points. The takeaway is that it can be the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes antiauthorities are even better than authorities. (Location 2030) * Beyond War would arrange "house parties," in which a host family invited a group of friends and neighbors over, along with a Beyond War representative to speak to them. Ainscow recounts a simple demonstration that the group used in its presentations. He always carried a metal bucket to the gatherings. At the appropriate point in the presentation, he'd take a BB out of his pocket and drop it into the empty bucket. The BB made a loud clatter as it ricocheted and settled. Ainscow would say, "This is the Hiroshima bomb." He then spent a few minutes describing the devastation of the Hiroshima bomb—the miles of flattened buildings, the tens of thousands killed immediately, the larger number of people with burns or other long-term health problems. Next, he'd drop ten BBs into the bucket. The clatter was louder and more chaotic. "This is the firepower of the missiles on one U.S. or Soviet nuclear submarine," he'd say. Finally, he asked the attendees to close their eyes. He'd say, "This is the world's current arsenal of nuclear weapons." Then he poured 5,000 BBs into the bucket (one for every nuclear warhead in the world). The noise was startling, even terrifying. "The roar of the BBs went on and on," said Ainscow. "Afterward there was always dead silence." This approach is an ingenious way to convey a statistic. Let's unpack it a bit. First, Beyond War had a core belief: "The public needs to wake up and do something about the arms race." Second, the group's members determined what was unexpected about the message: Everyone knew that the world's nuclear arsenal had grown since World War II, but no one realized the scale of the growth. Third, they had a statistic to make their belief credible—i.e., that the world had 5,000 nuclear warheads when a single one was enough to decimate a city. But the problem was that the number 5,000 means very little to people. The trick was to make this large number meaningful. (Location 2110) * The final twist was the demonstration—the bucket and the BBs, which added a sensory dimension to an otherwise abstract concept. (Location 2124) * Pretty sobering stuff. It's also pretty abstract. You probably walk away from these stats thinking something like "There's a lot of dissatisfaction and confusion in most companies." Then Covey superimposes a very human metaphor over the statistics. He says, "If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent." The soccer analogy generates a human context for the statistics. It creates a sense of drama and a sense of movement. We can't help but imagine the actions of the two players trying to score a goal, being opposed at every stage by the rest of their team. (Location 2156) * The cost of maintaining a wireless network was estimated at $500 per year per employee. That price sounds hefty—on the order of adding dental or vision insurance for all employees. But it’s not a benefit, it’s an investment. So how do you compute the value of an investment? You’ve got to decide whether you can get $501 worth of additional value from each employee each year after adding the network. One Cisco employee figured out a better way to think about the investment: "If you believe you can increase an employee's productivity by one to two minutes a day, you've paid back the cost of wireless." On this scale, the investment is much easier to assess. Our intuition works at this scale. We can easily simulate scenarios where employees can save a few minutes from wireless access—for instance, sending someone a request for a forgotten document during a critical meeting. Statistics aren't inherently helpful; it's the scale and context that make them so. Not many people have an intuition about whether wireless networking can generate $500 worth of marginal value per employee per year. The right scale changes everything. We saw that Concreteness allows people to bring their knowledge to bear—remember HP's simulation of a family at Disney World? Similarly, the human-scale principle allows us to bring our intuition to bear in assessing whether the content of a message is credible. (Location 2167) * All the books had to arrive in stores by 8 A.M. on the morning of the release. Not too early, or the bookstore owners might try to sell them early and the secret would be blown; and not too late, or the bookstore owners would be irate at lost sales. Also, the Potter books needed the same piracy protections as the studio's films—there could be no leaks. And Jain had a second story. He knew from an earlier conversation that the Bollywood studio executive had a brother who had recently taken his high school board exams. After telling the Harry Potter story, Jain mentioned, "By the way, we also safely delivered the examination papers for your brother's boards and carried the return answer sheets." Safexpress handles the distribution of all the central examinations for high school and university admissions. Two months later, the deal was signed. Both of Jain's stories passed the Sinatra Test. Jain could have used statistics instead of stories—"98.84 percent of our deliveries arrive on time." Or he could have drawn on an external source of credibility, such as a testimonial from the CEO of a multinational company: "We've used Safexpress for all our deliveries in India and we've found them to be an excellent service provider." Both of these are good credibility-boosters. (Location 2270) * Get ready to make a few predictions. Which of the following events kill more people: Homicide or suicide? Floods or tuberculosis? Tornadoes or asthma? Take a second to think about your answers. You might have thought that homicide, floods, and tornadoes are more common. People generally do. But in the United States there are 50 percent more deaths from suicide than from homicide, nine times more deaths from tuberculosis than from floods, and eighty times more deaths from asthma than from tornadoes. So why do people predict badly? Because of the availability bias. The availability bias is a natural tendency that causes us, when estimating the probability of a particular event, to judge the event's probability by its availability in our memory. We intuitively think that events are more likely when they are easier to remember. But often the things we remember are not an accurate summary of the world. We may remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent. We may remember things better because the media spend more time covering them (perhaps because they provide more vivid images), not because they are more common. The availability bias may lead our intuition astray, prompting us to treat unusual things as common and unlikely things as probable. (Location 2385) * Everyone enjoys hearing about real examples of good sportsmanship. Thompson uses the example of Lance Armstrong, who reacted unexpectedly when one of his chief opponents, Jan Ullrich, crashed during the Tour de France. Instead of taking advantage of this lucky break to increase his lead, Armstrong slowed down and waited for Ullrich to remount. He later said that he rode better when he was competing with a great athlete like Ullrich. That's sportsmanship. (Location 2615) * Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. "The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world's best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world's best lawn!)." An old advertising maxim says you've got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don't buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children's pictures. (Location 2675) * Note: Highlight the benefits and not the features * One group of homeowners was presented with some information about why cable might be worthwhile: CATV will provide a broader entertainment and informational service to its subscribers. Used properly, a person can plan in advance to enjoy events offered. Instead of spending money on the babysitter and gas, and putting up with the hassles of going out, more time can be spent at home with family, alone, or with friends. The second group of homeowners was asked to imagine themselves in a detailed scenario: Take a moment and imagine how CATV will provide you with a broader entertainment and informational service. When you use it properly, you will be able to plan in advance which of the events offered you wish to enjoy. Take a moment and think of how, instead of spending money on the babysitter and gas, and then having to put up with the hassles of going out, you will be able to spend your time at home, with your family, alone, or with your friends. (Location 2699) * Even John Caples, the mail-order copywriter, admits that there are powerful motivations outside narrow self-interest. He tells a story about a marketer who was promoting a new educational film on fire safety that was intended to help firemen. This marketer had been taught that there are three basic consumer appeals: sex, greed, and fear. (Location 2807) * Medically, the story related above teaches important lessons. It instructs people in how to spot and treat the specific condition pneumopericardium. More broadly, it warns medical personnel about relying too much on machines. The heart monitor was functioning perfectly well, but it couldn't substitute for the insight of a human being with a simple stethoscope. These medical lessons are not particularly useful to people who don't work in health care. But the story is inspiring to everyone. It's a story about a woman who stuck to her guns, despite implicit pressure to conform to the group's opinion. It's an underdog story—in the hierarchical hospital environment, it was the nurse who told the chief neonatologist the right diagnosis. A life hinged on her willingness to step out of her "proper place." (Location 3088) * Instead, he tells a story that's much more interesting to his lunch partners. It has built-in drama—a misleading code leads two men on a wild goose chase until they uncover, through lots of work and thought, that the problem is simpler than they initially thought. Why is this story format more interesting? Because it allows his lunch partners to play along. He's giving them enough information so that they can mentally test out how they would have handled the situation. The people in the room who weren't aware of the misleading E053 code have now had their "E053 schema" fixed. Before, there was only one way to respond to an E053 code. Now, repairmen know to be aware of the "misleading E053" scenario. (Location 3117) * But the stories above aren't simply transferring nuggets of information. The Xerox story is not functionally equivalent to an e-mail sent around the company that contains the line "Watch out for false E053 codes related to burned-out dicorotrons." Something more profound is happening here. It will take a bit of unpacking to reveal the additional value that these stories bring. (Location 3124) * By contrast, let's size up "7 Under 6" on the checklist. It's simple, but notice that it has a much less compelling core message. Its core message is "We've got a variety of low-fat sandwiches," versus Jared's "Eat Subway, lose weight, change your life." The first message sells drill bits; the second tells you how to hang your kid's picture. (Location 3352) * These are not trivial actions. This behavior is not routine. How many great ideas have been extinguished because someone in the middle—a link between the source of the idea and its eventual outlet—dropped the ball? In the normal world, a franchise owner would have been amused by the Jared tale. He would have tacked it up on the bulletin board, on the wall of the hallway leading to the bathroom, as a source of amusement for his employees. And that would have been the pinnacle of the Jared tale. (Location 3367) * Aristotle believed there were four primary dramatic plots: Simple Tragic, Simple Fortunate, Complex Tragic, and Complex Fortunate. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, lists twenty-five types of stories in his book: the modern epic, the disillusionment plot, and so on. When we finished sorting through a big pile of inspirational stories—a much narrower domain—we came to the conclusion that there are three basic plots: the Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot. (Location 3396) * The barrier to idea-spotting is that we tend to process anecdotes differently than abstractions. If a Nordstrom manager is hit with an abstraction, such as "Increase customer satisfaction scores by 10 percent this quarter," that abstraction kicks in the managerial mentality: How do we get there from here? But a story about a tire-chain-exchanging, cold-car-warming sales rep provokes a different way of thinking. It will likely be filed away with other kinds of day-to-day personal news—interesting but ultimately trivial, like the fact that John Robison shaved his head or James Schlueter showed up late seven days in a row. (Location 3612) * The Curse of Knowledge is a worthy adversary, because in some sense it's inevitable. Getting a message across has two stages: the Answer stage and the Telling Others stage. In the Answer stage, you use your expertise to arrive at the idea that you want to share. Doctors study for a decade to be capable of giving the Answer. Business managers may deliberate for months to arrive at the Answer. Here's the rub: The same factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer stage will backfire on you during the Telling Others stage. To get the Answer, you need expertise, but you can't dissociate expertise from the Curse of Knowledge. You know things that others don't know, and you can't remember what it was like not to know those things. So when you get around to sharing the Answer, you'll tend to communicate as if your audience were you. (Location 3674) * SYMPTOM: "They're not buying it." SOLUTION: Find the telling details for your message—the equivalent of the dancing seventy-three-year-old man, or the textile factory so environmentally friendly that it actually cleans the water pouring through it. Use fewer authorities and more antiauthorities. (Location 3740) * CHIFF is an acronym that stands for "Clever, High-quality, Innovative, Friendly, Fun." The CHIFF concept defines Cranium's strategic differentiation in the extremely competitive board-game market. CHIFF informs decisions across the organization—from branding to package design and the content of individual questions. (Example: A suggested question for the game asked how many justices were on the Supreme Court. It was rejected for being insufficiently clever and fun to be CHIFF. So it was rewritten: "In which of these sports could the members of the U.S. Supreme Court field a regulation team, with no justices left on the 'bench'?") (Location 3812) # Made to Stick  ## Metadata - Author: [[Heath, Dan]] - Full Title: Made to Stick - Category: #books ## Highlights - 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. (Location 82) - Why? Is it simply because hijacked kidneys sell better than other topics? Or is it possible to make a true, worthwhile idea circulate as effectively as this false idea? (Location 83) - CSPI called a press conference on September 27, 1992. Here’s the message it presented: “A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings—combined!” (Location 107) - The Kidney Heist, too, shares many of these traits. A highly unexpected outcome: a guy who stops for a drink and ends up one kidney short of a pair. A lot of concrete details: the ice-filled bathtub, the weird tube protruding from (Location 236) - In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.” (Location 276) - The surprising lesson of this story: Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It’s like Tolstoy’s quote: “All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way. (Location 359) - group but no more creative. The final group was trained for two hours on how to use the six creative templates. Once again, the fifteen best ads were selected by the creative director and tested with consumers. Suddenly these novices sprouted creativity. Their ads were rated as 50 percent more creative and produced a 55 percent more positive attitude toward the products advertised. This is a stunning improvement for a two-hour investment in learning a few basic templates! It appears that there are indeed systematic ways to produce creative ideas. (Location 374) - Colonel Kolditz says, “Over time we’ve come to understand more and more about what makes people successful in complex operations.” He believes that plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, Kolditz says, “They just don’t work on the battlefield.” So, in the 1980s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander’s Intent (CI). (Location 406) - Note: as step by step plans fail due to enemys countermeasures. - Yet somehow Southwest has pulled it off. Let’s think about the ideas driving Southwest Airlines as concentric circles. The central circle, the core, is “THE low-fare airline.” But the very next circle might be “Have fun at work.” Southwest’s employees know that it’s okay to have fun so long as it doesn’t jeopardize the company’s status as THE low-fare airline. (Location 462) - A warning: In the future, months after you’ve put down this book, you’re going to recall the word “Simple” as an element of the SUCCESs checklist. And your mental thesaurus will faithfully go digging for the meaning of “Simple,” and it’s going to come back with associations like dumbing down, shooting for the lowest common denominator, making things easy, and so on. At that moment, you’ve got to remind your thesaurus of the examples we’ve explored. “THE low-fare airline” and the other stories in this chapter aren’t simple because they’re full of easy words. They’re simple because they reflect the Commander’s Intent. It’s about elegance and prioritization, not dumbing down. (Location 469) - The process of writing a lead—and avoiding the temptation to bury it—is a helpful metaphor for the process of finding the core. Finding the core and writing the lead both involve forced prioritization. Suppose you’re a wartime reporter and you can telegraph only one thing before the line gets cut, what would it be? There’s only one lead, and there’s only one core. You must choose. (Location 503) - Note: Finding the lead before the telegraph gets cut. - “It’s the economy, stupid” was the lead of the Clinton story—and it was a good one, because in 1992 the U.S. economy was mired in a recession. But if “It’s the economy, stupid” is the lead, then the need for a balanced budget can’t also be the lead. Carville had to stop Clinton from burying the lead. (Location 528) - Adams’s Commander’s Intent is clear: “Names, names, and names.” Adams can’t be everywhere. But (Location 694) - The “bird in hand” proverb, then, is an astoundingly sticky idea. It has survived for more than 2,500 years. It has spread across continents, cultures, and languages. Keep in mind that nobody funded a “bird in hand” advertising campaign. It spreads on its own. Many other proverbs share this longevity. In fact, a repertoire of proverbs has been found in almost every documented culture. Why? What is their purpose? (Location 724) - The secret, of course, is that we’re not “lifting” JFK. All the remembering work related to JFK has already been done. We’ve already built those muscles—the concept of JFK, and all its associations, is already embedded in our memories. What we’re remembering is simply a pointer to this information—we’re posting a little flag on the terrain of our memory. With the raw letters, we’re posting three separate flags. In the end, it’s one bit of information (or one flag) versus three, and it’s no surprise that one is easier to remember. (Location 787) - EXPLANATION 2: A pomelo is basically a supersized grapefruit with a very thick and soft rind. Explanation 2 sticks a flag on a concept that you already know: a grapefruit. When we tell you that a pomelo is like a grapefruit, you call up a mental image of a grapefruit. Then we tell you what to change about it: It’s “supersized.” Your visualized grapefruit grows accordingly. (Location 807) - Then your boss tells you that the vision for the movie is “Jaws on a spaceship.” That changes everything. Jaws was not cool or immaculate. Richard Dreyfus navigated around on a rickety old boat. Decisions were rushed, slapdash, claustrophobic, anxiety-ridden. The environment was sweaty. As you think about what made Jaws tick, your ideas start to take shape: The ship will be underdeveloped, dingy, and oppressive. The crew members will not wear bright Lycra uniforms. The rooms will not be well lit and lintless. (Location 891) - If high-concept pitches can have this power in the movie world—an environment filled with forty times the normal density of egos—we should feel confident that we can harness the same power in our own environments. (Location 900) - There is no Enclave minivan. This ad was created by the Ad Council. (The Enclave spot was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation.) The Ad Council, founded in 1942, has launched many successful campaigns, from the World War II—era “Loose Lips Sink Ships” to the more recent “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.” The Enclave ad, like many other Council ads, capitalizes on the second characteristic of sticky ideas: Unexpectedness. (Location 991) - But because the surprise was utterly nongermane to the message that needed to be communicated, it was worthless. If the product being advertised had been “mauling-proof band uniforms,” on the other hand, the ad could have been an award winner. In this sense, the wolves ad is the opposite of the Enclave ad. Both ads contain powerful surprises, but only the Enclave ad uses that surprise to reinforce its core message. In Chapter 1 we discussed the importance of finding the core in your ideas. Using surprise in the service of a core message can be extremely powerful. (Location 1035) - HENSION and BARDLE provide an example of surprise without insight. So far, we’ve talked a lot about the power of surprise, and how surprise can make our ideas stickier. But although HENSION and BARDLE are surprising, they aren’t sticky; they’re just frustrating. What we see now is that surprise isn’t enough. We also need insight. To be surprising, an event can’t be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be “post-dictable.” The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it’s not something you would have seen coming. PHRAUG is post-dictable, but HENSION isn’t. Contrast the feeling you get from TV shows or films, such as The Sixth Sense, that have great surprise endings—endings that unite clues that you’ve been exposed to all along—with the feeling you get from gimmicky, unforeseeable endings (“It was all a dream”). (Location 1048) - Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. (Location 1208) - “You’ve heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?” he says. “Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience.” (Location 1209) - Cialdini believes that a major benefit of teaching using mysteries is that “the process of resolving mysteries is remarkably similar to the process of science.” So, by using mysteries, teachers don’t just heighten students’ interest in the day’s material; they train them to think like scientists. (Location 1218) - A schema violation is a onetime transaction. Boom, something has changed. If we were told that the rings of Saturn were made of dryer lint, a schema would be violated. We could call it “first-level” unexpectedness. But the actual “rings of Saturn mystery” is more extended and subtle. We are told that scientists do not know what Saturn’s rings are made of, and we’re asked to follow on a journey whose ending is unpredictable. That’s second-level unexpectedness. In this way, we jump from fleeting surprise to enduring interest. (Location 1226) - con man, fare as a trader? In McKee’s view, a great script is designed so that every scene is a Turning Point. “Each Turning Point hooks curiosity. The audience wonders, What will happen next? and How will it turn out? The answer to this will not arrive until the Climax of the last act, and so the audience, held by curiosity, stays put.” McKee notes that the How will it turn out? question is powerful enough to keep us watching even when we know better. “Think of all the bad films you’ve sat through just to get the answer to that nagging question.” What will happen next? How will it turn out? We want to answer these questions, and that desire keeps us interested. It keeps us watching bad movies—but it might also keep us reading long scientific articles. McKee and Cialdini have come up with similar solutions to very different problems. (Location 1244) - CLINIC An Internal Presentation on Fund-raising THE SITUATION: Imagine that you’re the fund-raising manager for a local theater company. Your job is to help raise donations to support the theater. It’s now the end of the year, and you’re preparing a summary presentation for the theater’s board of directors. • • • MESSAGE 1: (Both messages in this Clinic are made up.) This year we targeted support from theatergoers under thirty-five. Our goal is to increase donations from younger patrons, who have traditionally composed a much greater percentage of our audience than of our donor base. To reach them, we implemented a phone-based fund-raising program. Six months into the program, the response rate has been almost 20 percent, which we consider a success. COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1: This message is a classic summary approach. I know the facts. I’ve put the facts in a logical order and I will spoon-feed them to you. As a presentation format, it’s safe and normal and thoroughly nonsticky. In improving this message, we need to think about how to elicit interest rather than force-feeding facts. We’ll try to add a dash of the news-teaser approach. MESSAGE 2: This year we set out to answer a question: Why do people under thirty-five, who make up 40 percent of our audience, provide only 10 percent of our donations? Our theory was that they didn’t realize how much we rely on charitable donations to do our work, so we decided to try calling them with a short overview of our business and our upcoming shows. Going into the six-month test, we thought a 10 percent response rate would be a success. Before I tell you what happened, let me remind you of how we set up the program. COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 2: This approach is inspired by the gap theory. The goal is not to summarize; it’s to make you care about knowing something, and then to tell you what you want to know. Like the Saturn rings mystery, it starts with a puzzle: Why don’t young people donate more? Then we present a theory and a way of testing it. The mystery engages the members of our audience, causing them to wonder what happened and whether our theory was right. The improvement here is driven by structure, not content. Let’s face it, this is not a particularly interesting mystery. It would never make an episode of Law & Order. But our minds are extremely generous when it comes to mysteries—the format is inherently appealing. (Location 1279) - If curiosity arises from knowledge gaps, we might assume that when we know more, we’ll become less curious because there are fewer gaps in our knowledge. But Loewenstein argues that the opposite is true. He says that as we gain information we are more and more likely to focus on what we don’t know. Someone who knows the state capitals of 17 of 50 states may be proud of her knowledge. But someone who knows 47 may be more likely to think of herself as not knowing 3 capitals. (Location 1338) - The vision of a pocketable radio sustained a company through a tricky period of growth and led it to become an internationally recognized player in technology. The vision of a man on the moon sustained tens of thousands of separate individuals, in dozens of organizations, for almost a decade. These are big, powerful, sticky ideas. (Location 1450) - What the world needs is a lot more fables. On the Web, a satirical site features a “Business Buzzword Generator.” Readers can produce their own business buzzwords by combining one word each from three columns, which yields phrases like “reciprocal cost-based reengineering,” “customer-oriented visionary paradigm,” and “strategic logistical values.” (All of these sound eerily plausible as buzzwords, by the way.) Teachers have their own buzzwords: metacognitive skills, intrinsic motivation, portfolio assessment, developmentally appropriate, thematic learning. And if you’ve ever talked to a doctor, we don’t even have to provide examples. Our favorite from medicine: “idiopathic cardiomyopathy.” “Cardiomyopathy” means something is wrong with your heart, and “idiopathic” means “we have no idea why yours isn’t working.” (Location 1473) - Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract. Teachers teach students about battles and animals and books. Doctors repair problems with our stomachs, backs, and hearts. Companies create software, build planes, distribute newspapers; they build cars that are cheaper, faster, or fancier than last year’s. (Location 1479) - subdividing it into more tangible “subgoals.” For example: “We will protect a 2 percent chunk of California every year for twenty years.” Others try to invoke a unit of measurement that we can understand, such as the acre. Most people can visualize an acre. But the scale is too big: 2 percent of California is about two million acres. No one can picture two million acres. The students are wisely trying to find a way to break up a big, abstract goal into smaller, more concrete subgoals. This is the right idea. But in this case the numbers are just too big. And “acreage” is not necessarily the best way to think. There are 1,500-acre plots of land that are more environmentally precious than other 90,000-acre plots. Thinking about “acreage per year” is akin to a museum curator thinking about “canvases per (Location 1513) - Here’s what TNC did: Instead of talking in terms of land area, it talked about a “landscape.” A landscape is a contiguous plot of land with unique, environmentally precious features. The TNC set a goal of preserving fifty landscapes—of which twenty-five were an immediate priority—over a ten-year period. Five landscapes per year sounds more realistic than 2 million acres per year, and it’s much more concrete. (Location 1519) - People who live in cities tend to name and define their neighborhoods: “the Castro,” “SoHo,” “Lincoln Park,” and so forth. These names come to define an area and its traits. Neighborhoods have personalities. The Nature Conservancy created the same effect with its landscapes. The Mount Hamilton Wilderness is not a set of acres; it’s an eco-celebrity. This is not a story about land; it’s a story about abstraction. TNC avoided the trap of abstraction—saving 2 million acres per year—by converting abstract blobs on a map into tangible landscapes. (Location 1536) - In the “Unexpected” chapter, we talked about Nordstrom’s world-class customer service. “World-class customer service” is abstract. A Nordie ironing a customer’s shirt is concrete. Concrete language helps people, (Location 1545) - Why does this happen? Because concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain. For another example of this phenomenon, consider these two statements: (1) Think of five silly things that people have done in the world in the past ten years. (2) Think about five silly things your child has done in the past ten years. Sure, this is a neat brain trick. But what value does it have? Consider a situation where an entrepreneur used this neat brain trick to earn a $4.5 million investment from a savvy and sophisticated group of investors. (Location 1775) - What transformed this meeting from a grill session—with an anxious entrepreneur in the hot seat—to a brainstorming session? The maroon portfolio. The portfolio presented a challenge to the boardroom participants—a way of focusing their thoughts and bringing their existing knowledge to bear. It changed their attitude from reactive and critical to active and creative. The presence of the portfolio made it easier for the venture capitalists to brainstorm, in the same way that focusing on “white things in our refrigerator” made it easier for us to brainstorm. When they saw the size of the portfolio, it sparked certain questions: How much memory could you fit in that thing? Which PC components will shrink in the next few years, and which won’t? What new technology would have to be invented to make it feasible? This same process was sparked in Sony’s Japanese engineering team by the concept of a “pocketable radio.” (Location 1817) - A commercial claiming that a new shampoo makes your hair bouncier has less credibility than hearing your best friend rave about how a new shampoo made her own hair bouncier. Well, duh. The company wants to sell you shampoo. Your friend doesn’t, so she gets more trust points. The takeaway is that it can be the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources, not their status, that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes antiauthorities are even better than authorities. (Location 2030) - Beyond War would arrange “house parties,” in which a host family invited a group of friends and neighbors over, along with a Beyond War representative to speak to them. Ainscow recounts a simple demonstration that the group used in its presentations. He always carried a metal bucket to the gatherings. At the appropriate point in the presentation, he’d take a BB out of his pocket and drop it into the empty bucket. The BB made a loud clatter as it ricocheted and settled. Ainscow would say, “This is the Hiroshima bomb.” He then spent a few minutes describing the devastation of the Hiroshima bomb—the miles of flattened buildings, the tens of thousands killed immediately, the larger number of people with burns or other long-term health problems. Next, he’d drop ten BBs into the bucket. The clatter was louder and more chaotic. “This is the firepower of the missiles on one U.S. or Soviet nuclear submarine,” he’d say. Finally, he asked the attendees to close their eyes. He’d say, “This is the world’s current arsenal of nuclear weapons.” Then he poured 5,000 BBs into the bucket (one for every nuclear warhead in the world). The noise was startling, even terrifying. “The roar of the BBs went on and on,” said Ainscow. “Afterward there was always dead silence.” This approach is an ingenious way to convey a statistic. Let’s unpack it a bit. First, Beyond War had a core belief: “The public needs to wake up and do something about the arms race.” Second, the group’s members determined what was unexpected about the message: Everyone knew that the world’s nuclear arsenal had grown since World War II, but no one realized the scale of the growth. Third, they had a statistic to make their belief credible—i.e., that the world had 5,000 nuclear warheads when a single one was enough to decimate a city. But the problem was that the number 5,000 means very little to people. The trick was to make this large number meaningful. (Location 2110) - The final twist was the demonstration—the bucket and the BBs, which added a sensory dimension to an otherwise abstract concept. (Location 2124) - Pretty sobering stuff. It’s also pretty abstract. You probably walk away from these stats thinking something like “There’s a lot of dissatisfaction and confusion in most companies.” Then Covey superimposes a very human metaphor over the statistics. He says, “If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.” The soccer analogy generates a human context for the statistics. It creates a sense of drama and a sense of movement. We can’t help but imagine the actions of the two players trying to score a goal, being opposed at every stage by the rest of their team. (Location 2156) - The cost of maintaining a wireless network was estimated at $500 per year per employee. That price sounds hefty—on the order of adding dental or vision insurance for all employees. But it’s not a benefit, it’s an investment. So how do you compute the value of an investment? You’ve got to decide whether you can get $501 worth of additional value from each employee each year after adding the network. One Cisco employee figured out a better way to think about the investment: “If you believe you can increase an employee’s productivity by one to two minutes a day, you’ve paid back the cost of wireless.” On this scale, the investment is much easier to assess. Our intuition works at this scale. We can easily simulate scenarios where employees can save a few minutes from wireless access—for instance, sending someone a request for a forgotten document during a critical meeting. Statistics aren’t inherently helpful; it’s the scale and context that make them so. Not many people have an intuition about whether wireless networking can generate $500 worth of marginal value per employee per year. The right scale changes everything. We saw that Concreteness allows people to bring their knowledge to bear—remember HP’s simulation of a family at Disney World? Similarly, the human-scale principle allows us to bring our intuition to bear in assessing whether the content of a message is credible. (Location 2167) - All the books had to arrive in stores by 8 A.M. on the morning of the release. Not too early, or the bookstore owners might try to sell them early and the secret would be blown; and not too late, or the bookstore owners would be irate at lost sales. Also, the Potter books needed the same piracy protections as the studio’s films—there could be no leaks. And Jain had a second story. He knew from an earlier conversation that the Bollywood studio executive had a brother who had recently taken his high school board exams. After telling the Harry Potter story, Jain mentioned, “By the way, we also safely delivered the examination papers for your brother’s boards and carried the return answer sheets.” Safexpress handles the distribution of all the central examinations for high school and university admissions. Two months later, the deal was signed. Both of Jain’s stories passed the Sinatra Test. Jain could have used statistics instead of stories—“98.84 percent of our deliveries arrive on time.” Or he could have drawn on an external source of credibility, such as a testimonial from the CEO of a multinational company: “We’ve used Safexpress for all our deliveries in India and we’ve found them to be an excellent service provider.” Both of these are good credibility-boosters. (Location 2270) - Get ready to make a few predictions. Which of the following events kill more people: Homicide or suicide? Floods or tuberculosis? Tornadoes or asthma? Take a second to think about your answers. You might have thought that homicide, floods, and tornadoes are more common. People generally do. But in the United States there are 50 percent more deaths from suicide than from homicide, nine times more deaths from tuberculosis than from floods, and eighty times more deaths from asthma than from tornadoes. So why do people predict badly? Because of the availability bias. The availability bias is a natural tendency that causes us, when estimating the probability of a particular event, to judge the event’s probability by its availability in our memory. We intuitively think that events are more likely when they are easier to remember. But often the things we remember are not an accurate summary of the world. We may remember things better because they evoke more emotion, not because they are more frequent. We may remember things better because the media spend more time covering them (perhaps because they provide more vivid images), not because they are more common. The availability bias may lead our intuition astray, prompting us to treat unusual things as common and unlikely things as probable. (Location 2385) - Everyone enjoys hearing about real examples of good sportsmanship. Thompson uses the example of Lance Armstrong, who reacted unexpectedly when one of his chief opponents, Jan Ullrich, crashed during the Tour de France. Instead of taking advantage of this lucky break to increase his lead, Armstrong slowed down and waited for Ullrich to remount. He later said that he rode better when he was competing with a great athlete like Ullrich. That’s sportsmanship. (Location 2615) - Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. “The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world’s best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world’s best lawn!).” An old advertising maxim says you’ve got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don’t buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children’s pictures. (Location 2675) - Note: Highlight the benefits and not the features - One group of homeowners was presented with some information about why cable might be worthwhile: CATV will provide a broader entertainment and informational service to its subscribers. Used properly, a person can plan in advance to enjoy events offered. Instead of spending money on the babysitter and gas, and putting up with the hassles of going out, more time can be spent at home with family, alone, or with friends. The second group of homeowners was asked to imagine themselves in a detailed scenario: Take a moment and imagine how CATV will provide you with a broader entertainment and informational service. When you use it properly, you will be able to plan in advance which of the events offered you wish to enjoy. Take a moment and think of how, instead of spending money on the babysitter and gas, and then having to put up with the hassles of going out, you will be able to spend your time at home, with your family, alone, or with your friends. (Location 2699) - Even John Caples, the mail-order copywriter, admits that there are powerful motivations outside narrow self-interest. He tells a story about a marketer who was promoting a new educational film on fire safety that was intended to help firemen. This marketer had been taught that there are three basic consumer appeals: sex, greed, and fear. (Location 2807) - Medically, the story related above teaches important lessons. It instructs people in how to spot and treat the specific condition pneumopericardium. More broadly, it warns medical personnel about relying too much on machines. The heart monitor was functioning perfectly well, but it couldn’t substitute for the insight of a human being with a simple stethoscope. These medical lessons are not particularly useful to people who don’t work in health care. But the story is inspiring to everyone. It’s a story about a woman who stuck to her guns, despite implicit pressure to conform to the group’s opinion. It’s an underdog story—in the hierarchical hospital environment, it was the nurse who told the chief neonatologist the right diagnosis. A life hinged on her willingness to step out of her “proper place.” (Location 3088) - Instead, he tells a story that’s much more interesting to his lunch partners. It has built-in drama—a misleading code leads two men on a wild goose chase until they uncover, through lots of work and thought, that the problem is simpler than they initially thought. Why is this story format more interesting? Because it allows his lunch partners to play along. He’s giving them enough information so that they can mentally test out how they would have handled the situation. The people in the room who weren’t aware of the misleading E053 code have now had their “E053 schema” fixed. Before, there was only one way to respond to an E053 code. Now, repairmen know to be aware of the “misleading E053” scenario. (Location 3117) - But the stories above aren’t simply transferring nuggets of information. The Xerox story is not functionally equivalent to an e-mail sent around the company that contains the line “Watch out for false E053 codes related to burned-out dicorotrons.” Something more profound is happening here. It will take a bit of unpacking to reveal the additional value that these stories bring. (Location 3124) - By contrast, let’s size up “7 Under 6” on the checklist. It’s simple, but notice that it has a much less compelling core message. Its core message is “We’ve got a variety of low-fat sandwiches,” versus Jared’s “Eat Subway, lose weight, change your life.” The first message sells drill bits; the second tells you how to hang your kid’s picture. (Location 3352) - These are not trivial actions. This behavior is not routine. How many great ideas have been extinguished because someone in the middle—a link between the source of the idea and its eventual outlet—dropped the ball? In the normal world, a franchise owner would have been amused by the Jared tale. He would have tacked it up on the bulletin board, on the wall of the hallway leading to the bathroom, as a source of amusement for his employees. And that would have been the pinnacle of the Jared tale. (Location 3367) - Aristotle believed there were four primary dramatic plots: Simple Tragic, Simple Fortunate, Complex Tragic, and Complex Fortunate. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, lists twenty-five types of stories in his book: the modern epic, the disillusionment plot, and so on. When we finished sorting through a big pile of inspirational stories—a much narrower domain—we came to the conclusion that there are three basic plots: the Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot. (Location 3396) - The barrier to idea-spotting is that we tend to process anecdotes differently than abstractions. If a Nordstrom manager is hit with an abstraction, such as “Increase customer satisfaction scores by 10 percent this quarter,” that abstraction kicks in the managerial mentality: How do we get there from here? But a story about a tire-chain-exchanging, cold-car-warming sales rep provokes a different way of thinking. It will likely be filed away with other kinds of day-to-day personal news—interesting but ultimately trivial, like the fact that John Robison shaved his head or James Schlueter showed up late seven days in a row. (Location 3612) - The Curse of Knowledge is a worthy adversary, because in some sense it’s inevitable. Getting a message across has two stages: the Answer stage and the Telling Others stage. In the Answer stage, you use your expertise to arrive at the idea that you want to share. Doctors study for a decade to be capable of giving the Answer. Business managers may deliberate for months to arrive at the Answer. Here’s the rub: The same factors that worked to your advantage in the Answer stage will backfire on you during the Telling Others stage. To get the Answer, you need expertise, but you can’t dissociate expertise from the Curse of Knowledge. You know things that others don’t know, and you can’t remember what it was like not to know those things. So when you get around to sharing the Answer, you’ll tend to communicate as if your audience were you. (Location 3674) - SYMPTOM: “They’re not buying it.” SOLUTION: Find the telling details for your message—the equivalent of the dancing seventy-three-year-old man, or the textile factory so environmentally friendly that it actually cleans the water pouring through it. Use fewer authorities and more antiauthorities. (Location 3740) - CHIFF is an acronym that stands for “Clever, High-quality, Innovative, Friendly, Fun.” The CHIFF concept defines Cranium’s strategic differentiation in the extremely competitive board-game market. CHIFF informs decisions across the organization—from branding to package design and the content of individual questions. (Example: A suggested question for the game asked how many justices were on the Supreme Court. It was rejected for being insufficiently clever and fun to be CHIFF. So it was rewritten: “In which of these sports could the members of the U.S. Supreme Court field a regulation team, with no justices left on the ‘bench’?”) (Location 3812)