Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Book Review: Sticky is sticky!
Summary: 5 Stars
I had my incoming MBA class read this book before the first day of class. Their first assignment was to introduce themselves in a two-minute "Sticky Introduction" using the concepts from the book. The introductions were much better than usual. Further, the concepts give us a vocabulary to talk about good writing and good presentation skills for the rest of their MBA Program. Book Review: Great Resource for Pastors: The Need for Sticky Sermons
Summary: 4 Stars
Think back to the most memorable sermon you have ever heard. Now think about what it was that made that sermon memorable. Chances are, it was an illustration. Some analogy or story gripped your attention.
I remember attending a youth event where the preacher delivered a message about the dangers of thinking you can control your sin. The illustration he used was so powerful and vivid that fifteen years later I still remember them both - the point of the sermon and the illustration he used to make his point.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2008, Random House) is written by brothers Chip and Dan Heath. The Heath brothers believe they know why some ideas stick and why others don't, and they are determined to help communicators figure out how to make their ideas "sticky."
Made to Stick is not a Christian book. Anyone entrusted with the task of communicating concepts to others can benefit from the insights here. But having read Made to Stick, I cannot help but see the practicality of these principles for preachers and teachers of God's Word.
According to the Heath brothers, there are six principles for "stickiness" in communication:
Simplicity
Unexpectedness
Concreteness
Credibility
Emotions
Stories
In expounding upon each of these principles, Chip and Dan provide us with a wealth of stories and examples. They show the difference between an "un-sticky" and a "sticky" idea. Most of the time, the packaging of a concept or idea is what makes it sticky, not the idea itself.
Chip and Dan also warn against some of the dangers in communication. One villain is what they call "The Curse of Knowledge."
"This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has `cursed' us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind." (20)
Many pastors and teachers struggle here. We know the biblical text and the context, but many of our listeners do not. We must take great care to avoid the Curse of Knowledge as we preach, and Made to Stick helps us figure out ways to circumvent this natural tendency.
There is much food for thought in this book:
"An accurate but useless idea is still useless." (57)
"Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in on ear and out the other." (72)
Chip and Dan also tell stories of people who have succeeded at making sticky messages. I love the story about the Subway guy - the man who lost weight from eating sub sandwiches. This personal story helped boost Subway's sales by giving them a new advertising campaign.
The Heath brothers believe we should be concrete and specific in our communication. Church leaders need to heed this challenge. As a discipleship pastor, I have seen mission statements that are hopelessly broad. Take this one for example: "We exist to make full fledged disciples of Jesus." Sounds great, right? But what does it mean? What does a full-fledged disciple of Jesus look like?
If we are truly passionate for seeing lives changed by the power of God's Word, delivered through our sermons and teaching, then we should desire that our messages to be remembered. We want our teaching to "stick," not because our teaching is our own, but because we are setting before our hearers the Word of God.
If there are ways to faithfully present the truth of God's Word memorably, then we should benefit from them. Made to Stick is a book that helps us fulfill our calling.
Book Review: Essential reading for marketers, speakers and persuaders everywhere
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent book, in a similar vein to Robert Cialdini's ground-breaking book "Influence". Chip and Dan Heath turn their attention not to general principles of persuasion, as Cialdini does, but to the specific factors that make an idea stick in people's minds.
They share six principles that (admittedly in a cheesy way) almost spell "success": Simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. They back up each of these principles by quoting research, case studies, examples and stories. It's an entertaining, as well as an educational, book.
Book Review: sticks with you
Summary: 5 Stars
Why did the duct tape cross the road? To stick with you, too. A most worthwhile book. If you ever need to sell an idea, sell yourself, or sell a product, this will give you ideas that will stick with you.Book Review: Overly Simplistic, but arguably that's the goal
Summary: 4 Stars
An American conglomerate with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue may hire a big shot Manhattan firm to handle marketing ideas. But for the local baker looking to increase his presence, the businessman trying to give a sales presentation or just the mother trying to instill morals in her child, there is Made to Stick, a hand-holding primer on effective messaging. Written by trendy west-coast consultant-brothers Chip and Dan Heath, the book offers us no cutting edge consumer psychology or advanced literature on human memory recall. In fact examples are doled out in highly entertaining bits of anecdotes and stories, void of the numerology typical of modern marketing professionals. The advice is simplistic and save for a few gems, unsurprising. No doubt, the Manhattan firm would provide more effective ideas than anything that can be gleaned from the book's cookie-cutter procedures. Nevertheless, Made to Stick delivers on its central promise, both implied and explicit - it's easy for the businessman and even applicable to the parent.
The book couldn't be more simplistic and un-academic. Most of you think the previous sentence has a negative intonation. Made to Stick's ease of usefulness may have you reconsider. The common person with common problems has never been aided by today's obtuse academic musings on originally simplistic and common fields such as accounting or leadership. Effective messaging is another of those fields. The Heath brothers keep you at bay from today's theoretical categorization of market types, conceptualization of ideas from other sciences, or advanced computerization and model building. Instead, they offer only one acronym- SUCCESs- whose letters represent only six common attributes of an effective ("sticky") message. It's self-validating in fact, since simplicity is the first of those attributes. To be simple, the authors recommend finding a singular essence and explaining it in terms and images already familiar to everyone. To be unexpected, the reader has to break a pattern and leave out a smidge of information to promote curiosity. To be concrete, we have to bring people in with representations they can easily picture. And likewise, the brothers explain, we can be credible and emotional. The ease of explanation is taken to another level as the authors invent lucid ways of assessing an attribute, for example their so-called Sinatra Test, named for the famous musician's line on New York: "If you can make it here you can make it anywhere."
That said, it's easy to lay out attributes matter-of-factly and get lost in methodology, reverting to the sins of academia. To apply methodology is the ultimate matter at hand. Luckily, this is the facet where Made to Stick shines brightest. The book is chockfull of intriguing real life examples in a style reminiscent of chicken-soup-for-the-soul. For example, the section on emotionality tells us the ways others have stretched associations of honorable words and appealed to self-pride or personal identity. Often times the anecdotes not only illustrate applications, but are either inspirational, such as scientists inflicting danger upon themselves to prove their point in an uphill battle for credibility, or fascinating, such as the eccentric employee training methods of an upscale clothier demonstrating unexpectedness. Ultimately, the applications range from billion dollar airliners to a single suburban math teacher attempting to explain the importance of Algebra. But to take it to the final step, to champion complete translucency, the authors shove their applications into a Petri dish and assess different renditions of the same example for the six attributes. The so-called "clinics" are in every section and by this, with a copy of Made to Stick, even the most unsophisticated beginner is set for effective messaging.