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Edition:	Arrow Books (Paperback)
Author:	Chip Heath
Published:	January 2008
Pages:	304
ISBN 10:	009950569X
New:	$7.05 (13)
Used:	$7.55 (17)
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This plot summary may be too long or overly detailed. Please help improve it by removing unnecessary details and making it more concise.

INTRODUCTION—WHAT STICKS?

Consider the famous urban legend spread by email about the "Kidney Heist." According to the email a person in a hotel bar accepts a drink from a stranger only to wake up in a tub full of ice, with a missing kidney. This story has circulated the Internet for almost fifteen years. It is a story that sticks.

Why have so many other stories been quickly forgotten? Simply because certain ideas are much more inherently interesting. Is it “nature” or “nurture”? Or in other words, are ideas born interesting or can they be made interesting? This book is based on the latter assumption.

Why do good ideas often have a difficult time gaining traction, while something as ridiculous as the Kidney Heist tale never stops making the rounds—even without any resources to support it? Is it that stolen kidneys sell better than other topics, or is there a way to also make true, worthwhile idea ideas spread effectively?

The Truth About Movie Popcorn

Art Silverman of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) needed to figure out a way to get the public informed about the dangers of movie popcorn. A medium size bag of contained almost two times the amount of saturated fat than the recommended intake for an entire day. Unfortunately, just the phrase "37 grams of saturated fat" caused most people's to tune out. "Saturated fat has zero appeal," Silverman lamented. "It's dry, it's academic, who cares?"

But the CSPI presentation at a 1992 press conference brought the concept to life by stuffing an entire day's worth of unhealthy food (a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak with trimmings) stuffed into one medium sized popcorn bag. The point got across. The story made a big splash and was featured on the front pages of several major newspapers and was mentioned by both Jay Leno and David Letterman.

More importantly, the idea stuck. Moviegoers began skipping popcorn at the theaters and sales dropped rapidly. The result is that today, most theater chains use unsaturated oils to pop their popcorn.

On Stickiness

This success story is even better because unlike the Kidney Heist, it was true! The CSPI knew something worth sharing, and all they had to do was figure out a way to make the story stick.

Given how important it is to make ideas stick, it’s strange how little attention the subject is given. Communication advice tends to involve “delivery” instructions to stand up straight and make eye contact, or it has to do with structure—the way you introduce with a story, repeat your points and so forth. Or sometimes audience awareness, or knowing what they personally care about, is stressed. But the reality of it is that you can perfect all of these skills and still not create an idea that sticks.

Six Principles of Sticky Ideas

Sticky ideas and stories tend to have similar themes and attributes. While there is not a set "formula" for a sticky idea, being sticky tends to have to do with a common set of traits, which increases the chances of success. The six principles that tend to work are: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories. The acronym spells SUCCESs. No specific expertise is required to utilize these ideas.

Tappers and Listeners

If you were to tap "Happy Birthday," on someone else's arm you would hear the song in your head and think that the simple melody must be obvious. But it isn’t obvious. This is the Curse of Knowledge. You know exactly what you’re trying to convey but the "listener" has nothing more than a few disconnected taps to go by and it is a lot less clear to them than you might think it would be.

Unfortunately, this tapper/listener occurrence is replayed every day around the globe. “Tappers and listeners” are CEOs and employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers. All of these groups rely on ongoing communication, but, like the tappers and listeners, they suffer from enormous information imbalances. When a CEO discusses "unlocking shareholder value,” for example, there is almost always a “tune” playing in her head that the employees can't hear.

CHAPTER 1—SIMPLE

The Army invests a tremendous amount of energy in its planning, and processes, which have been refined over the years. The systems used are marvels of communication. But the drawback is that these plans often don’t work.

Colonel Tom Kolditz, head of behavioral sciences division at West Point, states, "No plan survives contact with the enemy. You may start off trying to fight your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen…" So in the 1980's the Army redefined its planning process to something called Commander's Intent (CI).

CI is a clean, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order that specifies the desired end-state of an operation. The CI does not specify so much detail that is risks becoming obsolete by unpredictability. Commander's Intent is much more effective at aligning the behavior of soldiers at all levels without requiring detailed play-by-play instructions. This is effective because when people know the desired destination, they have that needed flexibility to improvise built in.

As Kolditz explained, no plan survives contact with the enemy. This concept also makes sense to people with no military experience at all. No sales plan survives contact with the customer. No lesson plan survives contact with teenagers.

It's not always easy to make ideas stick in a noisy, chaotic environment. In order to succeed, the first step is to be simple. That doesn’t mean "dumbed down" or "sound bites". Simple means identifying the core of the idea and stripping it down to the most critical essence of it. You have to weed out superfluous and distracting elements. That's easy enough. The really difficult part is weeding out ideas that may be quite important but just aren't the most important. Finding the core is about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine. The trick is to know how much can be cut out of an idea before it begins to lose its essence.

Finding the Core at Southwest Airlines

Southwest is not just a successful company—there is a huge performance gap between Southwest and its competitors. The industry as a whole has a difficult time with profitability, but Southwest has been consistently profitable for more than thirty years. What’s the secret to their success?

Herb Kelleher (the longest-serving CEO of Southwest) once told someone, "I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-fare airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company's future as well as I can."

Kelleher's Commander's Intent is "We are THE low-fare airline." It is a simple idea that has worked for thirty years. But there is more to the story. People like working for Southwest. In 1996, Southwest received 124,000 applications for 5,444 openings.

If the ideas driving Southwest Airlines are pictured as concentric circles, the central circle is the core idea of "THE low-fare airline," the next circle is "Have fun at work." Southwest's employees know that it's okay to have fun so long as it doesn't jeopardize the first premise of being "THE low-fare airline." For example, you can joke about a flight attendant's birthday over the P.A., but don’t throw confetti in her honor. Have fun but don’t create unnecessary expense by creating extra work for cleanup crews, because extra clean-up time means higher fares. It's the commercial equivalent of the foot soldier that improvises based on the Commander's Intent. A single well-thought idea can powerfully shape behavior.

Decision Paralysis

Prioritizing is so difficult because what's "critical" and what's "beneficial” is not always crystal clear. It’s often a matter of making decisions between several "unknowns". This kind of complexity can be paralyzing. Psychology research has revealed that people can even be driven to irrationality by an overload of complexity and uncertainty.

Prioritization rescues people from the quicksand of decision angst, and that's why finding the core is so valuable. People are constantly suffering anxiety of choice, even when the choices are all positive. Core messages make it easier for people to avoid wrong choices by reminding them of what is important.

Names, Names, and Names

Dunn, North Carolina is a small town forty miles south of Raleigh. With 14,000 residents, its local paper the Daily Record has a penetration of 112 percent—the highest of any newspaper in the United States. Every resident of Dunn purchase the paper, and so do people outside of Dunn. Why is this particular paper so popular?

The Daily Record, founded in 1950 by Hoover Adams, has a simple core idea: local coverage. Adams states, "All of us know that the main reason anybody reads a local newspaper is for local names and pictures. That's the one thing we can do better than anybody else. And that's the thing our readers can't get anywhere else." Adam's focus on local coverage is not a new idea. In fact, among publishers of small newspapers it is supposed to be the norm. Yet its plain to see that the idea isn’t the case at most papers, which are loaded with wire stories, analysis of pro sports teams, and spot photos with hardly any local persons in sight.

Knowing the core is not synonymous with communicating the core. Top management can even clearly know what the priorities are, while still being ineffective in sharing and achieving those priorities. Adams managed to find and share the core.

Sharing the Core

Many publishers say they value a local focus, but Adams really does. In fact, he is even willing to hurt the bottom line, or even risk being boring in order to stay true to a local focus. When asked why the Daily Record has been so successful, Adams replies, "It's because of three things: Names, names, and names."

Adams shares his core idea in clear, solid language. He wants names, and there is no confusing the fact. He wants many local names in the newspaper every day. This idea is concrete enough that everyone in the organization can comprehend and use it.

"Names, names, and names" is a simple way to state a symbolic core truth. Publishing a daily paper requires a vast number of daily decisions. Adams can't personally make the majority of these decisions, but his employees aren’t hit with “decision paralysis” because Adams “Commander's Intent” is very clear: "Names, names, and names." Adams can't be everywhere, but by finding the core and communicating it clearly, he had made himself everywhere. That's the power of a sticky idea.

Simple = Core + Compact

Adams is clever with words, but his most useful phrase isn’t especially clever: "Names, names, and names." This phrase is useful and memorable because it is highly concrete, but also because it is highly succinct. This example illustrates a second aspect of simplicity: Simple messages are core and compact.

The idea of compactness is not new. You’ll rarely get advice to make your communications as lengthy and convoluted as possible (unless you write interest-rate disclosures). Everyone understands that sentences are better than paragraphs. Two bullet points are better than five. Easy words are better than hard words. It's a bandwidth issue. The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.

"Simple" means core and compact. Compactness is worth striving for. But what if you make it too compact and lose something valuable? Is it possible to say something meaningful in the span of a sound bite?

"A Bird in the Hand"

For millennia, people have exchanged sound bites known as proverbs, which have the commonality of being simple yet profound. Cervantes defined proverbs as "short sentences drawn from long experience." Take the English-language proverb: "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." What's the core? The core is a warning that you may not want to give up a sure thing for something speculative. This short and simple proverb packs some serious wisdom, one that is universally useful in a wide variety of situations.

This simple proverb appears in many slightly different forms all over the world. It’s found in Aesop's fables, from 570 B.C. Basically, the "bird in hand" proverb is a very sticky idea. It has survived for more than 2,500 years. It has spread across landmasses, cultures, and languages, as well as have other ancient proverbs. In fact, a collection of proverbs has been found in nearly every known culture. Why? What are proverbs good for?

Proverbs are helpful in guiding individual decisions in environments with shared standards. Those shared standards often convey ethical or moral norms. Proverbs offer “rules of thumb” for the individual’s behavior. Proverbs are ideas that are compact enough to be sticky and meaningful enough to make a difference.

Using What's There

Messages need to be compact, because people can only learn and remember a finite amount of information at a time. However, suppose you have too much information to compact it into a proverb sized sound bite. How does one convey lots of useful information when needed? You take advantage of what’s already there. By using flags, you can tap the existing memory of your audience.

The Pomelo Schema

Most people in the world have complicated messages that can’t always be pared down to one or two core ideas. You don’t want to replace an architecture school curriculum with a single compact idea like "Keep the building from falling down."

But you can create the needed complexity with the artful use of simplicity. If simple ideas are staged and layered correctly, they can very quickly become complex.

You many not know what a pomelo is, but if you were told it was a lot like a grapefruit then you already know a lot about it, because you can automatically attach your previously understanding of what a grapefruit is like. "Grapefruit" is a schema, which psychologists define as “a collection of genetic properties of a concept or category”. Schemas consist of prerecorded information stored in our memories. Using schemas improves both our comprehension and our memory.

Complexity from Simplicity

Schemas help us create complex messages from simple materials. Plenty of science courses have been taught by clever use of schemas. Introductory physics is taught with simple, idealized situations: pulleys, inclines, and objects moving at constant rates along frictionless paths. As students become familiar with one simple schema, such as pulleys, it can then be stretched or merged with other schemas to explain more complicated problems.

People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough information to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.

Schemas in Hollywood: High-concept Pitches

A great way to avoid useless accuracy, and to dodge the Curse of Knowledge, is to use analogies. Analogies get power from schemas. A good analogy wields power. In Hollywood $100 million movies can be green-lighted based largely on the strength of a one-sentence analogy.

The average Hollywood studio considers hundreds of pitches or screenplays for every movie it creates. Because when they do invest, they are essentially betting millions of dollars on an intangible idea.

In Hollywood, people use core ideas call "high-concept pitches." The movie Alien was pitched as "Jaws in a Spaceship." That instantly lets the set designer know that the idea isn’t to have a pristine spaceship like Star Trek, but one more like the nautical ship in Jaw—rickety, old, dingy, and oppressive. The crewmembers won’t be wearing bright Lycra uniforms in well-lit and lintless rooms. High-concept pitches are Hollywood's “core proverbs” that quickly let everyone know what the point and purpose is.

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.

Generative Analogies

The psychologist Donald Schon introduced the term "generative" to describe metaphors that generate "new perceptions, explanations, and inventions." Many simple sticky ideas are actually generative metaphors in disguise. For example, Disney calls its employees "cast members." This metaphor of employees as cast members in a theatrical production is communicated consistently throughout the organization. Cast members don't interview for a job; they audition for a role. When walking around the park, they are onstage. Jobs are performances, and uniforms are costumes. The theater metaphor is extremely useful for Disney and its employees. "Employees as cast members" is a generative metaphor that has worked for Disney for over half a century.

The Power of Simplicity

Both generative metaphors and proverbs get power from substitutions: They substitute an easy concept for a difficult one. The proverb "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush" gives us a tangible, easily processed statement that we can use for guidance in complex, emotionally fraught situations. Generative metaphors fill a similar role. The "cast members" at Disney find it easier to know how to tackle any new situation from the perspective of an actor rather than just as an employee.

Proverbs are the Holy Grail of simplicity. Coming up with a short, compact phrase is easy. Anybody can do it. On the other hand, coming up with a profound compact phrase is incredibly difficult. But the effort is well worth it. "Finding the core" and expressing it in the form of a compact idea can be enduringly powerful.

CHAPTER 2—UNEXPECTED

The first challenge in communication is getting other's attention. Most of the time we can't demand it; we must attract it by breaking a pattern. Humans adapt quickly to consistent patterns, therefore consistent sensory stimulation makes us tune out. We often only become consciously aware of these things when they change. Our brain is designed to be keenly aware of changes. Smart product designers are well aware of this tendency, by ensuring that when a product requires users to pay attention, something will change. Warning lights blink on and off because we would tune out a light that was constantly on.

The two essential questions are: How do I get people's attention? And, just as crucially, how do I keep it? Messages have to break through the clutter to get and keep people's attention.

Two essential emotions—surprise and interest—are commonly utilized by naturally sticky ideas. Surprise begets attention. Interest keeps our attention and is what maintains our interest over time. Naturally sticky ideas are frequently unexpected. The more unexpected the idea, the stickier they will be.

GETTING PEOPLE'S ATTENTION

No One Ever Does

A TV commercial opens with a visual story of a mom picking up the kids from a sports event. The voice-over warmly describes some of the minivan’s wonderful features. Then without any warning the minivan is broadsided by another vehicle as it crosses an intersection. The screen fades to black and a message appears, "Didn't see that coming?" Then fades to, "No one ever does." The final screen reads, "Buckle-up…Always."

The buckle-up ad is unexpected because we think it’s a car commercial and what happens violates our schema for car commercials. We know how car commercials are supposed to go—trucks on mountains, sports cars zooming on vacant curvy roads, minivan full of kids in suburbia—but no one ever dies, ever. The ad also violates our schema of real-life neighborhood trips. We all take lots of uneventful trips in our neighborhoods. The commercial, however, reminds us that accidents are inherently unexpected, so we ought to buckle-up, just in case.

Schemas are our “personal guessing machines”. They help us predict what will happen next. Whenever our “guessing machines” fail, we are surprised.

Emotions are elegantly tuned to help us deal with critical situations. They prepare us for how to act and think in a variety of situations. Anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to flee. But the connection between emotion and behavior can be subtle. For example, a secondary effect of being angry is that we become more certain of our judgments. When we are angry, we know we are right, as anyone who has been in a relationship can attest.

Surprise jolts us to attention. Surprise is triggered when our schemas fail, and it prepares us to understand why the failure occurred. When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs our attention so that we can repair them for the future.

The Surprise Brow

Surprise causes a facial expression that is universal across cultures. In Unmasking the Face, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen coined a term, "the surprise brow" to describe the distinctive facial expression surprise is associated with. When our brows rise, it widens our eyes and creates a broader field of vision—the surprise brow is literally our body's way of forcing us to see more of what’s around us.

In contrast, when we are angry our eyes will narrow. That allows us to focus on a known problem. Surprise also causes our mouths to gape open. We're struck speechless for at least a moment. Our bodies freeze and our muscles go slack. It as though our bodies want to ensure that we are not talking or moving when we ought to be taking in new information. Surprise acts as a kind of emergency override when we confront something unexpected and our guessing machines fail.

In a state of surprise, unexpected ideas are more likely to stick because surprise makes us pay attention and think. That extra attention and thinking seals these unexpected events into our memories. Surprise can prompt us to imagine other possibilities, to figure out how to avoid surprises in the future, and to resolve the question of why we were surprised. Big surprises call for big answers. If we want to motivate people to pay attention, we should seize the power of big surprises.

Hension and Phraug

Researchers presented four words, HENSION, BARDLE, PHRAUG, and TAYBL to test subjects. The first two seemed almost familiar, like words we might know but just can’t recall, which resulted in the "the surprise brow" reaction combined with the frustration of not being able to recall them (they were made up words). The last two words were found to be funny spellings of ‘frog' and ‘table.'

HENSION and BARDLE provide an example of surprise without insight. People were surprised, but not in a way that sticks. They were mostly just frustrated. Surprise—without real insight—is not enough.

To be surprising, an event can't be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be "post-dictable." In other words, the twist must make sense after you think about it, although it’s not something you would have seen coming. It’s the difference between the feeling you get from TV shows or films that have great surprise endings—endings that unite clues you've been exposed to all along (such as The Sixth Sense) compared to the gimmicky, unforeseeable endings of shows where "It was all a dream".

If you want your ideas to be stickier, you have to break someone's guessing machine and then fix it. Avoid gimmicky surprise by ensuring that your unexpected ideas produce insight by targeting an aspect of your audience's guessing machines that directly relates to your core message.

You can make ideas sticker by first identifying the central message you need to communicate—the core, and secondly by figuring out what is counterintuitive about the message. In other words, what is the unexpected implication of your core message? Why isn't it already happening naturally? Thirdly, convey your message in a way that breaks your audience's guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Once their guessing machines have failed, you then help them refine their machines.

Common sense is the enemy of sticky messages. When messages sound like common sense, they float gently in one ear and out the other. If people already intuitively ‘get' your message, they won’t pay much attention. It's your job to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.

KEEPING PEOPLE'S ATTENTION

The Mystery of the Rings

A social psychologist at Arizona State University, Robert Cialdini, decided to improve the way he talked about science in his writing and in his classes. After a lot of research he found that the most successful way to introduce a subject is to start with a mystery. The authors described a state of affairs that seemed to make no sense and then invited the reader into the material as a way of solving the mystery.

An astronomer who was attempting to explain the substance of Saturn’s rings wrote one example of this idea:

"What are the rings of Saturn made of anyway? How could three internationally acclaimed groups of scientists come to wholly different conclusions on the answer? One…proclaimed they were gas; another…was convinced they were made up of dust particles; while the third…insisted they were comprised of ice crystals. How could this be? After all, each group was looking at the same thing, right? So what was the answer?"

The answer revealed itself like the plot of a mystery. The teams of scientists pursued promising leads, they hit dead ends, and they chased clues. Eventually, after many months of effort, there was a breakthrough. At the end of the twenty-page article, the answer was dust, specifically, ice-covered dust. Cialdini stated that, "I don't care about dust, and the makeup of the rings of Saturn is entirely irrelevant to my life. But that writer had me turning pages like a speed reader."

Mysteries work because they create the need for closure. By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer ultimately made dust interesting. He sustained attention, not just for the span of a punch line, but also for the span of a twenty-page article dense with information on scientific theories and experimentation.

Science doesn't have a monopoly on mysteries—they can be made out of nearly anything. Mysteries move us to a higher level of unexpectedness. Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment, but from an unexpected journey.

Curiosity in Hollywood Screenplays

The movie Trading Places, starts out with Eddie Murphy's character, Billy Ray Valentine, being exposed as a con man by two cops who pull him to his feet exposing his perfectly normal legs (that he had been hiding in a specially made cart in order to elicit sympathy money from pedestrians who thought he was an amputee). Later on, Valentine is in a luxurious office as a commodities broker with two elderly business tycoons engaged in a private wager regarding ‘nature or nurture.'

Screenwriting guru, Robert McKee, uses this example to illustrate the concept of a "Turning Point." He says, "Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations." In Trading Places, the Turning Point with Valentine and the tycoons makes the audience wonder, “How will Valentine the vagabond handle being a trader?

McKee believes that every great script should design every scene to be a Turning Point. What will happen next? How will it turn out? We want to answer these questions, and that desire keeps us interested.

Yet people can also be interested in something that lacks any sense of mystery. What makes kids want to memorize Pokemon characters, and what keeps car buffs flipping through every page of Car & Driver, for example?

The "Gap Theory" of Curiosity

George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University, provided a comprehensive account of situational interest back in 1904. It is surprisingly simple. Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge. He states that gaps cause pain. Wanting to know something is like having an itch that needs to be scratched. To remove the pain, we need to fill the knowledge gap. We often sit patiently through bad movies simply because it's too painful not to know how they end.

This 'gap theory' of interest explains why some areas create fanatical interest; because they naturally create knowledge gaps. One important implication of the gap theory is that we need to open gaps before we can close them. We have a tendency to tell people the facts, but first you need to get them to realize that they need the facts. The trick, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they don’t possess by posing a question or puzzle that helps people become aware of a gap in their knowledge.

Battling Overconfidence

In order to take advantage of the gap theory we need the ability to point out things that people don't know. A challenge is that people tend to think they know more than they actually do. Research has shown that humans are typically overconfident about how much we know, which can make it hard to make the gap theory work. Fortunately, there are strategies for combating overconfidence. Prevent overconfidence by making your audience's natural schema's fail by asking them commit to their preconceived ideas and then pulling the rug out from under them by presenting an unexpected surprise.

Making people commit to a prediction can help prevent overconfidence. Harvard physics professor, Eric Mazur, came up with "concept testing." In his classes, Mazur will pose a conceptual question and then ask his students to vote publicly on the answer. The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome. That’s because overconfident people are more conscious of a possible knowledge gap when they find that others disagree with their notions. The thirst to fill a knowledge gap—to find out who was right—can be very powerful.

Gaps Start with Knowledge

Since curiosity arises from knowledge gaps, it seems logical that the more we know about a topic, the less curious we’ll become about it. Loewenstein, however, says that the opposite is true. He research shows that as we increase information, we are more and more likely to focus on the things we don’t know. In other words, someone who knows the state capitals of 17 of 50 states may be pleased with her knowledge, while someone who knows 47 is more likely to think of herself as not knowing 3 capitals.

Some topics naturally highlight gaps in our knowledge. Human-interest stories draw us in because we know what it's like to be human, but we don't know what it's like in every situation. How does it feel to win an Olympic medal, for example, or be lost for 10 days in the wild? Gossip is so tantalizing because we know a bit about some people but there's some information that we lack. That’s why people don't gossip about passing acquaintances, but celebrity gossip is so enticing. We have a basic sense of what specific famous people are like, but we crave the missing information—their romantic struggles, their secret vices.

In summary, curiosity comes from gaps in our knowledge. Knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first. "Here's what you know. Now here's what you're missing." It's no accident that mystery novelists and crossword-puzzle writers offer clues. When we feel that we're close to the solution we’ll go for it, because curiosity propels us to finish.

Treasure maps are vague and therefore intriguing, because they show only certain key landmarks and a big X where the treasure is. They sequence information. Rather than dumping a stack of information on someone all at once they drop one clue, then another. This method of communication resembles flirting more than lecturing.

Unexpected ideas, by opening a knowledge gap, tease and flirt. They mark a big red X on something that needs to be discovered but don't necessarily tell you how to get there.

Walking on the Moon and Radios in Pockets

A small Japanese company by the name of Sony struggled to stay in business after World War II when they repaired shortwave radios. During that same time transistors were being developed by Bell Laboratories in the United States. In 1953 Sony secured permission to license transistors and inspired its employees by presenting an unexpected message—"We are going to develop and build a radio that fits in a pocket." The concept of "transistor radio" was not enough. At the time radios were pieces of furniture. A radio small enough to fit in a pocket was preposterous and unexpected. Sony's employees, however, caught the idea and flew. By 1957, Sony had produced the world's first pocketable transistor radio.

John F. Kennedy gave a speech to a special session of Congress in May of 1961. Kennedy ended his speech on an odd and unexpected note. He said: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

Unexpected ideas such as these create surprise and insight. Rather than leading us along a boring path of one incremental step to the next, the ideas offer a sudden, dramatic glimpse of how the world might be. They set up knowledge gaps that did not seem insurmountable. Each goal was audacious and provocative, but not paralyzing. Engineers who heard the "man on the moon" speech instantly started brainstorming about the possibilities. Sony’s pocket radio and a man on the Moon were big, powerful, and sticky ideas.

CHAPTER 3 – CONCRETE

Aesop authored some of the stickiest stories in world history. His many famous fables include "The Tortoise and the Hare," "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," and "The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg”. Aesop illustrated universal human shortcomings. His fables would not have survived for more than 2,500 years if they didn't succinctly and clearly reflect profound truths about human nature.

Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract. Too much abstraction makes it difficult to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems.

Understanding Subtraction

Something "concrete" is anything you can examine with your physical senses. A V8 engine is concrete. "High performance" is abstract. Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things.

Concrete language helps us understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert who already understands the topic well. But when you have to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren't 100% certain about how much each of them knows, concreteness is the only safe language.

Abstraction demands some concrete foundation.

Concrete is Memorable

Concrete ideas are easier to remember than abstract ideas. Human memory research has shown that people are better at remembering concrete, easily visualized nouns ("bicycle" or "avocado") than abstract ones ("justice" or "personality").

The Velcro Theory of Memory

Concreteness makes ideas stick due to the very nature of our memories. Many think that remembering something is a bit like putting it in cerebral filing cabinets. While there's nothing wrong with that analogy, apparently there are completely different ways we store different kinds of memories.

David Rubin, a cognitive psychologist at Duke University, uses an exercise to illustrate the nature of memory. Spend five or ten seconds lingering over the following questions:

Remember the capital of Kansas. Remember the first line of "Hey Jude" by the Beatles. Remember the Mona Lisa. Remember the house where you spent most of your childhood. Remember the definition of "truth". Remember the definition of "watermelon".

Each statement triggers a different mental activity. Remembering the capital of Kansas is an abstract exercise, unless you live in Topeka. Remembering "Hey Jude" probably often evokes the music, as well as the lyrics. Mona Lisa conjures a visual image. Remembering your childhood home probably evokes a host of memories—smells, sounds, and sights. The definition of "truth" on the other hand, was probably more challenging to summon—you know what "truth" means, but you probably had not pre-formulated a specific definition to pluck out of memory, as with the Mona Lisa. The word "watermelon" likely evoked sense memories—the striped green rind and red fruit, the sweet smell.

Memory, then, is less like a single filing cabinet and it is more like Velcro. One side of Velcro is covered with thousands of tiny hooks and the other is covered with thousands of tiny loops. The hooks become caught in the loops when you press the two sides together, causing the Velcro to seal.

Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes

When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, third grade teacher, Jane Elliott, decided to teach her students the power of discrimination, which is an abstract idea. Her students resided in the all-white town of Riceville, Iowa. She divided the children into two groups, those with blue eyes and those with brown and told them that blue-eyed children were inferior to brown eyed children. The blue-eyed children were fitted with paper collars to designate them as inferior, forced to sit in the back of the classroom, and given less time at recess. The two groups were not allowed to interact with each other.

The situation quickly transformed. The brown-eyed children started mistreating the blue eyes, taunting and ridiculing them. Friendships disappeared.

The next day, Elliott told the children she had made a mistake and that in actuality blue-eyed children were superior to brown eyed children. To her dismay, the blue-eyed children were just as hateful towards the brown-eyed children despite their experience in being treated as inferiors.

Elliott's simulation made prejudice concrete—brutally concrete. However, it did ultimately make an impact on the students' lives. Studies conducted ten and twenty years later found that Elliott's students were significantly less prejudiced than their peers who had not been through the exercise. Her students still remembered the simulation vividly.

Jane Elliott put hooks into the idea of prejudice. Although it might have been easier, she didn’t teach the idea of prejudice the way other abstract bits of knowledge are taught—like the definition of "truth." Elliott turned prejudice into an experience. This experience created so many hooks sealed into the students' memories that even decades later, it could not be forgotten.

The Path to Abstraction: The Blueprint and the Machine

So if concreteness works so well then why do we slip back into abstraction so easily?

Simply because the difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly. Novices see concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols and insights that they have learned through much experience. They are capable of experiencing a higher level of insight, so they naturally want to talk using that level of understanding.

This is where the “Curse of Knowledge” comes into play. In a study done in a manufacturing firm that designed and built complicated machinery used to produce silicon chips two sets of workers had to collaborate—the engineers who designed the machinery, and the people who actually put the machines together. It was very important that these two groups communicated well in order to get the job done properly, but unfortunately this did not occur. The two groups spoke different languages. The engineers tended to think abstractly while the manufacturing team was thinking concretely.

Whenever something went wrong in manufacturing, the engineers thought making even more elaborate blueprints of the machines would help the workers know where parts went, when in reality it just made things even less understandable. The manufacturing crowd just wanted the engineer to come down to the factory floor and actually show them where the part should go.

The solution was for the engineers to change their behavior from making things increasingly complicated to making things clear. The physical machine is the most effective and relevant domain of communication. Both parties understood the machines well. Therefore, that is the level that the problems should be solved on.

However, it’s easy to forget that we're talking like an expert. We start to suffer from the Curse of Knowledge. It can even feel quite unnatural to speak concretely about subject matter that we’ve studied intimately for years. But the effort of being more concrete brings the rewards of our audience understanding and remembering our words.

But don’t mistake the moral of this story as the need to "dumb things down." The manufacturing people faced complex problems that called for smart answers. Rather, the point is to use a concrete and "universal language”.

Concrete Allows Coordination

The two slogans—"pocketable radio" and "man on the moon" were both pleasingly concrete. The Japanese engineers weren’t paralyzed with uncertainty about their mission, and NASA didn’t waste any time quibbling about what was meant by "man", "moon", or "decade".

Concreteness makes targets transparent. Even experts need transparency. Lets say a software start-up has the goal to build "the next great search engine." Two similarly skilled programmers are assigned the task. To one, "the next great search engine" means completeness, making the search engine return everything—no matter how obscure—that could possibly be relevant. To the other it means being fast, ensuring decent results very quickly. Their actions will not be aligned until the goal is made concrete.

Kaplan and Go Computers

This is the story of twenty-nine-year-old Jerry Kaplan and his first interview with technology giant Kleiner Perkins—the most prestigious firm in Silicon Valley.

In 1987 Jerry Kaplan Kaplan had the idea of developing a more portable generation of personal computers. While waiting for his turn to present his idea to the technology giant Kleiner Perkins, he listened in on the entrepreneur preceding him. The gentleman was dressed in suit, whereas Kaplan was tieless in a sport coat. The gentleman had a script, projection graphs, business plans, prototypes, and a slide show. Kaplan started feeling nervous. All he carried was a maroon portfolio with a blank pad of paper inside.

When Kaplan's turn arrived, he started on his spiel: "I believe that a new type of computer, more like a notebook than a typewriter, and operated by a pen rather than a keyboard, will serve the needs of professionals like ourselves when we are away from our desks. We will use them to take notes, send and receive messages through cellular telephone links, look up addresses, phone numbers, price lists and inventories, do spreadsheet calculations, and fill out order forms."

His audience was tense and silent audience, so Kaplan decided to risk some theatrics. "If I were carrying a portable PC right now, you would sure as hell know it. You probably didn't realize that I am holding a model of the future of computing right here in my hands." With that, he tossed his empty portfolio case onto the table. The audience sat in surprise for a few minutes just staring at the portfolio until one of the partners slowly reached out and touched the red portfolio as if it were some sort of talisman. From that moment, the questions flowed and the pitch was transformed into a brainstorming session.

A simple portfolio presented a challenge to the boardroom participants and thereby focused their thoughts and brought their existing knowledge to the scene. It changed their attitude from reactive and critical to active and creative.

Concreteness creates a shared "turf" on which people can collaborate. Everybody in the room feels comfortable that they're tackling the same challenge. Even experts benefit from concrete talk that puts them on common ground.

Making Ideas Concrete

How does one make their own message more concrete? Those decisions are easier to make if they are guided by the needs of the specific people we are trying to reach. Of the six traits of stickiness, concreteness is likely the easiest to embrace, and it is also the most effective of the traits.

To be simple by finding our core message, however, is quite a challenge. Designing our ideas in an unexpected way usually takes some effort and applied creativity. But being concrete is easy and effortless as long as we REMEMBER to avoid slipping into abstract speak. We often forget that other people don't know what we know. We’re like the engineers who keep referring back to our drawings, while the assemblers just want us to show them on the actual factory floor.

CHAPTER 4—CREDIBLE

Finding Credibility

We believe certain ideas because our parents, friends, past experiences, religious faith, or authorities tell us to. In trying to win over a skeptical audience, we are usually fighting an uphill battle against these kinds of powerful forces. But naturally sticky ideas can persuade us to believe some pretty incredible things.

Around 1999, an e-mail message spread over the Internet claiming that bananas from Costa Rica were infected with a "flesh-eating bacteria" and warned people to stop buying bananas. The e-mail claimed that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wasn’t telling us because it feared a nationwide panic. (Yes, as if flesh rotting off our bodies wouldn't create a panic…) This e-mail rumor spread rapidly partly because it was attributed to an expert source, the Manheim Research Institute.

Pam Laffin, the Antiauthority

Anti-authorities, people who are not experts or celebrities, are also powerful tools of credibility because of their experiences within the human condition. Pam Laffin starred in a series of anti-smoking TV ads broadcast during the mid-1990's. Laffin was not a health expert or a celebrity. She was a twenty-nine-year old mother of two dying of emphysema.

The ads were brutally transparent about her story, medical procedures, and revealed the scars both inside and outside of her body, which contrasted jarringly with the light entertainment of the program line-up during which time they broadcasted. Laffin became a heroine of the anti–smoking movement because her personal experiences allowed her to tell a powerful story.

In the modern world we are constantly inundated with messages, and people has consequently become more skeptical about the sources of those messages. A commercial claiming that a new shampoo will make your hair shiny is less credible than hearing your best friend raving about that same shampoo. Why? Because your friend isn’t trying to sell you something, so she gets more trust points. In a nutshell, it is often the honesty and trustworthiness of our sources—not their status—that allows them to act as authorities. Sometimes anti-authorities are even more effective at getting a message across than authorities.

The Power of Details

Not everyone has an external authority that can vouch for the message. Usually our messages have to vouch for themselves. They must have "internal credibility." Although internal credibility relies on the topic, there are a few general principles that help establish internal credibility.

In the popular urban legend, "The Boyfriend's Death” a couple goes on a drive into the country, run out of gas, and the boyfriend has to leave the car to find help. The girl, after several hours alone in the car listening to a brushing sound on the roof of the car, exits the vehicle to find her murdered boyfriend hanging from a branch, his toes softly scraping the across the car. What happens when people pass this legend along is that they always add particular details about the location, the weather, the kids' names, or the movie they saw before, and so forth. Details give a sense of reality to stories by making them sound more personal and credible. Concrete details don't just lend credibility to the authorities who provide them; they lend credibility to the idea itself. By making a claim tangible and concrete, details make it seem more real, more believable.

Vivid details create credibility. What should also be added is that we need to make use of truthful, core details. We need to identify details that are compelling, human, and meaningful—details that symbolize and support our core idea.

Beyond War

Using vivid details helps create internal credibility, and subtlety weaves sources of credibility into the idea itself. Statistics, on the other hand, tend to put us to sleep.

Geoff Ainscow and other leaders of the Beyond War movement in the 1980s were determined to find a way to address the following paradox: When we see a child running with scissors, we wince. We shout at her to stop. Yet when we read newspaper articles about nuclear weapons—which have the power to destroy millions of children—it provokes no emotion but perhaps a moment of dismay.

The Beyond War group went door-to-door hoping to galvanize ordinary citizens against the arms race. They arranged ‘house parties' within their neighborhoods to share their message. During one of these parties, they used a sensory presentation. The speaker simply dropped one BB into a galvanized bucket, saying that it represented the Hiroshima bomb and explained the devastation caused by a single bomb. Next, he dropped 10 BBs into the bucket. The noise was louder and more chaotic. He explained that those BBs were the firepower of the missiles from one U.S. or Soviet nuclear submarine. Finally, asking the audience to close their eyes, he dumped 5,000 BBs (one for every warhead in the world) into the bucket. The noise was surprising, even frightening, and seemed to go on forever.

The statistic was the number 5,000—a number that most people would not remember and didn’t really care about. However, the bucket and the BBs added a sensory dimension to an otherwise abstract concept. The statistic didn't stick, but the sudden, visceral awareness of a huge danger caused by 5,000 BBs “exploding” in a bucket did stick.

The exact number wasn’t as important as the overall point, which was that nuclear proliferation was out of control.

This is the most important thing to remember about using statistics effectively. Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It's more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.

The Human-Scale Principle

We give statistics life when we contextualize them in terms that are human, and everyday. Stephen Covey, in his book The 8th Habit, describes a poll of 23,000 employees drawn from a number of companies and industries. He reports the polls results in such sentences as "Only 37 percent said they have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why," or "Only 20 percent fully trusted the organization they work for." Those statements are somewhat bland, abstract, and forgettable. Covey, however, links a very poignant human metaphor to the statistics by adding that if a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal was theirs. The soccer analogy creates a human context for the numbers.

But why would a soccer analogy be more effective? Because it relies on a more concrete schema. Our soccer schema is well defined compared to our schemas of organizations. It’s a more compelling picture to imagine the lack of cooperation on a soccer field than in a corporation. Humanizing the statistics gives the argument power.

Statistics aren't inherently helpful; it's the scale and context that make them so.

The Sinatra Test and Safexpress

Another way to develop internal credibility is to use an example that passes the “Sinatra Test”.

Frank Sinatra's classic song "New York, New York," is about starting a new life in New York City, and the chorus declares, "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere." An example passes the Sinatra Test when one example alone is enough to establish credibility in a given domain. For example, even if you’ve only got one client, you’re still in the running for any security contract if your one contract is for Fort Knox.

Safexpress, a family-owned business based in India, competes in a shipping business where competition is fierce and low cost, but also unreliable and generally unsafe. Safexpress assured its international customers—companies accustomed to the reliability of FedEx—safe, on-time delivery. This was fine for international companies, but Indian companies balked at the higher rates. In order to secure Indian clientele, Safexpress set its sites on becoming the sole shipper of a Bollywood studio's films. The studio's skepticism was predictable and plausible. Piracy is a major concern in India so distribution was mission-critical.

Safexpress had two stories that sold their services, not with statistics, but in credentials and experience. Safexpress had handled the release of the fifth Harry Potter book—a highly complicated delivery. Every book had to be delivered to each retail outlet at the exact same time to prevent early sales (if delivered too early) or lost sales (if delivered too late) and there could be no leaks.

Safexpress had a second story. They knew that the studio executive had a brother who had recently taken his high school board exams. Safexpress mentioned that they had been the company that safely delivered the examination papers and carried the return answer sheets. In a couple of months the deal was signed, because these stories made them think, "If Safexpress can make it there, they can make it anywhere."

Where's the Beef?

In summary, you can create credibility by drawing on external sources like authorities and anti-authorities. You can also create credibility by drawing on sources inside the message itself by using details, applied statistics and examples that pass the Sinatra Test. But the remaining source of credibility may be the most powerful source of all.

Wendy’s launched one of the most effective television ad campaigns of all time in 1984. In the commercial three elderly women stand at the counter, commenting on the large fluffy bun of the hamburger in front of them. Finally, lifting the bun to reveal the tiny burger within, one of the woman cantankerously asks, "Where's the beef?"

The commercials were funny and perhaps more remarkably, the ads highlighted a true advantage of Wendy's hamburgers: There really was more beef. The ads worked. Polls showed the number of customers who believed that Wendy's Single was larger than the Whopper or the Big Mac increased by 47% shortly after the commercial aired. In the year after the ads ran, Wendy's revenues rose 31 percent.

What is different is that the message did not draw on external credibility—it outsourced its credibility to the customer. The commercials challenged customers to verify Wendy's claims. “See for yourself—look at our burgers versus McDonald burgers. You'll notice the size difference!” Wendy's made a “falsifiable” claim. In other words, any customer with a ruler and a scale could have verified the claim's truth value. Asking customers to test a claim for themselves is a "testable credential." Testable credentials can provide an enormous credibility boost, since they encourage your audience members to see for themselves.

Testable Credentials

Back in the 1990's Snapple struggled to shake off rumors that it supported the Ku Klux Klan. Rumormongers had presented the ‘evidence' that the Snapple label portrayed a ‘slave ship' as well as a ‘K' inside a circle—allegedly, evidence of the Klan's ownership. What Snapple really did feature was an engraving of the Boston Tea Party, and a ‘K' in a circle, which is the symbol for "kosher".

The KKK claim was a bait-and-switch version of "Where's the Beef?” It told you to look for yourself. The ship engraving and the kosher symbol were there, and so the validity of the see-for-yourself claim caused some people to illogically come to the rumormonger's conclusion. This is how testable credentials can backfire—the "see for yourself" step can be valid, while the resulting conclusion can be entirely invalid.

Testable credentials are useful, for better or for worse. Ronald Reagan famously asked the US, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" during his 1980 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter. He could have focused on statistics—the high inflation rate, the loss of jobs, the rising interest rates. Instead of selling his own case, he deferred to his audience.

Rookie Orientation

NBA players are young men often under twenty-one that become sudden celebrities. They've heard about AIDS their entire lives, so it’s not like they’ve never heard of safe sex, yet the danger is that their new lifestyle especially, my lead to the players dropping their guard for a night.

Somehow they NBA needed to make the threat of AIDS credible and immediate. External credibility like Magic Johnson, or statistics on a human scale using vivid details of an athlete retelling how his normal safe-sex vigilance was eroded by a particularly wild night of partying. Any of these might be quite effective. But the NBA really wanted to move the source of credibility inward, inside the heads of the players. How did they do it?

A few weeks before the NBA season begins, all the rookie players are required to meet in Tarrytown, New York, for a mandatory orientation session. One year, despite the secrecy of the orientation, a group of female fans showed up, dressed to be noticed, at the hotel bar and engaged the rookies in racy conversations and made plans for a future rendezvous. The following morning, as the rookies showed up for their scheduled meeting, they found the same girls present. Each one introduced herself and added that she was HIV positive. Suddenly, the talk about AIDS clicked for the new celebrities. They saw how easily a single night could have caused a lifetime of regret.

To get people to believe your ideas you’ve got to identify the right source(s) of credibility to draw on. It's not always obvious which one we should draw from. The most obvious sources—external validation and statistics—aren't always the best. A few vivid details might be more enticing than a barrage of statistics. An anti-authority might work better than an authority, and one Sinatra Test story might overcome a mountain of skepticism. It's inspirational to know that many many people have had to climb over the same hurdles of credibility in order to have their ideas prevail—and that their eventual success has been a benefit to us all.

CHAPTER 5—EMOTIONAL

Mother Teresa said, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." In 2004, some researchers at Carnegie Mellon University decided to see whether Mother Teresa was right.

The researchers found that Save the Children, a charity that focuses on the well-being of children worldwide got bigger donations when their literature outlined the plight of a single child, Rokia, than when they described the dire circumstances for African children with statistical evidence. On average, the people who read the statistics instead of the personal story contributed approximately one dollar less than those who read of the plight of Rokia. It seems Mother Teresa was right: When it comes to our emotions, one individual trumps the masses.

The researchers believed that the smaller donations for the statistical letter were a result of the "drop in the bucket effect". If people felt overwhelmed by the size of the problem, their small donations seemed almost meaningless. So the researchers gave a third group both of the letters—the statistical and the story of Rokia—to find out if people who received both sets of information would give more. Unexpectedly, this group still gave a dollar less than the people who received Rokia’s story alone.

The researchers theorized that thinking about statistics shifts people into a more analytical frame of mindset where they're less likely to think emotionally. The mere act of calculation reduced people's charity.

Belief counts for a lot, but belief isn't enough. For people to take action, they have to care. But "making people care" isn't something that only charities need to do. Mangers have to make people care enough to complete complex tasks in a timely manner. Teachers have to make students care about assignments. Activists have to make people care about public initiatives. The goal of making messages "emotional" is to make people care. Feelings inspire people to act.

Semantic Stretch and the Power of Association

You can make people care about your message without having to start from scratch. Ideas use a sort of piggybacking strategy, by associating themselves with emotions that are already there waiting to be tapped into.

In 1929, Einstein protested, "Philosophers play with the word [relativity], like a child with a doll…It does not mean that everything in life is relative." To Einstein's chagrin, the number of people trying to tap into the resonance of "relativity" began to exceed the number of people who were trying to actually understand relativity. When associations to certain terms are repeatedly overused—sometimes with precision, sometimes with crudeness—the effect is to dilute the power of the terms and their underlying concepts. In other words, when everyone paints with lime green, lime green is no longer an eye-catching color.

Research shows that exploiting terms and concepts for their emotional associations is a common theme in communication. People tend to overkill any idea or concept that delivers an emotional punch. The researchers call this concept "semantic stretch."

Fighting Semantic Stretch: The Case of "Sportsmanship"

Tennis star John McEnroe was once the poster child of poor sportsmanship, with his tantrums and snotty attitude towards officials. Nowadays, however, McEnroe's behavior is typical of many youth sports games. Bad behavior is now the norm not only amongst athletes but also for parents and crowds in general.

Sportsmanship was once a powerful concept. During the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong once stopped to wait for his chief opponent, Jan Ullrich, to remount after a fall rather than using the incident to increase his lead. He commented that he rode better when he was competing with a great athlete like Ullrich. That's sportsmanship.

But now the term "Sportsmanship" has been stretched too far. Like "relativity," it now has little in common with its original meaning. It used to refer to the kind of impressive behavior exemplified by Armstrong, but it’s been stretched to include all kinds of unimpressive behavior, like losing with minimal whining or not assaulting a referee. The norm is now to simply avoid excessive bad behavior, rather than to embrace good behavior.

The Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) strives to bring back and maintain good behavior. They call their strategy "Honoring the Game." Their message is that the Game itself and its integrity are something bigger than the individual players. "Honoring the Game" is sports patriotism. It implies that you owe your sport basic respect. Armstrong wasn't being a "good sport"; he was Honoring the Game.

Youth sports haven’t been wiped clean of discourtesy, but the concept is starting to catch on. The idea has managed to sidestep semantic stretch and peg a concept that makes people care.

Appealing to Self-interest

The thing that matters most to people is, of course, themselves. One reliable way of making people care is invoking self-interest.

In 1925, John Caples was assigned to write a headline for an advertisement promoting a correspondence music course. His headline, "They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano…But When I Started to Play!" has become a classic advertising formula. Sixty years later, the following knockoff headline increased sales by 26 percent over the previous year: "My Husband Laughed When I Ordered Our Carpet Through the Mail. But When I Saved 50%..." (Our publisher rejected the following subtitle for this book: They laughed When We Wrote This Book, But When They Woke Up in an Ice-Filled Bathtub…")

Ads should offer self-interest in their headlines by promising huge benefits for trivial costs. Don’t emphasize features as much as you emphasize benefits. An old advertising maxim states that you have 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.

Jerry Weissman, who coaches CEOs in how to deliver speeches, says there’s no good reason to beat around the bush when it comes to self-interest. He says that the WHFY—"what's in it for you," (pronounced whiff-y) should be a central aspect of every speech. If you've got self-interest on your side, use it to your advantage.

Maslow

Self-interest, in terms of wealth and security, isn't the whole story though. In 1954, psychologist Abraham Maslow studied what motivates people. He condensed volumes of existing research to a “Hierarchy of Needs” that people try to fulfill on step at a time:

• Transcendence: help others realize their potential
• Self-actualization: realize our own potential, self-fulfillment, peak experiences
• Aesthetic: symmetry, order, beauty, balance
• Learning: know, understand, mentally connect
• Esteem: achieve, be competent, gain approval, independence, status
• Belonging: love, family, friends, affection
• Security: protection, safety, stability
• Physical: hunger, thirst, bodily comfort

However, subsequent research suggests that the hierarchical aspect of Maslow's theory is false because in actuality people pursue all of these needs simultaneously. When referring to "self-interest," people are typically covering the Physical, Security, and Esteem layers. Perhaps these are the only ones that really matter. The rest do seem a bit academic, but are they effective? Recent research has explored this question as follows.

Imagine that a company offers its employees a $1,000 bonus if they meet certain performance targets. There are three different ways of presenting the bonus: (1) Think what it means—a home improvement, a down payment on a new car; (2) Think of the increased security—money in the bank; (3) Think of the company recognition, the status gained for your accomplishment.

When people are asked which positioning would appeal to them, most say No. 3. Here's the twist, though: When people are asked which is the best positioning for other people (not them), they rank No. 1 most fulfilling, followed by No. 2. That is, we are motivated by self-esteem, but others are motivated by down payments. A lot of us think everyone else is living in Maslow's basement—we have a penthouse apartment, and everyone else is living below.

But by spending too much time in Maslow's basement we may tend to overlook plenty of opportunities to motivate people. Sure the "bottom floors" comprised of tangible, physical needs are motivational. Everyone enjoys getting bonuses, job security, and a feeling of fitting in. But if we focus exclusively on these needs we miss out on the chance to capitalize on profound motivations.

Dining in Iraq

Army food is usually unattractive. Mess halls are pretty much just calorie factories to give the troops the necessary fuel to do their jobs. The Pegasus chow hall, just outside the Baghdad airport has developed a different reputation. At Pegasus, working with the same materials, supplies, and equipment as every other mess hall in Iraq, the prime rib is perfectly prepared. The fruit platter is a beautiful assortment of watermelon, kiwi fruit, and grapes. There are legends of soldiers driving some of the most treacherous roads in Iraq to eat a meal at Pegasus.

Floyd Lee, a twenty-five year Marine Corp veteran and the man in charge of Pegasus, came out of retirement to take the job, and he takes it seriously. Soldiers often work eighteen-hour days, seven days a week under constant threat of danger. Lee believes Pegasus can provide a little respite from the turmoil. His leadership mission: "As I see it, I am not just in charge of food service; I am in charge of morale." In terms of Maslow's hierarchy, Lee is going for Transcendence.

For Lee serving food is a job, but improving morale is a mission. He helped create a simple concrete core: A Pegasus chef is in charge of morale, not food. Hundreds of decisions are made by staffers in the tent who think to themselves, “What should a Pegasus person do in this situation?”

Don't Mess with Texas

Dan Syrek, the nation's leading expert on litter, was hired by the State of Texas to help control a serious litter problem. The standard antilitter message appeals to guilt and shame, or to our feelings for cuddly critters—"Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute!"

Syrek knew that this type of messaging wouldn't make a dent in Texas's problem where the typical litterer was an eighteen- to thirty-five-year-old authority hating, truck driving, sports loving male that Syrek universally dubbed "Bubba."

Self-interest probably wouldn’t work with this group. After all, the Bubbas did not have much to gain by not littering. Greed or sex-based appeal doesn’t play a part, and a fear-based approach like highlighting hefty fines, could easily backfire with the Bubbas' antiauthority streak. Syrek knew that the best way to change Bubba's behavior was to tell him that his kind of people didn’t litter. A campaign’s new slogan, "Don't Mess with Texas." Well-known Texans like Dallas Cowboys players, Houston Astros pitcher Mike Scott, and Willie Nelson helped sell the message that real Texans don't litter. The celebrities were valuable for quickly establishing the "ideal, masculine Texans". Within the first five years of the campaign, visible roadside litter in Texas decreased 72 percent.

The Music of Duo Piano

In summary, three additional strategies for making people care are: using associations (or avoiding associations), appealing to self-interest, and appealing to identity. But again, watch out for the Curse of Knowledge, which can get in the way of implementation. Knowing your purpose can be powerful.

In 2002, non-profit arts leaders in Southern Florida attempted to articulate and refine the core mission of their organizations. The point was to define the purpose of their organization in a way that would motivate people to care about it.

One of the organizations, Murray Dranoff Duo Piano Foundation responded: "We exist to protect, preserve, and promote the music of duo piano…We want to keep it from dying out." Most attendees had never heard of duo piano and asked about it. Duo Piano, shocked that nobody understood, explained the magnificence of the piano. That it was "an instrument created to put the entire range and tonal quality of the whole orchestra under the control of one performer. When two of these magnificent instruments are in the same room, the performers can respond to each other and build on each other, it's like having the sound of the orchestra but the intimacy of chamber music."

At that point, the room audibly murmured approval. The phrase—"the sound of the orchestra but the intimacy of chamber music"—was profound and evocative. Suddenly the people in the room understood, for the first time, why the Murray Dranoff team was, and should be, committed to the duo piano.

It took the Duo Piano so long to up with a great purpose, because while they already had it, the Curse of Knowledge had always prevented them from expressing it clearly.

We get people to care about our ideas by A) them to take off their Analytical Hats. B) We create empathy for specific individuals. C) We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. D) We appeal to their self-interest, E) but we also appeal to their identities and F) not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be.

CHAPTER 6—STORIES

A nurse in a neonatal intensive-care unit had been watching one baby in particular for several hours. His color had been wavering between a healthy shade of pink and blue, and then suddenly, within a matter of seconds, the baby turned a horrifying deep blue-black.

The gathering medical team, operating on the assumption that the baby's lung had collapsed prepared to deal with that problem. The original nurse, however, suspected a pneumopericardium, a condition in which air fills the sac surrounding the heart. Frantically, she tries to tell them, tries to stop them from treating the collapsed lung. The team indicates the heart monitor, which continued to show a steady, normal newborn heartbeat. The nurse, still insistent, leaned over the child and listened for a heartbeat through her stethoscope. The baby's heart was not beating. She began chest compressions until the chief neonatologist performed a procedure that removed the air from around the infant's heart.

Later, the group realized why the heart monitor misled them. It is designed to measure electrical activity, not actual heartbeats. The baby's heart nerves were firing but the air in the sac around the heart prevented the heart from actually beating.

This is one of the stories collected by Gary Klein, a psychologist who studies how people make decisions in high-pressure, high-stakes environments. It appears in a chapter called "The Power of Stories" in his book Sources of Power. Klein says that, in the environments he studies, stories are told and retold because they contain wisdom. Stories are great teaching tools. They show how context can mislead people to make the wrong decisions.

The above story is not really useful to people who don't work in health care, but the story is universally inspiring because the woman acted in the face of pressure to conform to the group's opinion. A life counted on her willingness to step out of her "proper place." The story's power is twofold: It provides simulation (knowledge about how to act) and inspiration (motivation to act). We know a credible idea makes people believe. An emotional idea makes people care. In the following chapter, we'll find that the right stories make people act.

The Un-passive Audience

Stories are strongly associated with entertainment. When children say, "Tell me a story," they want entertainment, not instruction. Being the "audience" for a story may seem like a passive role, but there is not such thing as a passive audience. When we hear a story we become drawn into a mental simulation of it.

Interestingly, we cannot imagine events or sequences without evoking the same modules of the brain that are evoked in real physical activity. Brain scans reveal that when people imagine a flashing light, they activate the visual area of the brain; when they imagine someone tapping on their skin, they activate tactile areas of the brain and so forth.

The right kind of story is and effective simulation. Hearing the nurse's heart-monitor story isn't the same as being there, but it's the next best thing. A powerful story gets people ready to act.

Stories as Inspiration: The Tale of Jared

In the late 1990's, Subway launched a campaign to highlight the healthiness of a new line of sandwiches. The campaign was based on a statistic: Seven subs under six grams of fat. But "7 under 6" didn't stick like Subways' next campaign, which was all about the remarkable story of a college student named Jared Fogle.

By age 20 Jared weighed a dangerous 425 pounds, had a 60-inch waistline and wore size XXXXXXL shirts. He already had symptoms associated with obesity including diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Motivated by the "7 under 6" campaign, Jared tried his first turkey club, enjoyed it, and soon initiated his own all-Subway diet. Jared dropped nearly 100 pounds in just three months. As his health improved, he began to walk, and is now a healthy 180 pounds.

The story of Jared's inspiring weight-loss became a national phenomenon. Jared's former dorm mate wrote about Jared’s experience in the Indiana Daily Student newspaper. A reporter at Men's Health magazine, who was writing an article called "Crazy Diets That Work," came across the Daily Student piece and included a blurb about a "subway sandwich diet." Then Subway franchise owner named Bob Ocwieja, who spotted the Men’s Health article and contacted Richard Coad, the creative director at Subway's Chicago ad agency. After a long series of initial rejections, the Jared Story became a national story.

The Jared story has simulation value. It makes it easy to imagine what it would be like to embrace the Subway diet. But it provided something even more. The story has emotional resonance. Jared fought big odds, and prevailed through perseverance. This is the second major payoff that stories provide: inspiration. Inspiration drives action, as does simulation.

Here’s how the Jared story does on the SUCCESS checklist:

• It's simple: Eat subs and lose weight
• It's unexpected: A guy lost a ton of weight by eating fast food!
• It's concrete: The oversized pants, the massive size reduction, the diet composed of particular sandwiches.
• It's credible: It utilizes anti-authority. The guy who wore 60-inch pants is giving us diet advice! Whoa!
• It's emotional: We care more about an individual, Jared, than about a mass. It taps into profound areas of Maslow's hierarchy—it's about a guy who reached his potential with the help of a sub shop.

It's a story: Our protagonist overcomes big odds to triumph. It inspires the rest of us to do the same.

The Jared example illustrates that we don't always have to create sticky ideas. Spotting them is often easier and more effective.

The Art of Spotting

How does one avoid letting a great idea, a Jared, float right past our nose? Spotting isn't hard, but it isn't natural, either. Ideas don't flag themselves to get our attention. We have to consciously look for the right ones.

The Chicken Soup series of books is a publishing phenomenon. 4.3 million books sold with thirty-seven Chicken Soup titles in print. They sell inspirational stories—stories that uplift, motivate, energize. What's perhaps even more incredible about this success is that the authors didn’t even write these stories—they merely collected them. All of the stories fell into three basic plots: the Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot.

The Challenge Plot

David and Goliath is the classic Challenge plot. A protagonist overcomes a formidable challenge and succeeds. It’s the underdog story, the rags-to-riches story, and the triumph of sheer willpower over adversity. Such stories, both real and fictional, include the American hockey team beating the heavily favored Russians in the 1980 Olympics, the Alamo, The American Revolution, The Star Wars movies, Lance Armstrong, Rosa Parks.

Challenge plots inspire us by appealing to our courage. Challenge plots inspire us to act.

The Connection Plot

The Connection plot is a story about people who bridge gaps such as racial, class, ethnic, religious, and demographic. The connection can be as simple as a bottle of Coke, like in the famous Mean Joe Greene commercial where a skinny young white fan encounters the towering black athlete. They’re different, but they both hold a bottle of Coke that links them. Connection plots inspire us in social ways. Connection plots are about our relationships with others. They make us want to help others, be more tolerant of others, work with others, love others.

The Creativity Plot

The prototype of the Creativity plot is the apple that falls on Newton's head, inspiring the theory of gravity. The Creativity plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a problem in an innovative way. It's the MacGyver plot.

The purpose of reviewing these plots is not to learn how to invent stories. The goal here is to learn how to spot the stories that have potential. You don't need to make stuff up, you don't need to exaggerate or be as melodramatic as the Chicken Soup tales. You just need to recognize when life is giving you a gift.

Stories at the World Bank

In 2001, Stephen Denning, former head of the World Bank in Africa, wrote an insightful book called The Springboard in which he describes a springboard story as a story that lets people see how an existing problem might change. It tells people about possibilities. One advantage of springboard stories is that they combat skepticism and create buy-in. Denning says that the idea of telling stories initially violated his intuition. He had always believed in the value of being direct, and he worried that stories were too ambiguous, too peripheral, and too anecdotal. Why not spell out the message directly. Why not hit the listeners between the eyes?

The problem is that arguments make listeners skeptical—you're implicitly asking them to evaluate, judge, and criticize it. However, with a story, Denning explains, you engage the audience—you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.

Springboard stories create buy-in and mobilize people to act. Stories focus people on potential solutions. Telling stories with visible goals and barriers shifts the audience into a problem-solving mode.

EPILOGUE—WHAT STICKS

Sometimes ideas stick even if we don’t want them to. Leo Durocher, coach for the Dodgers in 1946, spent many years refuting that he had ever said, "Nice Guys Finish Last”. Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson." But that inaccuracy didn’t stop them from sticking because the audience gets a vote.

The audience may change the very meaning of your idea, as in Durocher, or even improve your idea, as in Sherlock Holmes. The audience can retain and reject at will. Most of us experience "idea pride." We want our message to endure in the form we designed. But if the world changes or adapts our ideas, all we need to worry about is if the variations are still core. If they are, then humbly accept the audience's judgment. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether people use our exact words; it's a matter of having achieved the goal of making the idea stick.