Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Hardcover – January 2, 2007

The SUCCESs. Not the word that counts its literal meaning, but that invisible, intangible theory where we are able to express, deliver, and stick ideas to others. In this revealing book, you will be introduced to the six ingredients designed specifically to make ideas sticky, and let me deliver what I caught from this eye-opening book.Others may experience over time they develop habits that slowly erode their mind's sensitivity. The inevitable pain and disappointment of moments such as delivering your ideas at a business meeting or a conference have caused you to set up walls around your mind. Much of this is understandable. But, there's no way around the truth: your mind is out of tune with confidence it was created to maintain. As we live in community, communication is the way for us to feel the unity. The book is even greater because the authors, Chip and Dan Heath, apply their SUCCESs theory onto practical situation to help readers understand more clearly. Without the SUCCESs rule, some kinds of communications might ease our conscience temporarily but would do nothing to expose the deeper secrets we carry and deliver. And, it might be the secrets that keep our minds in turmoil. Worse, this kind of communication could actually fuel destructive behavior rather than curb it. The rules the authors explain in this book might seem the things you would feel that you already know. But, these are the things you could easily ignore. The book is a great reference to keep you on succeeding the efficient deliverability of your ideas.Chapter summaryChapter1: SimpleWhen you needed to deliver your message in a brief and compact way, how would you prepare to deliver it to your audiences or readers? Simplicity is the key and first step to make a message sticky to others. Making it simple does not mean that you need to bring out your most important idea. It is critical to find the core. According to the authors, "finding the core isn't synonymous with communicating the core." But, that simplicity must come with its value. Like the metaphor of a company for the employees to be encouraged, your message needs to be simple and important to make your message remain not just in your mind but others as well.Chapter2: Unexpected"We can't demand attention. We must attract it" says the authors in the book. In order to grab people's attention, your message may be attractive with unexpectedness. Breaking a pattern could be one way. For example, the old emergency siren was too monotonic to stimulate our sensory systems and therefore failing to attract our attention. As the siren gets systematically and audibly improved, people hear much brighter and more stimulating sound and therefore being aware of some situation. In order to catch people's attention, you need to break the ordinary patterns. According to the book, "Our brain is designed to keenly aware of changes." The more you learn knowledge, the greater the knowledge gap you would get. Because we sometimes tend to perceive that we know everything, it's hard to glue the gap. However, curiosity comes from the knowledge gaps, so these knowledge gaps can be interesting.Chapter3: ConcreteHumans can hallucinate and imagine what we've experienced in visual, audible, or any other sensory pathways. When we use all our sensory systems to visualize ideas or messages, then the ideas get much more concrete. As an example the authors provide in this chapter, "a bathtub full of ice" in the Kidney Theft legend is an example of abstract moral truths that makes it concrete.Chapter4: CredibleWhen you are a scientist, you believe more in the things that are scientifically proven or that are referred to many other studies or to the words or the theories that the well-known scientist has established. That much, credibility makes or deceives people believe your ideas. Both authorities and antiauthorities work. We present results, charts, statistics, pictures and other data to make people believe. "But concrete details don't just lend credibility to the authorities who provide them; they lend credibility to the idea itself."Chapter5: EmotionalWhat's in it for you? It is a good example of the power of association. Sometimes, we need to grab people's emotion. It does not mean tear jerking, dramatic, or romantic. It means that your idea must pull out people's care and attachment to it. However, we don't always have to create this emotional attachment. "In fact, many ideas use a sort of piggybacking strategy, associating themselves with emotions that already exist (Made to Stick)." People can make decisions based on two models: the consequence model and the identity model. The consequence model can be rational self-interest, while the identity model is that people identify such situations like what type of situation is this?Chapter6: StoriesHave you seen and heard the story of the college student from the Subway campaign? He's the guy who lost hundreds of pounds eating Subway sandwiches. The story inspires people and even connects to people's real life. Like the book, Made to Stick, also presents a lot of stories to deliver and to help readers understand in each chapter, stories allow people to understand how your idea can affect or change their mind.Close the book and think for a moment before you start reading. How are things with your mind? Chances are, you've never stopped to consider your mind. Why should you? There are interviews to prepare for, meetings to blow others' mind with your amazing ideas, and moments you need to bring up emotional attachment with your family or your friends. If you are all caught up with these things and ask yourself this, "how are things?" "How have I dealt with those situations?" Before you go reading, you first need to dispel a commonly held myth about communication. You need to understand your old habits would die hard. And, like any habit that goes unchecked, over time they come to keep disturbing you to make your ideas sticky. Try to use the clinic part in each chapter. It will enhance your understandings, and you will improve your skills to make your ideas survive. If you really want to understand much deeper, as you read the book, look up some informative articles about the anatomy and physiology of the brain. It will help you. According to the book, your ideas must simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and stories. Try to apply these rules into your next presentation. I was not a good organized speaker. When I adjusted my mind with these rules to prepare my presentation recently, an amazing thing happened. I am the leader of the young adult ministry of a small local church. At almost every meeting, I needed to make the members understand what and why we need to awaken ourselves and other people; they barely paid attention to what I was saying. Even they seemed understanding, but once they returned to their home or to their life, they forgot what I emphasized. However, with the rules I learned from the book, the members started showing their interests in what I say and paying good attention to it. It works!Part of our confusion in delivering ideas stems from a misapplication of the rules we think we already know for persuasions. The notion that all confusions can be reduced down to a single underlying problem may strike you as a case of oversimplification. However, with the book, Made to Stick, you will track and be ready for your next presentation. When I was looking for a neuroscience book, Made to Stick was one of the recommended books related to neuroscience. The book is easy to follow, and it is really made to stick! If you are looking for a scientifically texted neuroscience book, this is not the book for you. However, this book will stir up your curiosity about neuroscience as a fundamental connector to higher neural knowledge. Simply, highly I recommend.

This is the best book about communications I've read since I discovered Stephen Denning's work on telling business stories. I highly recommend Made to Stick to all those who want to get their messages across in business more effectively.Imagine if people remembered what you had to say and acted on it. Wouldn't that be great? What if people not only remembered and acted, but told hundreds of others who also acted and told? Now you're really getting somewhere!Brothers Chip (an educational consultant and publisher) and Dan (a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Business School) Heath combine to develop Malcolm Gladwell's point about "stickiness" in The Tipping Point. To help you understand what they have in mind, the book opens with the hoary urban tale of the man who ends up in a bathtub packed with ice missing his kidney after accepting a drink from a beautiful woman. That story, while untrue, has virtually universal awareness. Many other untrue stories do, too, especially those about what someone found in a fast food meal.The brothers Heath put memorable and quickly forgotten information side-by-side to make the case for six factors (in combination) making the difference between what's memorable and what isn't. The six factors are:1. Simplicity (any idea over one is too many)2. Unexpectedness (a surprise grabs our attention)3. Concreteness (the more dimensions of details the more hooks our minds use to create a memory)4. Credibility (even untrue stories don't stick unless there's a hint of truth, such as beware of what's too good to be true in the urban legend that opens the book)5. Incite Emotions in Listeners (we remember emotional experiences much more than anything else; we care more about individuals than groups; and we care about things that reflect our identities)6. Combine Messages in Stories (information is more memorable and meaningful in a story form . . . like the urban legend that opens the book)Before commenting on the book further, I have a confession to make. This book has special meaning for me. I was one of the first people to employ and popularize the term "Maximize Shareholder Value" by making that the title of my consulting firm's annual report (Mitchell and Company) over 25 years ago when we began our practice in stock-price improvement. That term has become almost ubiquitous in CEO and CFO suites, but hasn't gone very far beyond the discussions of corporate leaders, investment bankers and institutional investors and analysts.The authors use that term in the book as an example of a communication that hasn't stuck broadly. And they are right. Having watched that term over the years go into all kinds of unexpected places and be quoted by people who had no idea how to do it long ago convinced me of the wisdom of telling people what to do . . . not just what the objective is.The authors make this point beautifully in citing Southwest Airline's goal of being "THE low-fare airline." If something conflicts with being a good low-fare airline at Southwest, it's obvious to everybody not to do it.You'll probably find that some of the examples and lessons strike you right in the middle of the forehead, too. That's good. That's how we learn. I went back to a new manuscript I'm writing now and wrote a whole new beginning to better reflect the lessons in Made to Stick. I've also recommended the book already to about a dozen of my graduate business students. So clearly Made to Stick is sticking with me.If you find yourself skipping rapidly through the book, be sure to slow down and pay attention on pages 247-249 where the authors take common communications problems and recommend what to do about them (such as how to get people to pay attention to your message). That's the most valuable part of the book. It integrates the individual points very effectively and succinctly.I also liked the reference guide on pages 252-257 that outlines the book's contents. You won't need to take notes with this reference guide in place.So why should you pay attention? The authors demonstrate with an exercise that people who know and use these principles are more successful in communicating through advertisements than those who are talented in making advertisements but don't know these principles. Without more such experiments, it's hard to know how broad the principle is . . . but I'm willing to assume that they have a point here.No book is perfect: How could this one have been even better? Unlike Stephen Denning's wonderful books on storytelling, this book is more about the principles than how to apply the principles. I hope the authors will come back with many how-to books and workbooks.I would also like to commend the book's cover designer for doing such a good job of simulating a piece of duct tape on the dust jacket. That feature adds to the stickiness of this book.

Many business folk seek the one great idea that’ll transform the world and their bank accounts. They want to start a company or a product line to take them to the top or provide more stability. In our information age, however, ideas are everywhere; people able to push those ideas forward into beneficial, lasting change are harder to find. Leadership gurus (and brothers) Chip and Dan Heath seek to educate us about how to make our concepts “stick” around in the minds and lives of our listeners.In an age where authoritarian tendencies are seemingly flourishing, the Heath brothers offer a refreshing look at persuasion. They do so by pulling examples from dozens of different fields – all with the common theme of making lasting change. Obviously, you need a good idea, but most good ideas don’t morph into results without good rhetoric. They show us how to identify those story lines and narrative hooks in our own lines. Thus, at the proper time, we can pull out the proper push to inspire, challenge, or springboard our audience to reach new heights.I’ve appreciated both Chip Heath’s and Dan Heath’s writing in other domains, but I found this book not up to their usual standard. The examples are interesting, but the central, take-home message is weaker. The book dissected different ways people pitched ideas, but I finished the book without a lot of action items for my daily life and work. I guess you could say that the book itself didn’t have much “stickiness” for me. Don’t get me wrong: The concepts were good and sound, but it read more like a normal business book rather than reaching the high bar these two have set for themselves.

This book is very easy to read and uses a lot of research to make points. If your interesting in this topic you should check this book out!