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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Unavailable
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Unavailable
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Audiobook8 hours

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Written by Chip Heath

Narrated by Charles Kahlenberg

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas struggle to make their ideas "stick."
Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. The brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier.
Made to Stick is an audiobook that will transform the way you communicate ideas. Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, it shows us the vital principles of winning ideas-and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.


From the Compact Disc edition.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 2, 2007
ISBN9780739341353
Unavailable
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Author

Chip Heath

Chip Heath is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Chip and his brother Dan have written four New York Times bestselling books: Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, and The Power of Moments. Their books have sold over three million copies worldwide and have been translated into thirty-three languages including Thai, Arabic, and Lithuanian. He has helped over 530 startups refine and articulate their strategy and mission. Chip lives in Los Gatos, California.

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Reviews for Made to Stick

Rating: 4.189909115306122 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very useful, filled with practical examples and ways to implement the tips. Recommend for anyone who'd like to improve her/his communication skills
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Pithy, but fun for the most part.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I really liked this one, obviously. It was placed as a sort of capstone to my research and background reading on memetics, so it was perfectly positioned to be a modern summary of applications of the ideas I have been reviewing. I have found myself quoting the book and specific ideas from it (such as the idea of a "commanders intent") in our strategy sessions at work and to me that is always a great indicator of the quality of the book like this : immediate application. I have been and will certainly continue reviewing my communications to help me develop stickier habits and to improve the chances of my meme's survival! Definitely a recommended read ... for just about anyone, or at least anyone who wants to be heard and have their message survive!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Saturday February 24, 2007The Guardian Buy Made to Stick at the Guardian bookshop Made to Stick: How Some Ideas Take Hold and Others Come Unstuckby Chip and Dan Heath304pp, Random House, £12.99This is a book about what makes some ideas more effective than others. It explains what it is that makes you notice them, understand them, care about them, remember them, and act on them. And the simple answer is: presentation. Spin is crucial. Of course, substance is important, too. But the message of this smart, lively book is that if your spin is bad, you're nowhere.As the authors say: "Good ideas often have a hard time succeeding in the world. Yet the ridiculous kidney heist tale keeps circulating, with no resources whatsoever to support it."Kidney heist tale? That's right. The authors, Chip and Dan Heath, brothers from California, tell us the story of a guy who goes into a bar in an unfamiliar city and orders a drink, after which an attractive woman approaches him and asks him if he'd like another. And that's the last thing he remembers, until he wakes up the next morning in a bathtub full of ice. He has a wound in his back with a tube sticking out. He calls the emergency services. The operator says, "Sir, don't panic, but one of your kidneys has been harvested."Next, the authors give us an example of something unmemorable. I won't quote it in full, but to give you an idea: "Comprehensive community building naturally lends itself to a return-on-investment rationale that can be modelled ..." We are asked to imagine what would happen if we closed the book and tried to tell someone about the kidney heist and the jargon. We'd be able to remember the heist. We'd have forgotten the jargon. The authors ask us: "Which sounds closer to the communications you encounter at work?"This is a self-help book for ideas. Like a diet book, it tells you to slim your ideas down. Simplicity is the key. Dan, an educational publisher, studied teachers and what made them effective. Chip, a social science professor at Stanford, spent time researching the concept "How could a false idea displace a true one?" Both brothers were impressed by the concept of "stickiness", as explained by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point - some ideas stick in the mind, while others don't. "We want to pay tribute to Gladwell for the word 'stickiness'," they say. "It stuck."There are various things, according to the Heaths, that make ideas memorable. Apart from simplicity, it helps if ideas are unexpected. You need to grab people's attention. They describe an advertising spot in which the viewer sees a happy family getting into a minivan and cruising blandly through suburban streets. Then, apparently out of nowhere - bang! An appalling crash. The idea: "Buckle up." The reason that the ad was effective: "It violates our schema of real-life neighbourhood trips."Other things that make ideas stick: adding concrete details, dumping complicated statistics, connecting with people's emotions and telling stories. We hear about an anti-nuclear campaigner who wanted to give people the idea that the world was full of dangerous nuclear warheads - 5,000, in fact. Expressed as a number, he realised, this was not a particularly sticky idea. So he gave lectures, taking along a metal bucket and thousands of BB pellets. He dropped one pellet into the bucket and told his audience: "This is the Hiroshima bomb." Later, he poured 5,000 pellets into the bucket. This was the world's current nuclear capability. His audience was stunned into silence.This is one of many examples that make this book such fun to read. We learn about good communicators, which is inspiring. How do you get people to unlearn an idea which is sticky but false, such as the notion that lots of people are attacked by sharks? Not by telling people the actual numbers, but by asking them whether they are more likely to be killed by a shark or a deer. Of course, the deer is more dangerous. This is something you're likely to remember. It's funny. It's something you'll want to tell people.So why is this book scary? For one thing, it gives you an insight into the power of bad ideas - simple, concrete, emotive, story-based ideas will stick in spite of being wrong. For another, it makes you think of the world of ideas as a kind of arms race. Everybody is trying to seduce you, using concepts that, over time, are more and more fiendishly sticky. Sometimes, someone on the side of good will find a way of getting you to think about road safety or nuclear warheads. But who owns most of the sticky ideas? Surely it's the big corporations, who can afford to employ people who know how to keep their messages crisp and memorable.When I finished this book, I wondered what it had taught me. It has taught me a simple thing about communication: keep it simple. And an unexpected thing: that, to be clever, you have to avoid being complex. And a statistical thing: forget about numbers. And an emotional thing: he who spins, wins, which is sad. And which is why it's worth reading this book. In the right hands, it will help.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    As a writer and speaker, I love stories. I love to tell them, to write them, and I love to read them. I also like to read about stories, what makes them work, how they excite our imagination, how we use them to enrich our communications. Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive And Others Die is about all that and more. Good salespeople, advertisers, marketers, PR professionals, even managers wanting to motivate their employees and entrepreneurs needing to excite their investors can make good use of the techniques described in this book. The authors achieved their goal, "...to help you make your ideas...understood and remembered, and have a lasting impact...." In other words, they help you make your ideas "stick." As the author of several books about persuasion in business myself, I took away several great points: "Belief counts for a lot, but belief isn't enough. For people to take action, they have to care." "We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities--not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be." "One of the worst things about knowing a lot, or having access to a lot of information, is that we're tempted to share it all." Chip and Dan Heath dissect everything from urban legends to ad campaigns to explain what makes a message resonate in the audience's mind. In the process, they not only show the reader how to use successful strategies, they do it in an entertaining fashion that makes the book a pleasure to read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Teachers, writers, public speakers, anyone with an interest in spreading ideas should read Made to Stick. It’s absolutely brilliant. Chip is a professor of organizational behavior and Dan is a consultant and former business researcher. Together they have put together a fascinating history of some of the ideas that have “stuck” with us, from urban legends about Elvis’ motorcycle to memorable ad campaigns like “Where’s the Beef?”But Made to Stick is really about how to make your ideas memorable, and this is really the heart of the book. Using the simple mnemonic device SUCCESs, the Heath brothers have identied the essential elements of a sticky idea: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotion, and Story. Sure, these elements have been talked about before, but not with such clarity and insight.One of the great features of the book is what they call the “Clinic.” At the end of each chapter Chip and Dan take a situation and show how applying one or more of the six elements can makethe idea more “sticky.”I’m a teacher, writer and speaker, and Made to Stick has already had an impact on my work. It’s one of the most practical and insightful books I’ve read in a long time, and I highly recommend it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A good business book that taps into the 'story-telling' aspect of human interaction.This book inspired me to try to make my blue-sky ideas more concrete when explaining their benefit to co-workers.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great mix of how and why urban legends (true or not) matter. ore importantly, this is a great reference for why stories and storytelling are more than anecadotes or anecdotal evidence.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    We all want our views to be heard, understood and remembered: even better, if we can convince another person of our veracity. For those of us involved, at any level, of politics, this is crucial but, it is apparent that, more often than not, people throw their ideas to the wolves.This book is filled with lots of common sense and a few ground breaking ideas. This is not to decry it in the least. It is always useful to have the obvious concepts gathered together and, this book has so much more. I believe that a book is worth reading, if it gives the reader one new point to ponder. I have many from this tome that will need to be chewed over and with which, I will need to experiment to get the best use.Trying to summarise a book in a few short paragraphs is rather demeaning to the author because, if it is possible so to do, why has he/she taken nearly three hundred pages? The answer to that, is that Chip and Dan Heath make a much better job than I am about to do: however, below, you will find what I hope to be a brief flavour.The book gives examples of memorable stories and examines why they stick in our mind. It also includes examples in which a standard reportage could have been used and the version that was actually released. These make it glaringly obvious that presentation is vital. In their original formats, the stories drift from the memory as fast as one reads them; in their amended form - which, it is important to stress, differ only in the presentation, and not by exaggeration or lying about events - many of them are stuck in my mind, even after finishing the book.I would rate this as a must read for anyone wishing their words to be memorable.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An incredible little book. I deployed a few of its principles in presenting a proposal even before I finished reading the book and got exactly the response I wanted.Reminds us that words are important, and things that may seem trite on the surface - Disney callings its worker cast members instead of employees, for example - can leave profound and lasting changes.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Made to Stick is an exceptional book that all marketing professionals and educators should read. The authors offer concrete tips for helping people remember your messages
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of the best books I have listened to. It delivers on its title of how to convey ideas to others so they stick. I listened to this a couple of years ago and it seems to be even better the second time. As an added bonus he summarizes the key parts of the book on his website.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Great book. Very useful if you have to communicate anything. They follow their own advice in many instances, implementing the six characteristics of messages that stick: SimpleUnexpectedConcreteCredentialed EmotionalStories
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I'm surprised that I liked this book. As an educator, I tend to hate these marketing type books and find them rather vapid. The Heath brothers, however, included education in their research and I think that made all the difference. Their ideas on what makes ideas "sticky" is pretty insightful and I find myself using their principles when I'm planning my classes or making a presentation
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Excellent narrator, really good book! I gather that the book was a textbook because it's written to students, even has study questions at the end of each chapter. Since I'm not a marketing student, perhaps this is an unfair criticism, but I found that some concepts were taken for granted as "known" and I was screaming (internally) at the book "explain that first!" a couple times. Not much, however, and overall the book was totally understandable by a lay reader. It also got a little to repetitive for me (lay reader) and, again, that's not really a fair criticism for a book written for a different audience, but I'll just throw that out there so you can gauge interest given that info.Some concepts are probably known to everyone but there were some new concepts, and the book essentially formalized marketing techniques that most of us either know or can guess or at least can say "that makes sense" after hearing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Lots of great examples of how to get others to remember and adopt your ideas. Essential business reading. I had read many of the examples in other business books - I am not sure if they were reusing this authors examples or vice versa. But still a nice compilation.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A superb book that presents convincing arguments, great stories, great research, great analogies, and highly actionable advice on how to communicate ideas in a way that will "stick". That is, in a way that will make people remember your ideas and act on them. In fact, the book uses its own advice to convey its ideas, and, uh, well, it stuck. I wish I had read it long ago. I wish everyone would read it, as it would improve the average quality of communication significantly.

    Some good quotes from the book:


    PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
    How do we find the essential core of our ideas? [...] Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so pro- found that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

    PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
    How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people's expectations. [...] For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. [...] We can engage people's curiosity over a long period of time by systematically "opening gaps" in their knowledge—and then filling those gaps.

    PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS
    How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. [...] Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.

    PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY
    How do we make people believe our ideas? [...] Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a "try before you buy" philosophy for the world of ideas.

    PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS
    How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. [...] We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.

    PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
    How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. [...] Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

    To summarize, here's our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs.

    This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily recreate our listeners' state of mind.

    Had John F. Kennedy been a CEO, he would have said, "Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives."

    Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones. It's like Tolstoy's quote: "All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.

    If you say three things, you don't say anything.

    To be surprising, an event can't be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be "post-dictable." The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it's not something you would have seen coming.

    So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message —i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn't it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience's guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.

    Curiosity, he [Loewenstein] says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge. Loewenstein argues that gaps cause pain. When we want to know something but don't, it's like having an itch that we need to scratch. To take away the pain, we need to fill the knowledge gap. We sit patiently through bad movies, even though they may be painful to watch, because it's too painful not to know how they end.

    To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?"

    Abstraction demands some concrete foundation. Trying to teach an abstract principle without concrete foundations is like trying to start a house by building a roof in the air.

    Memory, then, is not like a single filing cabinet. It is more like Velcro. If you look at the two sides of Velcro material, you'll see that one is covered with thousands of tiny hooks and the other is covered with thousands of tiny loops. When you press the two sides together, a huge number of hooks get snagged inside the loops, and that's what causes Velcro to seal. Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory. Your childhood home has a gazillion hooks in your brain. A new credit card number has one, if it's lucky.

    Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through years of experience. And, because they are capable of seeing a higher level of insight, they naturally want to talk on a higher level. They want to talk about chess strategies, not about bishops moving diagonally.

    Caples says companies often emphasize features when they should be emphasizing benefits. "The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world's best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world's best lawn!)." An old advertising maxim says you've got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don't buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children's pictures.

    This finding suggests that it may be the tangibility, rather than the magnitude, of the benefits that makes people care. You don't have to promise riches and sex appeal and magnetic personalities. It may be enough to promise reasonable benefits that people can easily imagine themselves enjoying.

    How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities—not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be

    We cannot simply visualize the story on a movie screen in our heads; we must somehow simulate it, complete with some analogue (however loose) to the spatial relationships described in the story. These studies suggest that there's no such thing as a passive audience. When we hear a story, our minds move from room to room. When we hear a story, we simulate it.

    Stories are like flight simulators for the brain. Hearing the nurse's heart-monitor story isn't like being there, but it's the next best thing.

    The problem is that when you hit listeners between the eyes they respond by fighting back. The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you're implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument—judge it, debate it, criticize it—and then argue back, at least in their minds. But with a story, Denning argues, you engage the audience—you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.

    There is a curious disconnect between the amount of time we invest in training people how to arrive at the Answer and the amount of time we invest in training them how to Tell Others. It's easy to graduate from medical school or an MBA program without ever taking a class in communication. College professors take dozens of courses in their areas of expertise but none on how to teach. A lot of engineers would scoff at a training program about Telling Others.

    For an idea to stick, for it to be useful and lasting, it's got to make the audience:
    1. Pay attention
    2. Understand and remember it
    3. Agree/Believe
    4. Care
    5. Be able to act on it
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Required reading for one of my jobs. An excellent study of why some ideas stick and some ideas die.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I generally don't like business books, and I like business principles applied to teaching even less. But this is a great book for getting teachers at any level to think about conveying abstract material in a concrete manner, and focus on the big picture - identifying the core things you want your students to learn, without getting sidetracked by a million tiny details.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved the book, but it won't help you be more sticky! Just read all the boring reviews of the book by people who read it...just sayin.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A great way to get your ideas to mean something. Definately see the usefullness of their SUCCESS formula and why it would help.

    My only problem with the book is the point and methods are illustrated pretty quickly but it ends up being a bit long winded and you want to skim to the next section once the point is grasped. I still enjoyed it though.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an interesting look at why some marketing ideas work-why we remember them and how we can craft ideas to work in the same way. I originally read it as a book review for my library, but ended up getting so interested in the comments made about how to use marketing ideas to make teaching lessons stick. I now use its message to create my information literacy lessons.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Finished Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath the other day. This is definitely a book worth checking out. Not a Christian book per se, but every preacher/teacher should read it. It's a book about what it takes to get ideas to stick with people and becoming a better communicator. In short, their premise is that in order for an idea to stick it needs to be simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and incorporate stories.Honestly, for a preacher this book is a goldmine. Not only for teaching you to be better at your craft, but because it's also chock full of great stories and illustrations.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very readable, with practical advice for communicating your ideas and generating action. The key to success is "SUCCESs": simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories stick with people.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    You don't need to be a copywriter or presenter to appreciate this amazingly clear analysis of rhetoric. Highly, highly recommended.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I bought this book because it came highly recommended by someone whom I hold in high regard. I have to say, however, that I was quite disappointed. I agree with another reviewer who said so much of what's in this book has been said/written before -- I found nothing new in what I read. I did find reference to an individual I actually know and did find that "story" interesting. Add this to the pile of similar self-help books on how to sell yourself and your ideas, but I would not put it at the top of the pile...
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Dan and Chip Heath have done a good job communcating what makes ideas click. As is case with management guru's books, outcome is not mind boggling but support of case studies and examples stress the points enough to make them, eh, stick. Cute acronym SUCCESs helps too. Book is easy read and has potential to change our communication style. However, utility to average cubicle dweller isn't that great despite what author says. People in creative professions, think tanks and opinion former groups will find more use of this.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very good (and entertaining) analysis of how to communicate an idea so it "sticks" in people's heads, hearts, and memory. The book is enlightening, has enough academic hooks to make it credible but is entirely practical.For anyone who has to / wants to present ideas to another person for any reason.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a brilliant book. It is worthwhile for many different areas. Public speaking, management, financial reporting - even telling jokes. It covers the critical areas that you need to focus on to get your message across so that it sticks. Its very practical and also humorous. You'll never think about kidney transplants the same again (read it and you'll understand)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very interesting read, and the ideas make a lot of sense. It felt too long; I skipped some of the material which felt repetitive.