This is a highly recommended book even for those who are thinking about their own career strategic inflection points at this moment of time.

A strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can equate to an opportunity for a company to rise to new heights or tumble down to collapse. While it is obvious that strategic inflection points are likely to be caused by technological change, they can also be caused by competitors when they deliver more value or become more efficient.

A strategic inflection can be deadly when it is unattended. We have seen how big bookstores like Borders fell because they did not see the threat of the Amazon Kindle. A similar insight can also be applied to one’s career.

Though a very short book, Andy Grove drove home the point about changing rules and how leaders in companies have to find their way through uncharted waters.

He narrates the story of how Intel navigated through the changing computer industry brought about by the personal computer revolution in the 1980s. While the present generation may not recall the days of the 386, 486 to the Pentium chip, he explained how the industry has dramatically changed from 1970s to the early 1990s, with his thoughts on the Internet (at its nascent stage) in the 1990s.

Using those examples, he explained  how companies need to steer clear of strategic dissonance. Using data, he shows that the demographics of customers can change and how this could lead to a strategic inflection point.

He also reckons that the timing for a resources shift towards new technology has to be just right, not too early or too late. He also noted that the strategic change has to be clearly communicated to rest of the company.

The last chapter about managing an individual’s career strategic inflection points is an addition to the original book. Andy Grove, advocates having a mental fire drill that lets you spot incoming threats or red flags which might harm your industry, build the relationships around, find the right timing to make the transition, and get in shape for the change. It sounds simple, but given how most people prefer taking less risk and staying comfortable in their own domains, they probably would not see the problems arise until later.

Of course, this book is a good read and I do recall many successful entrepreneurs and investors in today’s world citing the title of the book as a lesson for them to be wary of their competitors, navigate into new territories and change the landscape of the industry.

Andy Grove is right: “Only the paranoid survive.”

The lessons on how to build a minimum viable product, iterate base on customer feedback and metrics and pivot when all else fails will guide the entrepreneur and hold them accountable in their attempt to change an industry.

In the vein of Peter Drucker, who wrote that entrepreneurship is risk management, Eric Ries began the book with the note that the lean startup method is for entrepreneurs and the people who hold them accountable. The five key principles which set up the entire book are:

1. Entrepreneurship is everywhere and isn’t limited to people who work in startups. In his definition, he broadened the definition to anyone who works within any human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty, which implies that the approach he is advocating works in a company of any size of any sector or industry, and that includes multi-national enterprises.

2. Entrepreneurship is management. This sets up the notion that the entrepreneur needs a different kind of management for an environment that is specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty.

3. Validated Learning. Eric Ries argued that startups exist to learn how to build a sustainable business and the learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow them to test and find out how the market reacts to their products. In fact, that approach pervades the book.

4. Build-Measure-Learn. This concept explains that a startup’s fundamental activity is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond and then learn whether to pivot or persevere, and how the lessons from all successful start-ups can be directed to grow the feedback loop.

5. Innovation accounting. Ries strongly believe that the survival of a startup can be better enhanced by focusing on the boring stuff: How to measure progress, set up milestones and prioritize work. It provides a possible way for how investors and entrepreneurs themselves can evaluate the progress of a start-up.

With the five principles in mind, the author takes the reader through the rest of the book in three parts: “Vision”, “Steer” and “Accelerate”. He buids his case with several interesting case studies including his time in IMVU.

For example, Intuit demonstrated with Snaptax that they can build a good product even though they are a big organization. They found their own way to break the Innovator’s dilemma. Snaptax was able to solve an interesting problem of allowing users to finish their entire tax returns on a mobile phone. Other stories included Zappos, Facebook and Path.

In “Vision”, the first part of the book, Ries builds the case for the discipline of entrepreneurial management. The author identifies who the entrepreneur is, the definition of a startup, and offers a new way for startups to gauge that they are making progress with a method called validated learning.

The key, according to Ries, is that start-ups need to devise scientific hypotheses on their product and find out how a sustainable business can be built in the process.

On “Steer”, the second part of the book, the author brings up the concept of building the minimum viable product to test the assumptions and an accounting system to evaluate whether entrepreneurs are making progress. He offers the a decision making method to help entrepreneurs to decide if they should pivot or persevere.

In “Accelerate”, Eric explore techniques that help lean startups accelerate through the build-measure-learn feedback loop as quickly as possible while the start-ups scale.

What’s interesting about the book is that Eric Ries presents an upfront and realistic picture of how life in a start-up can be. He says that entrepreneurs tend to dupe themselves into thinking that they have the perfect idea or product, not realizing that the market have disproved their own notions.

Probably, for any entrepreneur who reads this book, the best lesson to learn is to be able to admit that an idea failed and it is time to go back to the drawing board. Of course, like some other books I have reviewed, this is one title which will be kept on my bookshelf and iPad for referencing from time to time.

While browsing through the Kinokuniya bookstore on a Saturday, I came across this book “The Founder’s Dilemma” by Noam Wasserman, which has the extraordinary nature of combining scholarly research and practical advice on dealing with a couple of sensitive issues from founding team dilemmas to division of equity and other financial rewards among the founding team.

Highly recommended for those who plan to embark or are already living the entrepreneurial lifestyle, it can serve as a guide to very tough situations for founders to evaluate the best possible way out.

Here are a set of a common questions that I often get in my day-to-day communication with people who are thinking of starting up and people who have already started their own companies.

1. Pre-Founding Situation: ”I have a great career at company X, should I quit and launch a start-up?” or “I have done some research on the idea but I am not sure if the market is receptive to my idea or my perceived situation may be unfavourable to me.” Even with the data that might back the venture, you might be caught in a hesitant mode because of family reasons.

2. Founding Team Issues: Here’s one which I know that it might have implications for start-ups seeking funding: “Should I launch the business myself or try to attract co-founders?” or “Should I ask my friends, family, acquaintances, co-workers or strangers to be my co-founders?”

Even you manage to overcome that, the next question is the role of each co-founder and his or her area of responsibility which probably intersects each other early but will become more specialized when the company grows. Then the next problem is about how a team should make decisions in the midst of facing a tough call that might affect the company in the long run. Of course, the most sensitive enquiry I often get is how the team should divide equity and financial rewards among the founding team.

3. Beyond the Founding Team: This is the part which both the growth of the start-up and gaps in the founding team’s abilities or resources will require them to add non-co-founders and people who might be able to scale their company, which brings a few dilemmas on hiring, dealing with investors and founder-CEO succession.

What Wasserman did in the book is collect 10,000 case studies of founders from various industries, and help to decipher how some of them might have a great story to tell but made decisions that are very absurd or not logical during any of the three stages of the companies.

He broke the problem down in a similar way to how venture capitalist Brad Feld did in his book “Venture Deals”: Entrepreneur seeks to balance between wealth and control, two important aspects of the business. Put simply, do you want to have control over the business or make a lot of money? The follow-up question to that is what kind of trade-offs can you make in the process?

The way the author distills decisions into a matter of wealth and control is, in my opinion, brilliant. The principal case studies used by the author are: Tim Westergren with Pandora Radio, Evan Williams with Odeo & Twitter, Genevieve Thiers of Sittercity and other founders. In each chapter, Wasserman organizes each founder’s dilemma and set up a framework that helps the founder to find an answer with the issue involved.

The most contentious and sensitive chapter is in the reward dilemmas in the form of equity splits and cash compensation. One of the things the author showed in the book is that natural inclinations about equity splits are wrong and counter-productive.

How does one circumnavigate these difficult and tough calls? There is an inherent conflict to how the founders’ contributions (relative or absolute) can never be precisely defined or measured while their equity stakes & cash compensation are specific down to the decimal point.

The key is that founding teams need to avoid potential disastrous consequences of early and static equity split. They need to devise a good compensation plan that one, reflects each member’s past and expected contributions and motivating each co-founder without seeming unfairness to the others, including future employees.

For some, it may be hard to read every page of this book. My suggestion is that you should use this book as a reference and look at the section whenever you faced one of the founder’s dilemmas in the process of your entrepreneurial journey.

Author’s note: Check out the reviews of “The Founder’s Dilemma” by Brad Feld & Eric Ries.

Also watch this video from the Kauffman’s Foundation which summarizes this book really well:

Finally, I found a book that echoed exactly the same view. “The Start-up of You” by Reid Hoffman (Co-founder of LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha describes in detail on how one can map the lessons of successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley into their own careers in an uncertain global economy out there. It might be interesting to draw out some of the important ideas sketched out in the book.

“All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed … finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became “labor” because they stamped us, “You are labor.” We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.” –Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Prize winner.

The theme of the book is simple: your future success whether in career or any project you undertake, depends on understanding several entrepreneurial strategies. Society can flourish when people start to think entrepreneurially.

The book illustrated on how globalization and technology have changed the way individuals can progress in their careers. Globalization allows corporations to distribute your jobs to cheaper labour out there, for example, outsourcing American manufacturing to China. Technology has been able to simplify workflow in order to utilize less labour in jobs that used to need more people.

After the book sets the stage, it introduces us to a few interesting case studies of successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and mapped out the best practices and lessons that individuals can adopt to manage their own career in the same way.

Most notably, they described a “permanent beta” mindset where all of us have “bugs”. Constant upgrade and development of our skill sets with optimism will allow us to go through a life marked with new challenges and opportunities.

In the chapters which followed, the authors lay out the lessons with case studies of various successful entrepreneurs and corporate executives, for example, the entrepreneurs who founded AirBnB, Paypal and LinkedIn and Sheryl Sandberg who transitioned to a corporate career with successful stints in Google and Facebook.

In each part of the book, the authors give some practical exercises for the individual to work out an action plan. Like entrepreneurs who have to deal with uncertainties, changes and constraints in their own careers, we have to take stock of our assets, aspirations and market realities to develop a competitive advantage.

“Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are. Similarly, it doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked or how passionate you are about an aspiration: If someone won’t pay you for your services in the career marketplace, it’s going to be a very hard slog. You aren’t entitled to everything” – Marc Andreessen

Next, the authors recommend the following strategies for your career which is analogous to building a start-up.

First develop a competitive advantage based on your assets, aspirations and values while adapt to the market realities, then work out a plan A, B all the way to Z and pivot if your initial plan did not work. Then build an extensive network where you build genuine relationships and maintain the relationships you build with the people within the network.

Finally, pursue breakout opportunities and take intelligent risks, and in the end you will be able to navigate your way and build a career.

Sounds simple, but most of us are often stuck in our day jobs, focusing on the details rather than taking a step back to see the big picture. Someone once told me that an entrepreneur needs to understand that everyone works for themselves, and their objective as entrepreneurs is to facilitate employees that the objective of working for yourself and the company stays the same.

Whether you are an entrepreneur or not, you should invest in yourself, and the start-up is you.

Somehow it felt like we were cheating.

I didn’t understand how a small team like ours could compete with “proper” companies. As I saw it, big companies had hundreds of suit-wearing geniuses in big offices churning out perfect software.

It was not until I worked for large organisations that I realised that the way most large companies develop software is often slow, unproductive or completely broken. It is like a sickness and even big names like IBM, Microsoft or Google aren’t immune. I now think that perhaps they had it right in 1999 at the first company I worked for all along.

Rework is a book on a similar subject. It takes apart the conventional wisdom of how to run a company and suggests different approaches.

It is written by owners of the small but very successful software company called 37Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier. The company produces a number of web applications and is also famous for inventing Ruby on Rails. For years they have been writing a popular blog called Signal vs. Noise. This book is very much based on that blog and if you have been an avoid reader you will not find much new. If you haven’t, it is a worthwhile and easy read.

The book itself is a series of pieces of advice with good reasoning behind them. There is nothing revolutionary or even partially new. However, all the ideas are expressed clearly, directly and at times they got me thinking. That is a good thing.

My three favourite nuggets of advice were:

- Planning is guessing
- Fire the workaholics
- Outside Money is Plan Z

If you went to business school the advice in this book will probably contradict what you were taught and give you a different perspective. It is up to you to work out whether the advice is good or not. That said a lot of it is common sense.

Rework is a short book and you should be able to read it in a few hours. If you are thinking of starting a software company and are put off because you think you need a massive amount of funding, hundreds of people or a uniquely brilliant idea to be successful read Rework and be prepared to have your mind changed.

Image credit: cjc4454. All opinions are made in the author’s individual capacity.

About The Author

Daniel Vaughan is a software development consultant from the UK and a regular visitor to Singapore. He graduated from the University of Canterbury with a BSc in Computer Science and Management Science in 1999. Since then he has worked at startups, multi-nationals and everything in between. He is currently a Web Specialist at a UK financial company.

Managing human relations within a company is not an easy task, particularly in a startup. People comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and not to mention that there is always a colleague who’s hostile and arrogant, a client who’s furious or too picky, a staff who is cynical and don’t get things done. In dealing with these rough and tough situations, what are the possible strategies that one can use to engage people back into productive communication? That’s what Mark Goulston’s book is about. In Mark’s own words, “People have have their own needs, desires and agendas … To cope, they throw up barricades that make it difficult to reach when your goals are in sync with their own.” While reading the book, Goulston threw very common situations that one will either face working in a startup with other founders, or talking to an investor or handling difficult people.

In the book, Goulston presented his own treatise in productive communication in four parts. The first part puts into perspective how the persuasion cycle works and throws a little science on how rational thought can be overtaken by an amygdala hijack (coined by Daniel Goldman, the author of Emotional Intelligence) i.e the rational part of the brain for the individual has lost control and it is impossible for you to talk facts or reason. Also, the author presented a simple story to show that getting through to somebody is not a difficult endeavour. From the start of the book, he brought out his point through a simple hostage situation and explains how the persuasion cycle works in the folllowing order: (i) from resisting to listening, (ii) from listening to considering, (iii) from considering to willing to do, (iv) from willing to do to doing and finally (v) from doing to glad they did and continuing to do.

Once the big picture is set, Goulston followed with his nine basic rules and twelve quick techniques (that make up the 2nd and 3rd part of the book) that one can apply to handle people across different points within the persuasion cycle. Of the nine, there are two rules which might be of interest to founders and employees in any startup.

The rule “Make People Feel Valuable” focuses on the insight that everyone competes for time but no one should need to compete for importance and offers the action point for the user to identify a person at work who constantly creates problems where none exist. In fact, the author recommends the following solution that the next time when the same person complains to you, just say, “What you’re saying to me is so important that I’d like you to take responsibility for coming up with a solution. When you have some ideas, call me, and we’ll get together and go over your solutions. I really appreciate your help.” .

Another interesting rule is “Check your dissonance at the door” where people might slide into unnecessary arguments abouut something in the workplace, particularly when the employee and boss are in conflict over how to solve a problem. In the book, Goulston prescribed a solution to the reader in how to defuse the solution by offering a useful insight from Warren Bennis, “When you really get where people are coming from – and they get that you get them – they’re more likely to let you take them where you want them to go.”

Finally, at the end of the book, Goulston provided seven fast fixes for seven situations which most people encounter in business. Of the two situations, it will be good for the reader to look at. One of the situations called “The Team from Hell” is a situation when a project manager is put in charge with a team with four different types of personalities: one who is really smart and you can count on, one who wants to do the least amount of work possible, one who spends all the time complaining about everyone and finally one, who wanted your assignment and is more experienced than you. The author tries to dissect the four personalities and the rules of engagement for each one of them. In fact, one of the main strategies is identify the “silos” they put up towards you.

All in all, the book is an easy read and can serve as a guide from time to time, particularly for those who are in leadership positions or even working under someone whom they deemed as “unreasonable” or “horrible”. From a personal point of view, I find it a good read that can help me to reflect about different situations I am being placed under.

Related Videos & Links:
[1] Jason Calacanis interviewing Mark Goulston in This Week in Startups #TWiST episode 21

In this book, Fannin divided the book into three parts. She explored the rise of Chinese internet companies from the perspective of the entrepreneurs. She picked the six most successful companies which she labelled the copycats, i.e. there is a western counterpart to these companies doing exactly the same thing. In this group, she picked Baidu, Alibaba, Dangdang, Chinacars,  Oak Pacific Interactive and Bokee. Of the six, I am more familiar with Baidu and Alibaba. She explored a bit more in depth about the founders. From the group, there are two groups of founders. Either these founders have spent their time in the US or they are made in China. She also described some of the strategies how these local companies have given the tech giants such eBay, Paypal and Google a hard time.

The next part of the book deals with the investors. Of interest, she discuss why some venture capitalists from Silicon Valley (Perkins, DFJ and Sequoia) have moved to China while some do not. For example, Guy Kawasaki is one of those who did not want to go to China. In fact Don Valentine, the godfather in Silicon Valley has once felt that China is too far and too foreign, and crippled with intellectual property theft, immature stock exchanges and regulatory problems before 2003, and he changed his mind after Sequoia has deeply invested in China. The last part of the book, the author identified the innovators, and selected five of them: Lingtu, Oriental Wisdom, Pingco, Maxthon and Lattice Power Corporation.

If you are looking for a book to give you a headstart on the up and coming Chinese tech companies, then Silicon Dragons will be a good one to start off with.

Author’s note: This review is first published in his personal blog.

Ultimately, I prefer an agnostic view of entrepreneurs. Here are some interesting issues to why I think that this is a must-read book for those out there. Before you really think of committing yourself to start a business, it might be good to learn some lessons from this book, because a lot of things you hear about are likely to anomalies rather than the norm.

My first impression from reading the book is that I will ask someone working in any of the government agency in Singapore to read it. In some sense, the author has specifically targeted the work for policy makers in the United States. To me, some of the lessons can be adapted for the case of Singapore. One interesting thing that the author has done is to look at some data on entrepreneurship based on several studies.You will be interested to learn that America is not as entrepreneurial as you think it would be. In fact, the data is showing that the proportion of the US population that is starting business is not growing but possibly shrinking. In fact, the author corroborated data with the US Small Business Association. If it does not convince you, On the self-employment rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, US is the third lowest with countries and rank lower than countries you would perceive to be entrepreneurial: Korea, UK, Japan, Turkey and Italy. The number of new businesses emerging is significantly much more higher than in China as compared to the US based on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2005 report.One thing I enjoyed about the book is in the third chapter which he explored the genetic makeup of an entrepreneur. Specifically, he attacked the issue on what makes entrepreneurs tick. In fact, he demonstrated an interesting argument against people who thinks that entrepreneurship is a young people’s game. In reality, the chance of setting up a business at the age of 45-64 is far higher than the age groups of 18-24, 25-34 and 35-44 added together. There goes the argument that you should think of becoming an entrepreneur below 27. The argument is to tell you that there is no age limit to become an entrepreneur, and most people become entrepreneurs for reasons which you don’t read from Bill Gates, for example, they prefer to work for themselves at a lower wage as compare to working for others where they can’t find satisfaction in their lives.Here are some of the myths he talks about in the book which you might find disagreeable and surprising (which I will quote directly from the book):

• - The typical entrepreneur doesn’t start a business because of a desire to make money, for the thrill of starting a business, to support their families, or become well known; the typical entrepreneur starts a business because he doesn’t like working for someone else.
• - Education doesn’t hinder entrepreneurship; getting an education makes people more likely to start businesses.
• - Working for someone else increases the chances that a person will start a business.
• - It does not take a lot of money to start a business; the typical new business established in the United States take less than $25K in initial capital.
• - Informal investors are a more important source of capital for startups than venture capitalists.

Actually, if you think that the author seems to hammer those who want to promote entrepreneurship, I think that you are in for a surprise. The author is actually teaching entrepreneurship as a professor at an established university in the US. Somehow, I think that it is a good idea to write this book to debunk the romantic conceptions which some of us might have about being entrepreneurs.Author’s note: This review is first published in his personal blog.

Lately, there is a lot of talk about CPF changes and compulsory annuities. No matter how much everyone may be happy or unhappy about the changes proposed to our social security, it is important to ensure that you can manage your finances. Sometime back, I recommended Christopher Ng Wai Chung’s Growing Your Tree of Prosperity and some of you have read excerpts from his second book. Of course, the focus of this post is to present a review for his sequel “Harvesting the Fruits of Propserity”.

If you have read the first book, my sense is that you will like the second book. All in all, Chris started with the story about his Belgian friend Pierre (not his real name) who committed suicide and touched on the realities of today’s working world. While many people are dreaming of becoming the next big millionaires, this book is dedicated to people who want to work for a living and carry on normal lives in Singapore, despite the unpredictable forces of globalization which threaten our livelihoods at every moment. One example, we know, is that some of our jobs are now constantly outsourced to other places like India and China.

Here are a few lessons which I believe that many can draw from reading the book:

• Are you a scholar or a statistic?: While most of us agree that meritocracy, pragmatism and capitalism are the three bedrocks to a typical Singaporean view of life, the author offers a few glimpses of the dark side or what people don’t really see is a problem. I agree with Chris’ view that everyone puts the blame on the Singapore government and not themselves when they cannot live beyond their own means. What makes it more convincing is that the author exposes the few truths that most have to live with, for example, (i) the pragmatism to the point of failure: Singaporeans are efficient and productive in their work, and they are practical, but they can choose to neglect networking and realizing that they become foot soldiers to people who can outsource their jobs out, (ii) it helps to be born in the right family: Yes, some people are lucky and they are born into well to do families. It is a misconception to keep thinking that they are going to be playboys and squander their money. Some of these better off people, utilize the advantages and move to better and greater pastures. Despite all these weaknesses, there is still a way out for the normal Singaporeans to survive and perhaps make their lives better.
• MLM is a problem/disaster and not a solution: MLM is not just the bane for entrepreneurs but also for many people who are dreaming of making more money. The solution, as the author offers (which I believe to be good solutions) are to be part of the knowledge-based economy, for example, being a freelance designer by night while working in a day job.
• Charting your own finances and moving towards proper financial planning: In this book, the author lays out how one can tighten his expenses by keeping a record of daily expenditure. Later, he explained all the know-hows to understand what your CPF and insurances does for you. The author also offer some tips on what types of insurance are suitable for your own purposes and in the later chapter some ideas on doing proper investments. In the book, the author did take the pains to break down different insurance products such as life insurance policies, term life insurance, group life insurance, whole life insurance and investment-linked insurance policies.

Someone asked me why I am not reviewing other local publications about the habits of millionaires, and instead, recommending highly the books written by Chris Ng. My answer is that if they do have the secrets of success, they won’t be writing books on those topics. What appeals to me in both books, is that they promote the virtue of a person being down to earth (or in Chinese, 脚踏实地) and also tries to convince the reader that there are adequate financial planning solutions and hard work (for example, starting your own freelance jobs or start-up) than getting yourself into trouble with silly MLM schemes or some internet marketing shams.

For those might not know, the author of this book went through the stage of self-publishing for the first book and got it to market on his own. Like any entrepreneur, he has done his work and also put in his own money to see it through. The same lessons from his book and real life, I believe, are translated in the same analogy to how successful entrepreneurs work with their start-ups in the same way. If it is so easy to be successful in being an entrepreneur, we won’t be seeing one out of ten succeed in a few years time. A lot of hard work, patience and perseverance are required in that process. Most importantly, till the end, the book promotes a healthy message of optimism in life and not let the daily woes bogged you down. That is perhaps what I feel is the best thing for everyone who are working hard in their daily lives be it their jobs, family and dreams.

Editor’s Note: SG Entrepreneurs wishes Chris a happy and blissful marriage as he will be tying the knot in December 2007, and also more good sales on this local publication.

Related Links:
1. Human Capital by Chris Ng
2. MLM and Immaunel Kant by Chris Ng
3. See some of other works by Chris in Intelligent Singaporean.

About the author: Christopher Ng Wai Chung, 32, is an IT Project manager who dabbles in personal finance and wealth management. His own blog can be found in treeofprosperity.blogspot.com. He can be reached at this email address.

Broadly speaking, in the book, Chip and Dan Heath take the pain to simplify what a sticky idea is really about. They are inspired by the book “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell, and sought to make this book a complement to it. Their idea is to identify the traits that make an idea stick. They broke it down into these cardinal principles:

• 1. Simple: How do we find the essential core of our ideas? If you can reduce everything down a small set of points (like 3 points which a lot of good debaters use), you will be able to convince people easily. You need to say something short which can make the idea so simple that it sticks on the person’s head like a profound truth. The golden rule as recommended by the book is to have a one sentence statement so profound that any individual can spend a lifetime following it.
• 2. Unexpected: How do you get people to pay attention to your ideas and sustain their interest for a long time? You need to break their expectations and be counter-intuitive. We can use surprise as an emotion to grab people’s attention. Of course, you cannot do it all the time, but you must constantly create alertness and cause focus. Apple does that all the time with the next generation iPods and iPhones, and the Apple fans are always thinking about what comes next. By surprising them, you can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge.
• 3. Concrete: How do we make our ideas clear? We need to embed ideas in terms of human actions or make use of the five senses by others. Mission statements, synergies, strategies and visions are often ambiguous to the point that it’s useless. Sticky ideas usually come with a concrete image. Details are important sometimes in making an idea stick and make it indefensible against any doubt. You remember L’oreal for cosmetics, because of the tagline “Because I am worth it”.
• 4. Credible: How do you make people believe in your ideas? You need authority and credibility. Sticky ideas have credentials and we need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves. When you are building your ideas, you need to make comparisons like how your idea can do better than the other ideas in the marketplace.
• 5. Emotional: How do you make people care about your ideas? You need to make them feel something for it. We are made in such a way that we feel things for people, not for abstractions. The hard part is to find the right emotion to harness. For example, why is it that it’s so hard to get young people to quit smoking? The reason is that they are rebelling against the establishment in telling them not to do something.
• 6. Stories: How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. A lot of people are interested in how this idea come about. The more we talk about it, the more people will buy into the story.

Of course, throughout in the book, Chip and Dan Heath have established examples to demostrate whether particular stories or ideas stick in our minds. They have shown with case histories and thought-provoking anecdotes. OF course, I actually think that this book can also be a complement to another book I highly recommend: Cialdini’s Influence. They also offer a communication framework in the final pages to talk about ways in how you can make an idea stick.