The Entrepreneur’s Bookshelf: Made to Stick

How do you know when an idea is a good one? Why do some ideas stick and some others come unstuck? Here’s a book which I highly recommend to you when you are trying to brainstorm for new business ideas. The book Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die by Chip and Dan Heath, seems to be an ideal companion for those who are seeking simple and interesting business ideas. We take the opportunity to review this interesting book and expound the main principles behind.

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.

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