Summary: Made to Stick

Review and Analysis of the Heath Brothers' Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9782806229687
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

The must-read summary of Chip and Dan Heath's book: `Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die`

This complete summary of the ideas from Chip and Dan Heath's book `Made to Stick` explains what 'sticky' ideas are: ideas that are highly memorable and exceptionally long-lasting in their impact. In this useful summary, you will find an analysis of some of the most successful sticky ideas of the past, along with a checklist of the six main principles at their core. This book provides you with all the information you need to make your product memorable and to make your own ideas stick. 

Added-value of this summary: 
• Save time 
• Understand the key concepts 
• Increase your business knowledge

To learn more, read the summary of `Made to Stick` and discover how to make your ideas impossible to forget!

Summary of Made To Stick (Chip Heath and Dan Heath)

1. Simple

State the essential core of your idea succinctly

The ideal here is to create ideas which are both simple and profound, like proverbs which exist in every culture around the world. To come up with something profound, you’ll probably need to forego all of the supporting points you could mention and instead find a simple way to express one main point. This is not as easy as it sounds.

To simplify your message doesn’t mean to “dumb it down” or to make it into a fluffy “sound bite”. Instead, what you’re trying to do is to get to the essential core of your idea. Usually, to get to that core, you have to weed out all of the superfluous elements which confuse rather than amplify or clarify. To create a sticky message, you have to then communicate the core idea and leave everything else out.

To see how this is done in practice, consider some successful sticky messages:

• During Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign for the Presidency of the United States, James Carville was one of Clinton’s key political advisors. He came up with three phrases which could become the core message of Clinton’s campaign. Of those three choices, one resonated well with everyone: “It’s the economy, stupid.” This subsequently became the theme of Clinton’s campaign, even though Bill Clinton personally wanted to talk about lots of other things. His advisers kept bringing him back to this one single idea again and again and eventually the voters got the idea.
• Everyone knows Southwest Airlines is a company which encourages its employees to have fun on the job, but that isn’t what makes the company successful. Instead, Southwest focuses on just one single goal: to become THE lowest-fare airline by reducing costs. As a result of that intensive focus, everyone knows where they stand with the company’s management. If you have an idea that will help them cut costs, they will welcome you with open arms. If your new idea isn’t aligned with that aim, they won’t have much time to talk with you.
• In the 1980s, the United States Army changed the way it drafted its orders. Planners were aware even their best laid plans were often made ineffective by the actions of the enemy ten minutes into a battle. Therefore, they developed a concept called “Commander’s Intent”. This means whenever an order is given, there is a crisp, plain-talk statement included which specifies the order’s goal. Soldiers are then able to improvise as required to respond to the actions of the enemy. Having the commander’s intent spelled out means the most important goal of the operation is articulated and understood by everyone with hands-on involvement. The person who is out in the field can improvise because the ultimate goal is clear.

Almost always, when you get to the true core of your message, you’ll find the idea can be expressed compactly rather than requiring extensive verbiage. This is what makes proverbs so powerful and universal. They are short and simple statements which pack dollops of common sense and wisdom into a few words. Proverbs are easily and readily expressed, but can take a lifetime to live. For example:

• “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”.
• “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.

Ideas which are simple have an undeniable elegance and utility. They cut to the chase because they fight the temptation to do too much. However, there’s no use being compact but saying nothing. In addition to delivering a compact idea, sticky messages are also quite profound. They say something worthwhile. A good, practical way of achieving this is to use a “schema” or analogies which compares something which is unknown with some idea which is very familiar.

This technique is commonly used in Hollywood to pitch new movie concepts and ideas. For example:

• Speed is Die Hard on a bus.
• Alien is Jaws on a spaceship.
• E.T. is a lost alien befriends lonely boy to get home.

This technique is also widely used in teaching and in business:

• The human brain is like a computer only vastly more powerful and adaptable.
• An atom is like a miniature solar system, with the nucleus taking the place of the sun and electrons taking the place of the various planets orbiting the sun.
• Disney doesn’t hire “employees” at its theme parks – it hires “performers” who are expected to entertain the guests at the same time as they complete their assigned tasks.

Sticky ideas use these same principles. They express something substantive and important in a concise way which is easy for people to pick up on and then later recall. In many ways, sticky ideas are constructed like newspaper articles in that they have the most important idea right out in front where it is obvious.

This inverted pyramid format is great for readers because they can read the first sentence and then decide whether or not they need to read the rest of the story. This is a...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Book Presentation
• Summary of Made To Stick (Chip Heath and Dan Heath)
• About the Summary Publisher
• Copyright