Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

“World-class customer service” is abstract. A Nordie ironing a customer’s shirt is concrete. Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. If you’ve got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren’t certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language.

For an example that unites all three of the “internal credibility” sources—details, statistics, and the Sinatra Test—we

This challenge—asking customers to test a claim for themselves—is a “testable credential.” Testable credentials can provide an enormous credibility boost, since they essentially allow your audience members to “try before they buy.”

“The trite expression we always use is No plan survives contact with the enemy,” says Colonel Tom Kolditz, the head of the behavioral sciences division at West Point. “You may start off trying to fight your plan, but the enemy gets a vote. Unpredictable things happen—the weather changes, a key asset is destroyed, the enemy responds in a way you don

Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.

Denning defines a springboard story as a story that lets people see how an existing problem might change. Springboard stories tell people about possibilities.

Then Covey superimposes a very human metaphor over the statistics. He says, “If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would,

Competition: “Sony will beat Bell Labs in making a transistor radio work.” Quality: “Sony will be the world’s most respected manufacturer of radios.” Innovation: “Sony will create the most advanced radios in the world.” Here’s the idea Ibuka proposed to his team: a “pocketable radio.”

Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.