To Dad, for driving an old tan Chevette while putting us through college. To Mom, for making us breakfast every day for eighteen years. Each. INTRODUCTION WHAT STICKS? Kidney heist. Movie popcorn. Sticky = understandable, memorable, and effective in changing thought or behavior. Halloween candy. Six principles: SUCCESs. The villain: Curse of Knowledge. It’s hard to be a tapper. Creativity starts with templates. CHAPTER 1 SIMPLE Commander’s Intent. THE low-fare airline. Burying the lead and the inverted pyramid. It’s the economy, stupid. Decision paralysis. Clinic: Sun exposure. Names, names, and names. Simple = core + compact. Proverbs. The Palm Pilot wood block. Using what’s there. The pomelo schema. High concept: Jaws on a spaceship. Generative analogies: Disney’s “cast members.” CHAPTER 2 UNEXPECTED The successful flight safety announcement. The surprise brow. Gimmicky surprise and “postdictability.” Breaking the guessing machine. “The Nordie who …” “No school next Thursday.” Clinic: Too much on foreign aid? Saturn’s rings. Movie turning points. Gap theory of curiosity. Clinic: Fund-raising. Priming the gap: NCAA football. Pocketable radio. Man on the moon. CHAPTER 3 CONCRETE Sour grapes. Landscapes as eco-celebrities. Teaching subtraction with less abstraction. Soap-opera accounting. Velcro theory of memory. Brown eyes, blue eyes. Engineers vs. manufacturers. The Ferraris go to Disney World. White things. The leather computer. Clinic: Oral rehydration therapy. Hamburger Helper and Saddleback Sam. CHAPTER 4 CREDIBLE The Nobel-winning scientist no one believed. Flesh-eating bananas. Authority and antiauthority. Pam Laffin, smoker. Powerful details. Jurors and the Darth Vader toothbrush. The dancing seventy-three year old. Statistics: Nuclear warheads as BBs. The human-scale principle. Officemates as a soccer team. Clinic: Shark attack hysteria. The Sinatra Test. Transporting Bollywood movies. Edible fabric. Where’s the beef? Testable credentials. The Emotional Tank. Clinic: Our flawed intuition. NBA rookie camp. CHAPTER 5 EMOTIONAL The Mother Teresa principle: If I look at the one, I will act. Beating smoking with the Truth. Semantic stretch and why unique isn’t unique. Reclaiming “sportsmanship.” Schlocky but masterful mail-order ads. WIIFY. Cable television in Tempe. Avoiding Maslow’s basement. Dining in Iraq. The popcorn popper and political science. Clinic: Why study algebra? Don’t mess with Texas. Who cares about duo piano? Creating empathy. CHAPTER 6 STORIES The day the heart monitor lied. Shop talk at Xerox. Helpful and unhelpful visualizations. Stories as flight simulators. Clinic: Dealing with problem students. Jared, the 425-pound fast-food dieter. Spotting inspiring stories. The Challenge Plot. The Connection Plot. The Creativity Plot. Springboard stories at the World Bank: A health worker in Zambia. How to make presenters angry with stories. EPILOGUE WHAT STICKS Nice guys finish last. Elementary, my dear Watson. The power of spotting. Curse of Knowledge again. Pay attention, understand, believe, care, and act. Sticky problems: symptoms and solutions. John F. Kennedy versus Floyd Lee. STICKY ADVICE TALKING STRATEGY. Cranium’s CHIFF. Inert strategies. Costco’s “salmon stories.” Avoiding decision paralysis. Muckers. Australian bank: “We sure as hell don’t want to be third.” TEACHING THAT STICKS. Mugs as variables. The San Diego Zoo’s food- stealing pony. Teaching functions with crickets. Using emotion: Students as Civil War surgeons. Dissolving eyeballs. Rubber duckies that circled the world. UNSTICKING AN IDEA. “Wedge-drivers” in World War II. Fight sticky with stickier. The Goodtimes Virus parody. How auto “reliability races” convinced people to sit on an explosion. MAKING IDEAS STICK: THE EASY REFERENCE GUIDE NOTES ACKNOWLEDGMENTS WHAT STICKS? A friend of a friend of ours is a frequent business traveler. Let’s call him Dave. Dave was recently in Atlantic City for an important meeting with clients. Afterward, he had some time to kill before his flight, so he went to a local bar for a drink. He’d just finished one drink when an attractive woman approached and asked if she could buy him another. He was surprised but flattered. Sure, he said. The woman walked to the bar and brought back two more drinks—one for her and one for him. He thanked her and took a sip. And that was the last thing he remembered. Rather, that was the last thing he remembered until he woke up, disoriented, lying in a hotel bathtub, his body submerged in ice. He looked around frantically, trying to figure out where he was and how he got there. Then he spotted the note: DON’T MOVE. CALL 911. A cell phone rested on a small table beside the bathtub. He picked it up and called 911, his fingers numb and clumsy from the ice. The operator seemed oddly familiar with his situation. She said, “Sir, I want you to reach behind you, slowly and carefully. Is there a tube protruding from your lower back?” Anxious, he felt around behind him. Sure enough, there was a tube. The operator said, “Sir, don’t panic, but one of your kidneys has been harvested. There’s a ring of organ thieves operating in this city, and they got to you. Paramedics are on their way. Don’t move until they arrive.” You’ve just read one of the most successful urban legends of the past fifteen years. The first clue is the classic urban-legend opening: “A friend of a friend …” Have you ever noticed that our friends’ friends have much more interesting lives than our friends themselves? You’ve probably heard the Kidney Heist tale before. There are hundreds of versions in circulation, and all of them share a core of three elements: (1) the drugged drink, (2) the ice-filled bathtub, and (3) the kidney-theft punch line. One version features a married man who receives the drugged drink from a prostitute he has invited to his room in Las Vegas. It’s a morality play with kidneys. Imagine that you closed the book right now, took an hourlong break, then called a friend and told the story, without rereading it. Chances are you could tell it almost perfectly. You might forget that the traveler was in Atlantic City for “an important meeting with clients”—who cares about that? But you’d remember all the important stuff. The Kidney Heist is a story that sticks. We understand it, we remember it, and we can retell it later. And if we believe it’s true, it might change our behavior permanently—at least in terms of accepting drinks from attractive strangers. Contrast the Kidney Heist story with this passage, drawn from a paper distributed by a nonprofit organization. “Comprehensive community building naturally lends itself to a return-on-investment rationale that can be modeled, drawing on existing practice,” it begins, going on to argue that “[a] factor constraining the flow of resources to CCIs is that funders must often resort to targeting or categorical requirements in grant making to ensure accountability.” Imagine that you closed the book right now and took an hourlong break. In fact, don’t even take a break; just call up a friend and retell that passage without rereading it. Good luck. Is this a fair comparison—an urban legend to a cherry-picked bad passage? Of course not. But here’s where things get interesting: Think of our two examples as two poles on a spectrum of memorability. Which sounds closer to the communications you encounter at work? If you’re like most people, your workplace gravitates toward the nonprofit pole as though it were the North Star. Maybe this is perfectly natural; some ideas are inherently interesting and some are inherently uninteresting. A gang of organ thieves—inherently interesting! Nonprofit financial strategy—inherently uninteresting! It’s the nature versus nurture debate applied to ideas: Are ideas born interesting or made interesting? Well, this is a nurture book. So how do we nurture our ideas so they’ll succeed in the world? Many of us struggle with how to communicate ideas effectively, how to get our ideas to make a difference. A biology teacher spends an hour explaining mitosis, and a week later only three kids remember what it is. A manager makes a speech unveiling a new strategy as the staffers nod their heads enthusiastically, and the next day the frontline employees are observed cheerfully implementing the old one. 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. Why? Is it simply because hijacked kidneys sell better than other topics? Or is it possible to make a true, worthwhile idea circulate as effectively as this false idea?