Book Recommendation: Made to Stick

What makes some ideas work and others not work? Made to Stick is one of those books that you end up recommending to everybody you know, and particularly to everyone you know who has anything to do with small business (embraceable business) and marketing. Why is it that some urban legends spread like epidemics and stay forever? How and why were some spectacularly effective marketing campaigns developed? How does that relate to what you’re doing today?

Authors Chip and Dan Heath are brothers. Chip teaches organizational behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Dan is a consultant with Duke Corporate Education. What they do together is pull apart the mechanics of “sticky” ideas and put them back together in a logical, organized, useful, and ultimately, fascinating book.

I particularly liked a portion near the end that points to stories as one of the better way to make ideas stick.  Obviously that’s a bit of self interest, because I believe in stories for communication of ideas and it’s not for nothing that ‘stories’ is a part of the title of this blog.

The website for this book has excerpts worth reading.

You wouldn’t think a 59-year-old lifetime West Coast person (me) would particularly enjoy driving a rented car alone on a Friday evening from Philadelphia to Cape Cod. However, audible books can really turn something like this around, and this book did that for me.

I actually ordered the Microsoft Reader ebook version after finishing it, because this is one of those books I want to be able to browse through as needed. It’s also a great companion piece to some other books I’ve recommended on this blog.

— Tim