Made to Stick (Chip Heath and Dan Heath)

A great book on how to get your message across effectively (and by that the author means remembered and acted upon).This should be prescribed reading for managers and team-leaders as most of our role is based on effective communications.

The book uses it's own techniques to get its message across with liberal examples of stories to engage you with real individuals who achieved a powerful communications success.

SIMPLICITY We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission—sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound.
UNEXPECTEDNESS For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity.
CONCRETENESS Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors because our brains are wired to remember concrete data.
CREDIBILITY  We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a "try before you buy" philosophy for the world of ideas.
EMOTIONS We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness.
STORIES Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment.  We engage mentally when we hear a story about another individual



Locn. 180-82 a crash course in what makes great teachers great. And he found that, while each teacher had a unique style, collectively their instructional methodologies were almost identical.
Locn. 298-99 To summarize, here's our checklist for creating a successful idea: a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. A clever observer will note that this sentence can be compacted into the acronym SUCCESs.
Locn. 327-29 This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.
Locn. 419-21 plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that planning has taken place. The planning process forces people to think through the right issues. But as for the plans themselves, Kolditz says, "They just don't work on the battlefield." So, in the 1980s the Army adapted its planning process, inventing a concept called Commander's Intent (CI).
Locn. 448-49 The value of the Intent comes from its singularity. You can't have five North Stars, you can't have five "most important goals," and you can't have five Commander's Intents.
Locn. 721-23 We know that sentences are better than paragraphs. Two bullet points are better than five. Easy words are better than hard words. It's a bandwidth issue: The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.
Locn. 819-22 We've seen that compact ideas are stickier, but that compact ideas alone aren't valuable—only ideas with profound compactness are valuable. So, to make a profound idea compact you've got to pack a lot of meaning into a little bit of messaging. And how do you do that? You use flags. You tap the existing memory terrain of your audience. You use what's already there.
Locn. 883-84 If a message can't be used to make predictions or decisions, it is without value, no matter how accurate or comprehensive it is.
Locn. 991-92 The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns.
Locn. 1092-94 To be surprising, an event can't be predictable. Surprise is the opposite of predictability. But, to be satisfying, surprise must be "post-dictable." The twist makes sense after you think about it, but it's not something you would have seen coming. PHRAUG is post-dictable, but HENSION isn't.
Locn. 1116-19 So, a good process for making your ideas stickier is: (1) Identify the central message you need to communicate—find the core; (2) Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message—i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Why isn't it already happening naturally? (3) Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audience's guessing machines along the critical, counterintuitive dimension. Then, once their guessing machines have failed, help them refine their machines.
Locn. 1250-51 Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. "You've heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?" he says. "Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience."
Locn. 1303-5 In 1994, George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University, provided the most comprehensive account of situational interest. It is surprisingly simple. Curiosity, he says, happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge.
Locn. 1313-15 we need to open gaps before we close them. Our tendency is to tell people the facts. First, though, they must realize that they need these facts. The trick to convincing people that they need our message, according to Loewenstein, is to first highlight some specific knowledge that they're missing.
Locn. 1368-71 Making people commit to a prediction can help prevent overconfidence. Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard, came up with a pedagogical innovation known as "concept testing." Every so often in his classes, Mazur will pose a conceptual question and then ask his students to vote publicly on the answer. The simple act of committing to an answer makes the students more engaged and more curious about the outcome.
Locn. 1432-35 Knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first. "Here's what you know. Now here's what you're missing." Alternatively, you can set context so people care what comes next. It's no accident that mystery novelists and crossword-puzzle writers give us clues. When we feel that we're close to the solution of a puzzle, curiosity takes over and propels us to the finish.
Locn. 1810-11 Researchers get excited about pushing the boundaries of a technology, making products that are complex and sophisticated, while customers generally seek out products that are easy and reliable.
Locn. 1842-44 Because concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain. For another example of this phenomenon, consider these two statements: (1) Think of five silly things that people have done in the world in the past ten years. (2) Think about five silly things your child has done in the past ten years.
Locn. 2212-14 This is the most important thing to remember about using statistics effectively. Statistics are rarely meaningful in and of themselves. Statistics will, and should, almost always be used to illustrate a relationship. It's more important for people to remember the relationship than the number.
Locn. 2574-75 These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people's charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.
Locn. 2758-61 The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments (the world's best seed!) that they forget to tell us why we should buy (the world's best lawn!). An old advertising maxim says you've got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don't buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children's pictures.
Locn. 2846-49 Here's the twist, though: When people are asked which is the best positioning for other people (not them), they rank No. 1 most fulfilling, followed by No. 2. That is, we are motivated by self-esteem, but others are motivated by down payments. This single insight explains almost everything about the way incentives are structured in most large organizations.
Locn. 3131-33 How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities—not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be
Locn. 3252-54 Simulating past events is much more helpful than simulating future outcomes. In fact, the gap between the groups opened up immediately after the first session in the lab. By the first night, the event-simulation people were already experiencing a positive mood boost compared with the other two groups.
Locn. 3273-75 Notice that these visualizations focus on the events themselves— the process, rather than the outcomes. No one has ever been cured of a phobia by imagining how happy they'll be when it's gone.
Locn. 3606-9 The way you deliver a message to them is a cue to how they should react. If you make an argument, you're implicitly asking them to evaluate your argument—judge it, debate it, criticize it—and then argue back, at least in their minds. But with a story, Denning argues, you engage the audience—you are involving people with the idea, asking them to participate with you.
Locn. 3699-3702 If the world takes our ideas and changes them—or accepts some and discards others—all we need to decide is whether the mutated versions are still core. If they are—as with "It's the economy, stupid"—then we should humbly embrace the audience's judgment. Ultimately, the test of our success as idea creators isn't whether people mimic our exact words, it's whether we achieve our goals.