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| Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die | 
 enlarge | Authors: Chip Heath, Dan Heath
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $13.96
You Save: $11.04 (44%)
New (63) Used (30) Collectible (7) from $10.75
Avg. Customer Rating:  226 reviews
Sales Rank: 338
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.3
ISBN: 1400064287
Dewey Decimal Number: 302.13
EAN: 9781400064281
ASIN: 1400064287
Publication Date: January 2, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Not Good February 11, 2007
23 out of 55 found this review helpful
Depending what you are trying to get out of the book, this book didn't do it for ME.
I own a 15 year old Public Relations Firm as marketing and sales knowledge is critical. I purchased the book based on the great reviews and couldn't understand why?
For a book that espouses "stickiness", it was a hard read. I had to force myself to read each chapter.
One example is an analogy of trying to explain a "Pomelo", which is a sort-of fruit, well you can say it's like a grapefruit, sort of.
Quick Question: If you mixed pomelo juice with orange juice would it taste good? You might make a guess. But you must put a "flag" on it and tell people that a pomelo is "like" a grapefruit, you call up a mental image of a grapefruit. So, if you ask me what a Pomelo is i would tell you "it's like a grapefruit"(Now you know what a Pomelo is like). Wow, this is cutting edge, isn't it?
Is this a sick joke? This Pomelo story rambles and rambles until you feel like your reading what you kindergarden children are reading.
The above-mentioned is the type of mindless rambling that this book reads like. If your into this type of psyco-babble, this book is for you. If you value your precious time, stay away, far away.
If you are looking for great sales and marketing books, this is not it. There are many great (obscure) books on the market that will help you sell and market effectively which i would like to recommend but that wouldn't be fair to the authors of this mind numbing book. It was my mistake for buying it.
I know it looks like this review is a contrarian attack, but i really wanted to like this book. My apologies to the authors.
 The most important book you will read this year January 11, 2007
21 out of 25 found this review helpful
If you need to communicate ideas, if you are a businessperson, marketer, teacher, clergyperson, politician, parent or spouse, you need this book.
If you are a reader of Malcolm Gladwell, if you enjoyed any of Seth Godin's books, if you want to stay out of a bathtub filled with ice with one of your vital organs removed, you need this book.
Seriously, Chip and Dan have taken a concept that was briefly introduced in Gladwell's The Tipping Point -- the characteristics of ideas that are memorable and longstanding -- and turned it into a recipe book for constructing memborable stories.
The book is organized around a set of six powerful principles that anyone can use to transform themselves into more effective communicators. It's written with humor and real-life examples that make it a quick read, but also one that "sticks" with you long after you put it down.
Keep one for yourself and buy copies for everyone who inflicts PowerPoint presentations on you at work. You'll be glad you did.
For teachers and ministers also January 11, 2007
21 out of 29 found this review helpful
I have been in church ministry for 8 years and this book has helped me do a better job of crafting lessons and sermons.
I particularly liked the concept of the "Curse of Knowledge" - that sometimes our knowldge of a subject makes it harder to teach others because we can't remember what it was like to "not know." As a minister I need to remember to unpack terms like salvation, sin, holiness, repentence, etc that are familiar to me but not others.
I loved the example of the tapping exercise - pick a song and have someone try to guess what it is through your tapping it onto a tabletop. The frustration you will feel when they can't guess it is like the frustration a teacher feels when his/her students don't get a lesson. Since our students can not read our minds, we need to use methods that will help the message "stick" and this book will help you do that.
Also, it seems like most people started with Malcolm Gladwell's books and got to this book but I started with Made To Stick and am now reading some of Gladwell's stuff!
Not much of substance December 3, 2007
21 out of 51 found this review helpful
I dislike giving bad reviews when I know the author has tried hard to create a book of value. In addition, this book received so many raves that I was expecting to get something of real interest. I didn't.
I was half-way through the book and couldn't tell what it was trying to say and I realized there was nothing there for me. When I know a book is going to offer me something, it hits me within just a few pages.
I'm not sure what the reader was supposed to get from this book. And, like all reviews, this is just my opinion. Someone else may pick up the book and love it. I found it a big bore.
I immediately started to read a book sent me to review by the author and was absorbed within a few pages. That's the difference in books.
The Sticking Point for Busting the Communications Stall February 13, 2007
17 out of 20 found this review helpful
This is the best book about communications I've read since I discovered Stephen Denning's work on telling business stories. I highly recommend Made to Stick to all those who want to get their messages across in business more effectively.
Imagine if people remembered what you had to say and acted on it. Wouldn't that be great? What if people not only remembered and acted, but told hundreds of others who also acted and told? Now you're really getting somewhere!
Brothers Chip (an educational consultant and publisher) and Dan (a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Business School) Heath combine to develop Malcolm Gladwell's point about "stickiness" in The Tipping Point. To help you understand what they have in mind, the book opens with the hoary urban tale of the man who ends up in a bathtub packed with ice missing his kidney after accepting a drink from a beautiful woman. That story, while untrue, has virtually universal awareness. Many other untrue stories do, too, especially those about what someone found in a fast food meal.
The brothers Heath put memorable and quickly forgotten information side-by-side to make the case for six factors (in combination) making the difference between what's memorable and what isn't. The six factors are:
1. Simplicity (any idea over one is too many)
2. Unexpectedness (a surprise grabs our attention)
3. Concreteness (the more dimensions of details the more hooks our minds use to create a memory)
4. Credibility (even untrue stories don't stick unless there's a hint of truth, such as beware of what's too good to be true in the urban legend that opens the book)
5. Incite Emotions in Listeners (we remember emotional experiences much more than anything else; we care more about individuals than groups; and we care about things that reflect our identities)
6. Combine Messages in Stories (information is more memorable and meaningful in a story form . . . like the urban legend that opens the book)
Before commenting on the book further, I have a confession to make. This book has special meaning for me. I was one of the first people to employ and popularize the term "Maximize Shareholder Value" by making that the title of my consulting firm's annual report (Mitchell and Company) over 25 years ago when we began our practice in stock-price improvement. That term has become almost ubiquitous in CEO and CFO suites, but hasn't gone very far beyond the discussions of corporate leaders, investment bankers and institutional investors and analysts.
The authors use that term in the book as an example of a communication that hasn't stuck broadly. And they are right. Having watched that term over the years go into all kinds of unexpected places and be quoted by people who had no idea how to do it long ago convinced me of the wisdom of telling people what to do . . . not just what the objective is.
The authors make this point beautifully in citing Southwest Airline's goal of being "THE low-fare airline." If something conflicts with being a good low-fare airline at Southwest, it's obvious to everybody not to do it.
You'll probably find that some of the examples and lessons strike you right in the middle of the forehead, too. That's good. That's how we learn. I went back to a new manuscript I'm writing now and wrote a whole new beginning to better reflect the lessons in Made to Stick. I've also recommended the book already to about a dozen of my graduate business students. So clearly Made to Stick is sticking with me.
If you find yourself skipping rapidly through the book, be sure to slow down and pay attention on pages 247-249 where the authors take common communications problems and recommend what to do about them (such as how to get people to pay attention to your message). That's the most valuable part of the book. It integrates the individual points very effectively and succinctly.
I also liked the reference guide on pages 252-257 that outlines the book's contents. You won't need to take notes with this reference guide in place.
So why should you pay attention? The authors demonstrate with an exercise that people who know and use these principles are more successful in communicating through advertisements than those who are talented in making advertisements but don't know these principles. Without more such experiments, it's hard to know how broad the principle is . . . but I'm willing to assume that they have a point here.
No book is perfect: How could this one have been even better? Unlike Stephen Denning's wonderful books on storytelling, this book is more about the principles than how to apply the principles. I hope the authors will come back with many how-to books and workbooks.
I would also like to commend the book's cover designer for doing such a good job of simulating a piece of duct tape on the dust jacket. That feature adds to the stickiness of this book.
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