Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. report 1

The main purpose of the book, Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die, is too teach the reader how to make ideas stick using the six principles of successful ideas. The six principles given are: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories. Coincidently these six ideas form the acronym SUCCESs. They use four different examples in the introduction to explain these principles. Three of them are examples how ideas can effective and the other one shows how an idea can fail. The first one is The Kidney heist urban legend. If you don’t know it, here it is. A friend of a friend is offered a drink by a fairly attractive woman, then he wakes up in a tub full of ice, he can’t remember how he got there, and one of his kidneys are gone. The idea is simple and there are many versions of this story but they are all the same once you get to the core of the story. It’s a simple idea, the story has a twist, it in invokes concrete images, your friend has to be at least a little credible, the story causes fear, and it’s got a story behind the idea not to accept drinks from total strangers. The author uses the other two stories in a similar way.

            The authors also describe two different tests that were performed. The first test involved “tappers” and “listeners”. Several people were given the job of tapping out a popular song like happy birthday and the star spangled banner and they could not tell them anything about the song that they are tapping. It was up to the listeners to pick out the song that the tappers were tapping. The results were surprising. The listeners were right only 4% of the time. The answer for the results is kind of interesting. It was easy for the tappers to tell what the song is because it is in there head while the listeners have the disadvantage of not knowing what the song is.  The listeners were not able to distinguish the taps of the different songs. This test also shows how poor communication skills can hinder performance of a team or group. They describe this as the curse of knowledge and compare the tappers and listeners as a CEO and Frontline employees. These two groups have to communicate with each other but there is an imbalance of information. What makes sense to one person might seem pointless and boring to another because the second person lacks the information to understand the problem. The authors state that the six principles are your best weapon to defeat the curse of knowledge. 

            The second test was conducted by an Israeli research team in 1999. They assembled a group of random people and separated them into three smaller groups. Their job was to create ads for three products: shampoo, a diet-food item, and a sneaker. The ads would be tested by consumers. The first group was given background information on the products, the second group wa trained for two hours by an experienced creativity instructor, and the third group was given both the information and the training. Obviously the third group’s ads tested the most positive but the first group’s ads were tested the least positive. This test showed that the best group knows information but more importantly, they are trained and have experience. In the first case analysis the group was both experienced and creative, that is why they were very successful.