Made to Stick: Booke report 5

In the last Section of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, the authors take all the parts in the last chapters and put it all together for the reader. They take the main idea of each chapter tell the reader how to use all of these together to make an idea stick. These five things are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story. These five things are very important in creating an idea, without one of these elements the whole idea could fail in some way.

            In this section the authors talk about “villains” that can destroy an idea. One villain is focusing on the speaker more than the message. Know that it is still beneficial to be a good charismatic speaker but the listener has to forget about how well the speaker is doing and needs to focus on the message. The next villain is the Curse of knowledge. When someone tries to speak they tend to communicate as if the audience is themselves. Getting past the curse of knowledge is important in all aspects of organizational behavior. If a manager is trying to communicate with one of the people he/she is in charge of and the manager has several more years of experience, he/she is going to have to put themselves in the shoes of the listener. If the manager does not do this than the message he or she is conveying will be lost and the problem will be right back to square one. Another example is if a CEO tells the company’s employees that their job is to “maximize shareholder value”. Now to the CEO that makes perfect sense but to a simple employee that idea is way too abstract. It is important to observe the world around you because it holds more sticky ideas than a single creative person. The next villain is decision paralysis. This can affect anyone in almost all aspects of organizational behavior. When giving information it important to make your idea more precise by stressing a couple main ideas instead of touching on several ideas. A lawyer will do this during the closing arguments. Instead of stressing ten arguments, the lawyer needs to only focus on the strongest couple of ones.

            It takes time to master these five things so you can avoid the “villains”. Using this SUCCES strategy will make ideas stickier. Keeping idea simple and to the core will make the idea more understandable. Making your presentation of the idea unexpected will keep the audience’s attention.  Making your idea concrete will allow the listener to easily picture what you are saying and it keeps an idea from being abstract. You may be an expert but the people in your audience are not. Make sure your information to support your idea comes from a credible source or your audience will be less inclined to believe and accept your idea. Keep your message emotional; make the audience care about your idea. Finally surround your idea in a story; it will keep your listeners attention and will be easier to convey your idea. Using these five ways to make idea sticky can be used in all aspects of a person’s daily life.

Class and Goat Bucks

So class on Monday was more or lees confusing and annoying. I was in one of the bottom groups and for the first half hour we just sat in the dark basement waiting to be contacted. My group and another group were tired of waiting so we sought out our middle level adviser. When we eventually found her she was waiting for the level above her to give her information so we left without learning anything.

When we eventually got the information we needed which was about 20 mins before the end of class we felt rushed frustrated and confused and when we finally finished with ten minutes left the top level had all the slogans they needed and were on there way to meet with the other group (I don't remember their name but they were the ones in charge of giving out the goat bucks). I was a little agitated but my one member in my team was furious so he decided take the several slogans we had made and decided to bypass the upper levels and sell to the other group directly.

We sold our slogans at a cheaper price than the top level slogans and mad out with seven bucks total we split it up as evenly as we could with our middle level supervisor then we left. I ended making two goat bucks and i hope everyone in the class got at least one, if you did not get one I will happily give you one.

Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. report 4

            In the next two chapters of the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, the authors explain two more aspects to making your ideas stickier. These two aspects are emotion and stories. Adding these two things two the rest of the book can help your ideas to stick.

            The authors go to explain what the word “emotion” means in the context of making one’s ideas more likely to stick: it means getting people to care for your idea or cause. The authors use a test done on several people to elaborate their message. The test subjects were separated into two groups and were given an irrelevant test and for their participation they were given five dollars in one dollar bills. Before they were able to leave they were given a brown envelope from a charity organization. Each group’s envelope was from the same charity but the way the message was delivered differed from the two groups. Group one’s message was presented with a lot of facts and statistics while the second group was given a picture of a little girl and an explanation how their money can help little children like her get food. The testers then averaged out each group’s own average of donations. Groups one’s average was $1.18 but group two’s average was $2.48. Once you get emotions involved in your message than your idea is more likely to stick and you’re more likely to get a better response from your audience. The authors then reference Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how this can help with getting people to care. He then uses an example to show how to use Maslow’s triangle to motivate or get people to care about something. A company wants to tell its employees that is offering a one thousand dollar bonus if they meet performance targets. In doing this the company hopes that this will increase worker productivity. There are three ways the company can present this; the first two involve spending that extra thousand dollars on some material object and saving it for future use. The third way is to tell its employees that this $1000 means that the company values you as an asset to the company and recognizes your job performance. Most people who answered this question picked the third way. By doing this a company positively affects the employee’s self-esteem which is higher on Maslow’s triangle than the physical reward promised in the first two ways.  But when asked the question in reverse; what do you think someone else would prefer to hear? Most people chose the first way. Many people feel that they are motivate by self-esteem while others are motivated by down payments. The third way invokes emotion into the employee while the other two are analytical and invoke little to no emotion (plus they are also pretty obvious) into the person which cause them to care less.

            The next aspect the authors talked about is using stories to get an idea to stick. The authors used examples to explain how stories surround a central idea that is easily sticks to the mind of the listener. In class we read an article about the nacirema people which talked about their strange culture with plenty of descriptive examples. Then after you read it you find out that this article is actually critiquing American culture (nacirema spelled backwards in American). The main idea of the article is that American culture is very strange once you take a step back from it and look at it from the outside.  The author covered his main idea in a story that stuck in the readers mind. This is a prime example that shows how an idea embedded in a story is a great way to transmit and idea.

            The authors show how these two stratagies can make people care about an idea and how to make an idea easy to listen to. Using emotion and stories and help make your ideas stick.

Magic Cable

After reading and discussing this article I came to the conclusion that Roberts is never satisfied. It seems he stays at a place for a little while than he finds something to complain about and if something grinds his gears he will try to argue with the upper staff once and if he does not succeed he moves on in hope of finding perfect job. It is understandable in his last job where his pay was essentially cut in half. He has the right to try and fight it but he yells at his boss then leaves.

We discussed what factors of motivation force him to change jobs and we figure out that his work never holds any satisfaction for him. The only reason he stays at these place is that he is never dissatisfied. If one factor changes for the worse he gets up and leaves.

Doctors

In class on Monday we discussed what motivates doctors to make the decision if a person is sick or not. Basically there are two types or errors the first error Is telling someone that they are well but in fact they are actually sick. Error two involves telling a well person that they are actually sick. In the world that the author describes doctors are more inclined to tell a person that they are sick because there is larger penalty if a doctor commits the first error. It's pretty easy to see the problem with this scenario.

One might think at first glance that the first error is worse so it deserves  a larger punishment and in most cases it might be proven right. But as we discussed in class error 2 can be just as devastating. A great example is diagnosing a person with cancer when they do not have it. The treatment for cancer is just as terrifying as actually getting cancer and many people with cancer will usually avoid the treatment and Dr. Goates example also proves that an error 2 can be just as bad as error 1.

A simple start to  fixing this problem is my making the penalties equal or coming up with a new system in which punishments are based on the damage to the patient.

Maslow's Hierarchy of needs

His theory is a good start to trying to figure out what motivates people but as we discussed in class this theory doesn't apply to everyone and there are very large exceptions to his theory like the parents giving all of their food to their kids instead of eating themselves. According to his theory eating is a primal need and must be satisfied, but the parents choose to ignore this and satisfy their loving and belonging needs. This one example goes against everything in his theory.

Education system

Last class we discussed the problems with rewarding teachers for their teaching. Doing this can cause more bad than good. Teachers can try to cheat the system by boosting their students grades by giving them easy tests and other things. There was already a study in Chicago that around 5% of the teachers "helped" their students improve their grades on the standardized tests.

We also learned in class that you can't motivate someone using just money because people are more complicated than that. Employers  need to find other means to motivate their workers other than throwing money at them. Doing this too much can often lead to a decrease in motivation and even lead to unethical behavior.

Truth is, money is important to everyone but people need more than that to be motivated.