Does your business have what it takes to succeed? Small Business Success talks to two authors who wrote the book on finding the right idea.

By Brian Moran

Have you ever wondered if your product, company, or new idea has what it takes to advance to the next level? Authors Chip and Dan Heath wrote a book that may help to answer that question. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die considers six principles shared by all sticky ideas—ideas that people understand, remember, and that change the way people think or act.

What’s a sticky idea, and who needs to make their ideas stick?
A sticky idea is one that people understand when they hear it, that they remember later on, and that changes the way they think or act. We all need to make our ideas stick sometimes. Business owners need to get ideas across to their employees and customers.

Teachers need to get ideas across to their students. Parents need to give advice to their teenagers.

Yet stickiness is a rare commodity— how much can you recreate from the last memo you read or the last presentation you saw? And you probably couldn’t fill an index card with what you recall from high school chemistry.

What are some of the most common problems that arise when ideas just aren’t structured with enough stickiness?
People forget. They misunderstand. They get confused. They pick the wrong priorities. They don’t believe you. They believe you but they don’t act. They believe you but they don’t much care. If you’re the kind of person who needs to make ideas stick—a business owner, a teacher, a parent, a manager, a nonprofit leader, a politician—these are not theoretical problems. These are huge, everyday realities.

You start your book with the urban legend about a ring of thieves that steals kidneys from unsuspecting business travelers. What do urban legends have to do with sticky ideas?
Urban legends are some of the stickiest ideas around. Think about it—urban legends propagate without a shred of resources behind them. No advertising campaigns, no PR machine, no executive support. They spread on their own merits. In fact, there’s a whole class of what we call “naturally sticky” ideas— everything from proverbs and fables to conspiracy theories and gossip. But urban legends are some of our favorite naturally sticky ideas.

What is your favorite example from the book of a true sticky idea?
Our favorite is JFK’s speech from 1961—he challenges the nation to put a man on the moon and return him safely within the decade, and that sticky idea motivated a whole nation for years. We found there were six principles that link sticky ideas of all kinds. Your idea doesn’t have to have all six, but the more, the merrier. JFK’s idea to “put a man on the moon in a decade” had all of them:

Simple: A single, clear mission.
Unexpected: A man on the moon? It seemed like science fiction at the time.
Concrete: Success was defined so clearly—no one could quibble about man, moon, or decade. That’s not true for most of our goals.
Credible: This was the President of the U.S. talking.
Emotional: It appealed to the aspirations and pioneering instincts of an entire nation.
Story: An astronaut overcomes great obstacles to achieve an amazing goal.

You spend a lot of time in the book discussing the Curse of Knowledge. What does it have to do with sticky ideas?
The Curse of Knowledge is the archvillain in our book. The Curse of Knowledge happens because when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result we become lousy communicators. Think of the ITguy in the office who can’t give you a clear answer to some computer question. All the vast experience he has with computers renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in jargon and abstractions that you can’t follow. And the irony is that we’re all like the IT guy in our own domain of expertise. If we know enough to come up with an important insight, we also know too much to communicate easily with others. That’s why knowledge is a Curse. But the principles in our book can reverse the Curse.

So how do you dodge the Curse of Knowledge?
You go back to the principles. One of the best stories in the book is about a group of nutritionists who found that a typical medium movie-sized popcorn had 37 grams of saturated fat. They’re experts and they knew that was a ludicrous amount. But they had to come up with a concrete way to convey the ludicrousness to the rest of us. Here’s what they said: “A medium sized popcorn contains more fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings—combined!”

That message is a perfect example of at least three of the principles in the book—it’s very concrete, but it’s also emotional and unexpected. And it worked:

Moviegoers stopped eating popcorn until movie theaters stopped popping in coconut oil (the source of most of the saturated fat).

By the way, JFK also dodged the Curse. If he’d been a modern-day politician or businessperson, he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” That might have set a moon walk back 15 years.

What’s a typical error made by someone trying to suggest a new idea in a business meeting?
Businesspeople love abstractions. We love to talk about “shareholder value” and “quality” and “innovation.” The problem is that if there are 10 people in a meeting, they’ll have 10 different understandings of these terms. And our brains are wired to remember concrete images, not abstractions. If you don’t believe us, try to remember what was discussed in your staff meeting two weeks ago.

How have you personally experienced the success of a sticky idea or the failure of something that didn’t stick?
Dan: I have a failure story. I was trying to raise venture capital for my startup. And my co-founder and I would have these meetings with venture capitalists, and we’d get so excited, and we’d start telling them everything we knew about our product and our industry and the enormous opportunities we saw. No fact was left unspoken. And, at various times, we’d notice that their eyes were glazing over, so we’d adapt by speaking louder. We were rejected so many times that it began to feel like rejection was part of my job description.

And, finally, one kindly venture capitalist took me aside and said, “Look, your elevator pitch is more of an Oregon Trail pitch. We just don’t care as much as you do about this business. We care about whether it’s a good investment, not whether it’s a neat product. You need to go back to the drawing board.” It was an incredibly painful idea failure. I hadn’t learned about the Curse of Knowledge back then, but in retrospect we were big victims. Our story was way too complex.

So how do you overcome the tendency towards making a business idea overly complex?
Small businesses complicate their business models in a way that leads to mission drift.

Technology firms experience technology creep with their products that causes them to add that 52nd button to the DVD remote. Jeff Hawkins, the leader of the Palm Pilot team, carried around a wood block in the shape of the Palm Pilot. It became a living reminder of what the team was trying to build—a PDA that would be extremely simple to use (in contrast to, say, any remote control in your house).

Hawkins would pull out the wood block to “take notes” in meetings, and if people had new feature ideas, he’d make them show him where the new feature would fit on the block of wood. The block of wood was, in essence, a visual proverb. A proverb is a compact idea that packs in a lot of meaning. Proverbs help people make decisions in ambiguous situations. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” helps you see that you should be grateful for what you have. Hawkins’ block of wood helped his team see that they should err on the side of simplicity.

What would be your top three tips for presenting an idea effectively?

Tip 1: Be concrete . Trader Joe’s describes its target customer as an “unemployed college Professor who drives a very, very used Volvo.” That’s funny and clever, but more importantly, it’s practical—it allows the workers at Trader Joe’s to share a common mental image of who they’re trying to serve.

Tip 2: Use stories. People will remember your stories, not your advice. Aesop’s

Fables have endured for centuries, but Aesop’s Thesis Sentences wouldn’t have made it 10 minutes. Choose your stories carefully, so that after the fact, your audience can reconstruct your core meaning, just like we can do with “The Fox and the Grapes.” Any business owner o rmanager will have lots of stories about hard-won insights. Stories act as flight simulators for our brain—they let us vicariously experience situations we haven’t seen yet—where as our advice flows in one ear and out the other. Tell your stories and not your Thesis Sentences.

Tip 3: Find uncommon sense. Common sense isn’t sticky—you’ve got to find the uncommon sense in your message. When we hear something that surprises us, or something we wouldn’t have predicted, it grabs our attention. Nordstrom is an upscale department store that justifies its high prices by providing really outstanding customer service. They spend a lot of time telling unexpected stories: About the “Nordie” who gift-wrapped a package a customer bought at Macy’s. About the Nordie who refunded money for an unsatisfactory set of tire chains…even though Nordstrom doesn’t sell tire chains. Those messages highlight the uncommon sense about Nordstrom’s idea of outstanding customer service. Wal-Mart talks about “outstanding customer service,” but they don’t tell the same kind of stories as Nordstrom!

Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education. A former researcher at Harvard Business School, he is cofounder of Thinkwell, an innovative new-media textbook company.

Made to Stick Excerpt:

In this book excerpt, Chip and Dan Heath discuss the principle of simplicity, a key challenge for small businesses:

Every move an Army soldier makes is preceded by a staggering amount of planning, which can be traced back to an original order from the President of the United States. Then orders and plans cascade downward—from the President to generals to colonels to captains.

The plans are thorough, specifying the “scheme of maneuver” and the “concept of fires”— what each unit will do, which equipment it will use and how it will replace munitions. The orders gain enough specificity to guide the actions of individual foot soldiers at particular moments in time.

The Army invests enormous energy in planning, and its processes have been refined over many years. The system is a marvel. There’s only one shortcoming: The plans often turn out to be useless.

“The trite expression we always use is, No plan survives contact with the enemy,” said Colonel Tom Kolditz, head of behavioral sciences at West Point. “The enemy gets a vote. Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless 10 minutes into the battle.”

Colonel Kolditz said, “Over time we’ve come to understand more and more about what makes people successful in complex operations.” 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).

CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plans’ goal, the desired end-state, e.g. “My intent is to have Third Battalion on Hill 4305, to have the hill cleared of enemy, so we can protect the flank of Third Brigade as they pass through the lines.”

The CI never specifies so much detail that it risks being rendered obsolete by unpredictable events. “You can lose the ability to execute the original plan, but you never lose the responsibility of executing the intent,” says Kolditz. In other words, if there’s one soldier left in the Third Battalion on Hill 4305, he’d better be doing something to protect the flank of the Third Brigade.

Commander’s Intent aligns the behavior of soldiers at all levels without play-by-play instructions from the leaders. When people know the desired destination, they can improvise in arriving there. Col. Kolditz gives an example: “Suppose I’m commanding an artillery battalion and I say, ‘We’re going to pass this infantry unit through our lines forward.’

The mechanics know that they will need lots of repair support along the roads because if a tank breaks down on a bridge, the whole operation will come to a screeching halt.

The artillery knows they will need to fire smoke in the breech area where the infantry unit moves forward, so it won’t get shot up as it passes through. As a commander, I could spend a lot of time enumerating every specific task, but as soon as people know what the intent is, they begin generating their own solutions.”

The Combat Maneuver Training Center recommends that officers arrive at the Commander’s Intent by asking themselves two questions: If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must _________________. The single, most-important thing that we must do tomorrow is ________________.

No plan survives contact with the enemy. No doubt this idea resonates with people with no military experience whatsoever. No lesson plan survives contact with teenagers. No business strategy survives contact with the marketplace.

It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. For us to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of “dumbing down” or “sound bites.” What we mean by simple is finding the core of the idea.

To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out the superfluous and tangential elements. But that’s easy. The hard part is weeding out the really important ideas that just aren’t the most important. Commander’s Intent forces its officers to highlight the most important goal of an operation. You can’t have five North Stars, you can’t have five “most important goals,” and you can’t have five Commander’s Intents.

Research in psychology and economics shows that when people are given a good choice, they take it. When they are given two good choices they…delay, hoping to find a good way of deciding between them. Small businesses are filled with choices to make. Without a Commander’s Intent, dozens of critical choices may go unmade, waiting for the right choice to become clear.

The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once offered a definition of engineering elegance: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal—knowing how much can be taken out of an idea to highlight its essence.