I witnessed a business person state: "You heard what we want. We don't need documentation. We need you to just start coding it."

Would you want to live in a house that didn't have clarification of understanding what you want? Do you want to live in a house that a builder builds just based on you verbally explaining what you want? With all the money spent, don't you want checkpoints to make sure things are going as expected?

Everyone has filters. Everyone hears and stores information differently. Putting a few "documents" in place lets the two sides see if they are blinded by the "curse of knowledge" (a term described in the Made To Stick book by Chip & Dan Heath). Are you not saying something because you asssume it is generally understood? Did the techie stop listening or did he misunderstand something because of his previous knowledge.

Don't take the chance. Insist that things be documented and review the documentation. Filters get clogged and the wrong information doesn't always make it through. Architectural documentation is a stepping stone to ensure that what you say, is what you will get. It also gives you an opportunity to tweak.

The techies are right on this point. Let them document before coding. Read and approve it before anything is built. Otherwise, you'll be living in a house of straw and a hurricane is on its way.

Made to Stick: The Myth of Mutual Funds

By: Dan Heath & Chip Heath

Why we don't always believe the truth.

Let's pull off the Band-Aid quickly. You've come to believe that mutual funds are a smart place to put your money. They're not.

That's the assessment of the smartest minds in finance, supported by a mountain of historical data. If you own actively managed mutual funds, you will almost certainly retire with less money -- a lot less money -- than if you'd simply dumped your money into boring index funds. So two questions: How can this possibly be true? And why, in gleeful defiance of the data, do more people keep buying mutual funds every year?

First, the proof. A team of finance researchers conducted an exhaustive study of mutual-fund returns from 1979 to 1998. Mutual funds underperformed the Vanguard 500 Index Fund by an average of 2.8% per year (after taxes). From 1984 to 1998, the deficit was a stunning 5.1% per year.

It gets worse. Of all 203 mutual funds with at least $100 million under management from 1984 to 1998, only 8 managed to beat the Vanguard 500. Your odds, then, of picking a "winning" mutual fund during that time were less than 4%. By way of comparison, if you get dealt two face cards in blackjack, and your inner idiot shouts, "Hit me!", you have about an 8% chance of winning.

"Overwhelming evidence proves the failure of the for-profit mutual-fund industry," says David F. Swensen in his revealing book Unconventional Success. Swensen knows a bit about investing. Since he began managing Yale's endowment in 1985, he has grown the fund from $1.3 billion to $14 billion (a 16.1% average annual return). And his opinion is clear: "Overwhelmingly, mutual funds extract enormous sums from investors in exchange for providing a shocking disservice."

None of this is breaking news. The data have been lying around for years. Yet we keep buying mutual funds, just as people still buy bogus herbal remedies and corporate execs keep making statistically doomed mergers and acquisitions. Our behavior seems impervious to the truth. It's like waking up in a world where 91 million Americans drive Ford Pintos while wearing flammable pajamas.

Here's why this idea doesn't stick: It's true, but it violates common sense. Mutual funds are actively managed, which means that there's a team of Harvard and Wharton MBAs who come to work every day and hunt for good investments on your behalf. Whereas index funds (technically a kind of mutual fund) are passively managed; they simply track the market's performance. There's a robot behind the wheel.

We can't handle the truth that the robot beats the Ivy League MBAs. Even when the MBAs outperform the robot, you might still come out behind, because of the fees they charge. (Those fees ensure that, while you may lose, the MBAs never will.)

So why do mutual funds thrive? They take advantage of a mistake we all make. Two business-school professors -- Jay Koehler and Molly Mercer of Arizona State -- conducted studies on investors and documented the mistake. We treat cherry-picked data as typical. If a mutual-fund company advertises a 31% return on one fund, investors get more interested in others from the same company. But if the investors are reminded that the data were cherry-picked -- "the 31% return is from one fund of many managed by this company" -- then they are able to avoid this mistake (just as a bulleted highlight on someone's résumé doesn't convince you he's perpetually awesome). But mutual funds aren't inclined to provide helpful warnings like, "The returns we're hyping are anomalies!"

The consequences can be profound -- and invisible. Consider two 50-year-olds who each invested their life savings of about $140,000 in 1984. Vanessa put all of her money in the Vanguard 500, and Muriel put hers in an average mutual fund. If they both retired in 1998, both would be happy, because their assets would have grown substantially.

But happiness comes in different sizes. If Vanessa's nest egg was $1 million, Muriel's would've been about $550,000. Now, remember, Muriel is happy, because she has no clue what she could have made. You know who else is happy? The mutual-fund managers. Muriel has padded their multimillion-dollar retirement accounts with roughly $150,000 of her own foregone income. Forget sponsoring a child in Africa. You're sponsoring an MBA. And you don't even get a photo for your refrigerator.

The final irony is this: Every few years, one of Muriel's mutual funds would have a great return -- say, 22% in a single year! -- and the fund would then spend millions of dollars (including some of Muriel's own retirement money) touting its performance, like a movie trailer that showcases the one funny moment in a deeply unfunny movie. In the end, Muriel feels smart and Vanessa feels insecure.

 It's possible, we suppose, that this feeling of superiority might be worth something. But not as much as it's costing you. Swensen's advice is to buy index funds from TIAA-CREF or Vanguard, where fees are minimal. Stop driving that Pinto. With your investments, boring is beautiful.

Dan Heath and Chip Heath are the best-selling authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

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But this is only part of the inspiration. The other part is what Clay Shirky calls "the massive re-adjustment" and what this have of an impact on the world of education! This is a lot more profound this will not only change the education system but the whole world.

A shot introduction to the concepts of the book "Made to stick" by Chip & Dan Heath

Clay Shirky TED talk: "Institutions vs. collaboration"

An ad playing on one of the gym's TV monitors caught my eye during an early morning run the other day. Not "caught my eye" in a good way. It was the kind of misleading ad that makes a bad name for those involved in creating advertisements, or anything even remotely related to the field of marketing.

The ad in question was for a casino in the area. In the 30-seconds of airtime, the ad must have shown at least six or seven folks hitting it big. I'm talking jump out of your seat, wave your hands in the air kind of jackpots. And it makes you wonder, why would you want to deliberately create such a misleading ad?

Now, it should be said that the majority of TV viewers realize the absurdity of such advertising. Casinos are in the business of making money, and handing out jackpots to each guest is not a good way to go about doing so. Yet, such ads continue to proliferate tv screens, magazines, newspapers, radios, etc every single day.

Dan & Chip Heath, authors of the book Made to Stick and columnists in the always interesting Fast Company magazine, note a similar trend in this recent article. Definitely worth the read.

It Pays to Be Honest

This casino spot is just one example on a nearly endless list of advertisements that don't mind bending the truth. Unfortunately, such ads have become commonplace, even expected among consumers. The thing is, it doesn't have to be that way. It's possible to create an effective ad without being misleading; honesty in your advertising is actually good for business.

For example, this ad used some great shots of several friends enjoying themselves over some delicious looking food. Why not focus more on the social benefit of a night out with friends? And, sure, worked into the mix could be a shot of someone winning big (but not several jackpots crammed into the brief 30-second spot).

Addressing deliberately misleading advertisements starts with the approach we take with every client. As the Heaths put it in their article (linked above), "It's time for the marketing community itself to be the first to turn up its nose at people who shamelessly use these techniques."

So use those creative juices. Come up with a catchy slogan. Highlight the client in a way that makes people want to know more. But don't lie to the consumer. Why? Because, your mother was right. Lying is bad. And, when it comes to advertising, it's just lazy.

Your customers deserve better, and they'll thank you for your honesty with their business.

The authors present a basic framework for improving the stickiness of ideas you are trying to communicate. There are six basic aspects you need to keep an eye on: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and how much your idea is presented as a story (which abbreviates as SUCCESs). If your message has these attributes, it'll then help you make people understand (simplicity), pay attention (unexpectedness), remember (concreteness), believe and agree (credibility), care (emotions), and act (stories).

The book is full of examples of successful ideas. I didn't think they always fit well in the chapter they were in (that they ilustrated the attribute they were supposed to most), but what the heck.

Particulary interesting:

The was an experiment made at Stanford: Members of one group of people were asked to tap out a rhythm of a song on a table. Other group had to guess what song was being tapped. Only 3 out of 120 songs were guessed right. Now the interesting part. Each time the tappers were asked if they thought the listeners would guess right. They thought they would in 50% of the time! It shows how much we are affected by the Curse of Knowledge. We hear the songs in our heads and thus we think it's obvious what we're tapping. It's very hard for us to imagine not knowing what the song is. And yet this is very important if we want to get any complicated thought across.

Colonel Tom Kolditz: "(...) Many armies fail because they put all their emphasis into creating a plan that becomes useless ten minutes into the battle."

"To get to the core, we've got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. But that's the easy part. The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren't the most important idea."

"There are two steps in making your ideas sticky - Step 1 is to find the core, Step 2 is to translate the core using the SUCCESs checklist."

"People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more."

"In fifteen seconds:
(1) Write down as many things that are white in color as you can think of.
(2) Write down as many white things in your refrigerator as you can think of.

(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."

Are the tasks under (2)s easier because your brain is able to focus more?

Back to why I'm writing this particular post...

One of the chapters discusses how to sell an idea and make it credible. So many times IT sells statistics to get new technology implemented. It's a tough sell to the business community because IT folks forget to use the "human-scale principle."

Here is an example from the book:

...take a mundane situation: figuring out whether a particular technological upgrade is worth the money. One example comes from Cisco, when it had to decide whether to add a wireless network for its employees. The cost of maintaining a wireless network was estimated at $500 per year per employee. The price sounds hefty--on the order of adding adental or vision insurance for all employees. But it's not a benefit, it's an investment. So how do you compute the value of an inestment? You've got to decide whether you can get $501 worth of additional value from each employee each year after adding the network.

One Cisco employee figured out a better way to think about the investment: "If you believe you can increase an employee's productivity by one or two minutes a day, you've paid back the cost of wireless." On this scale, the investment is much easier to assess. Our intuition works at this scale. We can easily simulate scenarios where employees can save a few minutes from wireless access--for instance, sending someone a request for a forgotten document during a critical meeting.

Avoid statistics...it's the scale and context that makes the idea conceivable and acceptable to the business community.

Our current top 5 recommendations (ok, the top five does change a bit):

1. The Sales Bible (new version) by Jeffrey Gitomer
2. Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin
3. Made To Stick by Chip & Dan Heath
4. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
5. You, Inc. by Harry & Christine Beckwith

Our website has many more books (geekie and non-geekie) that we recommend.

Ladonna did it! I said I would link...Woo! Imp Perfect, too!

...and I am glad because I needed something to say today (horrible office stories coming up soon...) thanks Sam!

1) The last book I purchased:

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Published in 2007. Chip actually came to do a presentation to the staff of the Oakland Zoo when I still worked there. He's a Dork, First Class, but rocked nevertheless.

2) The last film I purchased:

Robocop. It's simply who I am. I downloaded it from iTunes to watch on a plane for some trip somewhere unimportant.

3) The last music or spoken word recording I purchased:

Viva la Vida by Coldplay released one minute ago, to be exact.Still can't get the title song out of my head. Not sure I want to.

So, here's who I tag: Chops, Sheri, Selma, everyone who reads this GO I will link you!

One thing that I do know is that they are prevalent in the St. Louis area. While many are based in outlying locations, they logically advertise to and service the urban and suburban markets. This means that your average St. Louis consumer encounters many marketing messages about wineries on any given day.

Two friends of mine opened a winery in Ballwin, Missouri that "provides quality wine with your personal touch." Wine Necessities is a winery for do-it-yourself-ers. They have an area where you can make your own Pinot Blanc or Italian Sangiovese or whatever your palette desires. You can even customize the labeling that goes on the bottle for personal or business use. It becomes your wine - inside and out. They host parties and have social and community events around wine, etc.

This business presents interesting marketing challenge. How do you cut through the clutter of all the other wineries, appeal to wine lovers/wine makers and present an innovative idea (a wine-making, fun, social experience) to potential patrons?

How would you communicate what you do in a short and concise way to capture your innovation? To help people understand you are not just some other winery?

One place that I would look for help is from Chip Heath and Dan Heath of Made to Stick fame. In a recent Fast Company article, they outlined a great way to do just that. They call it the anchor and twist.

According to Chip and Dan, the best way to help others understand your new, innovative idea, is to start them with something that they already know, the anchor. Then, you hit them with what makes it different, the twist.

The challenge is that you sacrifice some amount of accuracy for the sake of helping people understand your company, product, etc.

One example that they give has to do with cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).

The "cardio" part -- pumping on the chest -- forces blood to circulate. The "pulmonary" part - mouth-to-mouth breathing -- gets oxygen to the lungs. CPR has been ingrained in mass culture for the past 35 years, but what if a new innovation came along that supplanted it? That's precisely what happened in March 2007 when a team of Japanese researchers published a surprising paper in the prestigious Lancet medical journal. It tracked 4,068 adults who'd gone into cardiac arrest with bystanders present but not in a hospital. The shocker: Victims who received only the chest-pumping part of CPR had slightly better health outcomes than those who received full CPR, including mouth-to-mouth. For most victims, then, mouth-to-mouth was pointless.

The American Health Association had to take an old idea (CPR) and get the word out quickly about the new one (no more mouth-to-mouth). How could they communicate this new innovation to so many who were used to good ol' CPR?

Eventually, "Hands-Only CPR" was the term that they decided to use to express the new idea. CPR serves as the anchor, and "hands-only" is the twist. This is not completely accurate...really there is no longer the "P" since there is no mouth-to-mouth. But, for the sake of helping an audience understand, they let some inaccuracy go.

Here are some attempts at doing that for Wine Necessities from my feeble mind:

• Wine Necessities is the Build-a-Bear of wineries.
• Wine Necessities - the DIY winery.
• Get your hands dirty winery.
• The you-too-can-crush-grapes winery.

TRY THIS ONE:

Do you have better ideas for my friends at Wine Necessities? Can you come up with one for your company or organization that you would be willing to share?

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1. User involvement was limited (at times or all the time).
2. Scope change/creep.
3. Ran out of time or money.
4. Vision was different on all sides.

A book can be written for each one of the above reasons (and probably has). The truth is, it is probably a combination of them all. When I talk to the business community, either those in the trenches or executives, I get this common response to a rollout system: "It's not what I expected."

Before this ruffles your feathers...think about it. Many technologists tend to get right to the details that they forget the overall intent of the project. They work with knowledgeworkers that understand their process in great details. Getting caught up in the develoment process, it is easy to forget the business why this is needed. What was the business objectives? What was the executives intent for this system?

The core of the idea for any system should be simple and to the point. It should be posted on every document and in every person's cube that is involved in the development. I'm not talking mission statement. (Can you recite your company mission statement?)

I'm talking about the simple core of the projects purpose stripped down to its most critical essence. Unless you understand the core business issue, all participants will have a different 'vision' of what needs to be done and how it should look and feel. Once everyone understand the core, all decisions can be made quickly to support it. All designs can be made flexible enough to change with the growing scope creep or need for answers if it satisfies the basic core. Plans can be adjusted and money can change...if you at least support the core.

This idea on finding the core is from Made To Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath. It focuses on the corporate message but it can be extended to defining the essence of any project. It is hard to define and must be done so jointly by the business community (approved by executives) and IT.

Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz explains how to spread ideas, while Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good by Sarah Lacy tells the fall/rise of Web 1.0 and 2.0 through eyes of those entrepreneurs.

But Chip and Dan Heath's book, Made to Stick, is the foundation of it all: how to successfully express your ideas in a way that's memorable and inspires others to act. Their main framework (which like most communicators/marketers comes in a kitschy acronym) is SUCCESs.

.

Simple: Your audience isn't going to remember 10 take-aways, but they will remember one that's simple enough to recall and to survive repetition. The trick is to find the 'right' one, and it's not as 'simple' as you may think. Idea creation goes back to your core message. Problem? The 'Curse of Knowledge.' It's the inability to think from the recipient's POV, if you already know what information you're trying to convey.

Unexpected: Your message needs to surprise, provide more information or otherwise break the audience's established paradigms. Most Web 2.0 savvy participants have seen dozens of logos/buttons with rounded corners, beveled 3D shape and a nice, shiny reflection. So making yet another rounded corner, beveled 3D box and nice, shiny reflection won't get your logo noticed. See how much faster you read through the description the second time? Go back. I changed a few words, but I'm guessing most of you didn't notice/care.

Concrete: Counterexample-

Ideas need to be concrete enough to understand and digest. The example above probably makes sense to math majors and engineers, but I have no idea how tay^rolf has anything to do with "peanut butter, jelly time." The book has some lovely examples; mine comes from the 3G iPhone launch:

The lines around Apple & AT&T stores last week were bordering on ridiculous. You'd think the main goal was to "quickly and efficiently sell iPhones to everyone who wants one." Nope. Because the two companies had different goals and seemingly no communication during the actual launch, customers complained. There was miscommunication (you can't activate if you're 'flagged' as a business customer but neither customer service staff knew that beforehand), long waits and server outages: both iTunes and AT&T activation. Apple wanted to drive as much demand through their stores are possible, so they had an incredible supply of 3Gs, while most AT&T stores only had a paltry 100 units or so. On the other hand, AT&T wanted everyone to sign up for service (and charge the $200 markup for those not upgrade eligible), so they bottlenecked purchase at the activation phase. If both companies could agree on a set of goals and convey them effectively to staff on both ends, hours of waiting and frustration would have been minimized.

Credible: The source affects if and how viewers accept ideas. You're more likely to believe your comm professor than the Nigerian guy who's emailing you about the millions inherited from some assassinated dead uncle. More intriguing is that 'credible' can change per circumstance. We ask for suggestions from friends but may rebuke endorsements from paid celebrities (are you really going to buy Lindsay Lohan's new tights collection?). Conversely, we still read Perez Hilton to find out what celebrities are wearing, eating, dating and snorting as their drug of choice.

Emotions: By tapping into emotions, you can motivate people to listen and act upon it. How many of you feel a pang of guilt/pity when you see the adorable child on a Christian Children's Fund commercial? How many even blinked when the news anchor told you President Bush attended the G8 summit to discuss poverty in Africa? I'm guessing the first generated more yes responses. Two reasons:

1. One vs. Many

• We can build a stronger bond with a single person than 12 million because we can't quite grasp 12 million people. Is that 20 football stadiums? 200? They're so far away. That one picture of a starving child really 'drives the idea home' and makes poverty/starvation a reality.
• It's hard to imagine our $24/month helping 12 million people, but if it pays for school supplies, food and toys for a 8 year old Filipino child, sign me up (already done it :-) ).

2. Emotions vs. Analytics

• Emotions bring people together by drawing empathy, while analytics cause us to reason and drive debate/argument. It's a lot easier to get people to agree with you through emotion... on average.

Stories: Themes and story telling help engage and give context to characters. Great stories are often unexpected (David vs. Goliath), concrete (problem, solution) and emotional (go green! boo oil companies!).

.

You're probably thinking, why did I just reveal the entire book? I mean, didn't I just write that I wanted to do a proper book review?

Well, I didn't exactly write a review, more an abstract. Two, most of what I just wrote was covered in the 1st chapter! Turns out each concept is not so elementary, and finding an idea that covers all your bases? Even harder.

My goal is that you could just read this blog and walk away with some basic knowledge to start slightly altering how you communicate- emailing, calling, blogging, texting or otherwise. OR you could buy the damn thing and find out a lot more. Be entertained by the case studies (another term for stories) and use the handy outline in the back, when you need to reference something. (God, I sound like a saleswoman.)

Hope I did somewhat of a decent job. :-) Now, it's bedtime and then BlogHer tomorrow!

.

Notes: Thanks to my amazing boss, Parry, who lent the book to me. Uh... it might be a while before I get it back to you, since I already have 2 other people interested in borrowing. :)

"Another pet peeve is marketing based on the “ours stinks less than theirs” approach. As a customer of a well-known cellular company, somehow their tag line of “fewer dropped calls” isn’t very reassuring–would you go to a surgeon who promised fewer dead patients? How about a newspaper that promised fewer wrong stories? Now to be fair, it does pass the “made to stick” test as it is firmly implanted in my brain, but it serves as a constant reminder of the deficiencies of my mobile service–probably not the intended result."

Additionally he gets additional points for the shout out to the Heath Brothers. Authors of "Made to Stick." Great book.

Since when did marketers create disgust and embarrassment to sell products?

Dan Heath and Chip Heath best selling book, Made to Stick, explores why some ideas surve and others die. I personally haven't read it but I've glanced through a few highly rating reviews of the book.

Initial impressions are it is thought provoking and an excellent flip view of marketing. We often pat ourselves on our backs when we strategies ideas that we take to market that results in stellar sales. But the often forgotten path to that success is a selfish mask and daggar approach to consumer's image and self esteem. Manufactured stigmas that Imply a normality is actually an fault against society.

June 30, 2008

Daniel Heath
210 Records
100 Caswell Beach Rd.
Oak Island, NC 28465

Dear Mr. Heath,
Enclosed is your invoice submitted today (June 30, 2008 ) and your payment of one (1) U.S. Dollar.  Please note that we are aware that you have billed us for a total of $78.40.  However, this total is based on many assumptions which we have reason to doubt, plus it fails to take into account the original terms of use of our services.  Those services being the reading of the blog "Take A Penny for My Thoughts".

Please refresh your memory by reading the first post of "Take A Penny for My Thoughts".  In it you will find that you must submit proof of reading said posts and send a bill in order to receive payment.  You have done an excellent job in submitting a bill but you have yet to submit proof of an actual reading of the blog "Take A Penny for My Thoughts".

Since we here at "Take A Penny for My Thoughts" have reason to doubt the actual referrals made by you, Daniel Heath, and the actual pain and suffering incurred during reading we are not paying for those items in the invoice.  We are not paying for state or federal taxes because the last time we checked you are neither the state or the federal government.  This leaves us with the actual total of $0.63.  Since we here at "Take A Penny for My Thoughts" are in a generous mood we will pay one (1) U.S. Dollar at this time.  This will cover all past reading and the next thirty-seven (37) readings of "Take A Penny for My Thoughts".  Plus we just realized the impracticality of sending change in the mail.

Feel free to spend this money however you like, though we recommend that you actually become honest and pay for your next strawberry shake at the internet/coffee house.

Thank you for your time and your loyalty to "Take A Penny for My Thoughts".  We look forward to conducting further business with you.

Sincerely,

Chris Burfield
Sole Proprietor, Owner, Author, Manager of Accounts Payable, Accountant, and all around good guy of "Take A Penny for My Thoughts"

"Let's take the CEO who announces to her staff that they must strive to 'maximize shareholder value.'
 
"Is this idea simple? Yes, in the sense that it's short, but it lacks the useful simplicity of a proverb. Is it unexpected? No. Concrete? Not at all. Credible? Only in the sense that it's coming from the mouth of the CEO. Emotional? Um, no. A story? No.
 
"Contrast the "maximize shareholder value" idea with John F. Kennedy's famous 1961 call to "put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade." Simple? Yes. Unexpected? Yes. Concrete? Amazingly so. Credible? The goal seemed like science fiction, but the source was credible. Emotional? Yes. Story? In miniature.
 
"Had John F. Kennedy been a CEO, he would have said, "Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives." Fortunately, JFK was more intuitive than a modern-day CEO; he knew that opaque, abstract missions don't captivate and inspire people*... It was a brilliant and beautiful idea -- a single idea that motivated the actions of millions of people for a decade." (*emphasis added by soulmagnet75 for dramatic effect)

Here's soulmagnet75 again to editorialize: It seems to me what we're trying to do anywhere in corporate America is "captivate and inspire people." That's what we're talking about when we're talking about "employee engagement." So far, what I've heard about "the thing" at my company isn't sticking with me. If we were to apply more of these Heath principles of sticky ideas, could we be more successful? We're getting into the story, we're attempting to get at the emotional, I think, with a new idea that will spotlight individual employees. What I'm missing is that simple, concrete expression: From the earth to the moon and back. Where are we going? We'll have to be careful about avoiding overused analogies about "getting on the bus" and "reaching for the stars," but isn't there something? Isn't there some way to say this more effectively so employees actually care?

Multiple readings of 20 entries:                                  $0.63

Referral fee for nine people:                                       $18.00

Pain and Suffering, General Punitive Damages:       $51.37

State and Federal Taxes (12%):                                   $8.40

Total:                                                                            $78.40

I couldn't stop laughing when I received this bill and even as I type this I'm still laughing.  I typed out a response and printed up a copy of the bill and sent it off to him by snail mail.  I will copy and paste my response and post it here as soon as I think the postal service has done its job and Mr. Heath has received it.

But rather than write about her presentation, I thought I would mention one of the points from her talk. In short, she is a neuro-scientist and she says that the "right" side of the brain, which is normally associated with creativity, is the side of the brain that sees big pictures, gestalts, overall patterns. The right side of the brain is also responsible for imagining possibilities, combining things in novel ways, modeling, seeing things with the mind's eye, etc.

The left side of the brain is the analytical side. It's linear and is responsible for vertical thinking, which tends to select, while in the process of decision making, one option to the exclusion of others. The left side is responsible for absorbing the data that it is constantly collecting and assigning it into the bigger categories that the brain is so good at creating. This saves time so that we aren't constantly evaluating each new piece of information that comes into us but we can pick little pieces of data and draw conclusions based on our past experience.

So, what Taylor says is that the right side of the brain is responsible for the past and the future and the left side of the brain is responsible for the present. What's the connection to corporations?

One leading management thinker (the name escapes me now) said that corporate strategy is simply a series of predictions. If that's true, executives should be thinking a whole lot more time in right brain intensive activities than they are. More serious play, more work with images, more work with divergent sets of knowledge and experience, more work with looking for weak signals and imagining those signals being amplified 5 years from now....but this isn't happening. It seems as though the higher up the food chain they get, execs are more and more concerned with the present rather than learning from the past and making better predictions about the future.

This curse affects you, the business user, and technologists. People forget that what they know is not known by others. The listener is always at a disadvantage because their head is not on the same plane as the conveyer of information.

Some technology organizations try to overcome this by bringing technologists on board that already have business application knowledge. Unfortunately, that is a false premise. No technologist will know as much as the business community. If they did, they would be working in that capacity.

The danger this stimulates is a false sense of security by both the technologist (the listener) and the business person (the conveyer of requirements). Technologists easily stop listening thinking “they know this already.” Business people refrain from explaining nuances because they assume the geek “knows this already.”

The curse of knowledge affects the quality of software being built. It is important that the intent of the project (more on this in another post) always be conveyed by the business person. Never assume that your knowledge is already known and understood by the geeks. The detail must be provided and can be done so by many knowledge workers.

The geek must always think “how much of this do I really understand? What is different?” Make sure they do by remembering to explain everything. Their head is never in the same place as yours. Realize that what you know is NOT what anyone else knows. Don’t fall prey to the Curse of Knowledge.

Order Made to Stick (Chapter 5: Emotional): Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die from Amazon for $2.39

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The Art of Woo, by G. Richard Shell and Mario Moussa, discusses how to use strategic persuasion to sell ideas. "Woo" is a fun way of describing the act of winning someone over. I enjoy that the authors give specific steps on how "woo" works. Step one is to survey your situation, which reminds me of a situation analysis section of a public relations plan. Step two is to confront the barriers, which then reminds me of a problem statement. Step three and four discuss how to make your pitch and secure your commitments.

Made to Stick, which we are reading in my Advanced PR Writing class by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, explores the sustainability of message and ideas. This book is a wonderful compliment to The Art of Woo because it gives the reader tools to keep an idea constantly communicated and explains why other ideas "die." Made to Stick breaks stickiness down into six principles; the first two are my favorite. Principle one is simplicity. A message needs to be easy to remember by the audience. Principle two is unexpectedness, which is my personal favorite. When someone is taken by surprised they listen. Even a pleasant surprise, rather than shock value, is still "unexpectedness."

Selling ideas with strategic persuasion and making them stick is all proven in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. He shares stories of ideas and products that have been able to "tip" into our lives and create moment for change. I've actually never "read" this book, however, I have listened to it on tape. During my drive to Seattle, Wash., I could picture all of the "tipping points" that Gladwell describes in his book. The Hush Puppies story is my personal favorite and I encourage everyone to read or listen to this entertaining and educating book.

So whether you are "tipping," "wooing" or "sticking," remember to always keep your audience and key message in mind.

The two brothers authored a book that has been making its way from the business world into the Christian leadership sphere. In an interview with Harvard Business Review on their "idea cast" we are made to understand that leaders often appear as expert IT guys (a la Jimmy Fallon's character from SNL -- Nick Burns: Your Company's Computer Guy), speaking a foreign language, and barking cryptic commands to dejected computer neophytes who feel insulted and angry.

They say, rightly I think, that effective leaders are skilled at boiling down the stuff of our expertise, experience, and knowledge into something simple, compelling, and memorable. For instance, they say that the pitch to movie studio executives for the movie Alien was, "Jaws on a spaceship". That phrase guided everything: the marketing, the plot direction, the way the film appeared through the camera lens. If there was doubt regarding a key decision in any of the aspects of the film, it could be tested against the phrase: "Jaws on a spaceship".

In thinking about my leadership role in a ministry setting, I am not all that different than Nick Burns. I talk about stuff I'm not so sure I know all that much about. I inadvertently (on a good day) confuse and frustrate people on a regular basis -- assuming they ought to know what I mean. In talking about vision, I assume people can fill in the blanks about what isn't concrete in exactly the right manner (the way I would do it).

Recently, over bagels and coffee, my team and I huddled around a shoddy set of computer speakers, listening to the 12 minute HBR podcast. We were trying to find the Jaws-on-a-spaceship for some of what we're attempting do in our ministry. The ensuing discussion was fruitful and animated. Check it out (Chip's on the phone, not super clear, but worth it).

Our Made to Stick idea was an attempt to explain what our Wednesday night in-homes program is all about. Here's where we landed: A house party, redefined. Truthfully, it's still a work in progress. I'm amazed how much work it takes to make something simple. But, we were attempting to give our students and leaders a picture of celebration, community, relationships. In other words, we want to take what we know of house parties (synonymous with a litany of teen movies featuring a crowded-parents-not-home-soiree and an innocent heroine who is tragi-comically swept off her feet into teen pregnancy/family crisis/friend-estrangement/identity confusion by a monumentally arrogant jock) and refashion them into something better, richer, and more compelling. Simple enough?

As I mentioned recently, Made to Stick is one of my favorite leadership books. Scratch that. One of my favorite books period.

The cool people over at Elevation had a great post today about the book. I highly recommend making the click to read the post

In the book, the authors - Chip and Dan Heath - explore why some ideas seem to stick around forever (even when they are false) and other ideas are forgotten immediately. They give some great practical ideas on how to make your ideas more sticky. At the end of the book, there is a handy summary to refer back to frequently.

You can also check out the website for the book for excerpts, reviews, etc... - www.madetostick.com.

• Steve Wozniak, de computeringenieur die in 1976 samen met commerciële man Steve Jobs Apple Computer oprichtte. De 'Wizard of Woz' werkt nog steeds voor Apple en richtte nog enkele kleinere hi-tech bedrijven op.
• Tom Kelley, General Manager van IDEO, het designbedrijf dat instond voor de Apple muis, de Palm V, de Miele stofzuiger en 3000 andere innovatieve ontwerpen.
• Dan Heath, auteur van "Made to Stick", het boek dat in de VS tot beste business boek van 2007 werd verkozen. Hij legt uit waarom sommige ideeën beter blijven hangen bij mensen dan andere. En vooral: hoe je daaraan kan werken.

Een paar andere namen: strandbeestenkunstenaar Theo Janssen; web 2.0 wonder An De Jonghe; straatjutter Richard Stomp; Jef Staes, 'Engine of Innovation'-bezieler en auteur van 'Mijn organisatie is een oerwoud'.

Je kan nu inschrijven aan de Early Bird fee (spotvogel-prijsje) van 295€ ipv 395 €. Als je je op www.creativityworldforum.be gratis lid maakt van Flanders DC krijg je nog een extra korting van 20€ (275€, dus).

A. It’s the economy, stupid.

B. Change vs. more of the same.

C. Don’t forget healthcare.

The truth is, all three of these ideas were written by Mr. Carville on that famous white board as reminders to the Clinton campaign staff that these were important ideas to be communicated to the American voters. While the political process may not be of interest to many, what is instructive is to discover what makes one idea lodge in our memory while others refuse to stick? This is the question explored by Chip and Dan Heath in Made to Stick.

One of the greatest challenges that we face as agents of social change is that we must transfer our passion for the good of others into ideas that can resonate with people that we want to engage in the process. The Heaths analyze the process of communicating ideas and discover that those that cut through the avalanche of information that we encounter each day and wedge themselves permanently in our minds share six principles: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories. A memorable acronym emerges from these words – SUCCESs.

Made to Stick offers change agents a toolbox for analyzing and improving the way in which we convey our passionate call to action to others so that they become equally engaged and moved to action. For example, we may have attempted in the past to draw others to labor with us in the area of serving the homeless. We offer statistics to demonstrate that toiling in this field is not without a harvest as the cynical culture leads many to believe. The Heaths point out that the standard message is lacking in any of the adhesive qualities that would make our plea sticky and thus remain in the recipient’s consciousness, standing a better chance of catching fire.

They offer a story (S in the acronym) that cements the credibility (C as well) of our desire to engage others. Rather than telling others that a homeless rehabilitation program can be successful, followed by a graph and slide show, the Doe Fund in New York City sent a driver to pick up representatives of a grant organization. Rather than listening to the Doe executives on the ride from the airport, the grant representatives were enthralled by the story of their driver Dennis, a formerly homeless man who was a successful graduate of the work of the Doe program. The power of Unexpectedness, Credibility, Emotion, and Story combine to make the effectiveness of the Doe program stick in the mind far better than a presentation of the statistics can. The Heaths demonstrate that we can analyze all of our ideas in this way and find ways to integrate these principles in such a way as to make our ideas unforgettable.

Many primers on preaching and ministry leadership have attempted to convey this same idea but very few are as successful as Made to Stick. The brothers Heath have given us a book that succeeds at what it recommends; the illustrations and applications make each of the principles immediately memorable even apart from the easy to remember SUCCESs. Those of us involved in the work of social justice and change are often personally impassioned but can be frustrated when others that we hope to engage in our crusade fail to equally catch the fire. Using the SUCCESs principles to analyze the way in which we promote our passion can serve the kingdom well as we find those things that can cement the idea in the minds of fellow believers and move them action. After all, isn’t that what Jesus does in all the red words?

'The back of the napkin' is a book that can help you to use visual thinking.

The recommendation of Dan Heath (author of 'Made to Stick') is promising: "Inspiring! It teaches you a new way of thinking in a few hours — what more could you ask from a book?" — Dan Heath,author of Made to Stick

This is the blog post with a good book review. You see three podcasts including visual explanations of the book!

This is a blog on visual thinking!

Good review of the book

Great short presentation on Visual Thinking:

[slideshare id=331443&doc=the-ten-and-a-half-commandments-of-visual-thinking-120710279869368-4&w=425]

Click here if you do not see the presentation above.