I rarely read for pleasure. And by rarely, I mean r-a-r-e-l-y.
Between prepping for class (I enjoy the material, but it’s not for “pleasure”), client work (research! research! research!) and raising a happy, healthy, if not a little goofy, 14 month old, it’s all I can do not to drop into a coma at the end of the day.
However, I broke this trend recently when I kept hearing so much great stuff about the Heath Brothers’ book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
It took me longer than it should to get through the book (review paragraph 2), but let me tell you… I loved it!
The Heaths break the concepts of “stickiness” into six major criteria. They give lots of great examples and make it easy to think about how this information might be useful for lectures, clients, getting my partner to work on his honey-do list…. okay, maybe not the honey-do, but very useful nonetheless.
I’ve already started doing a mini “lecturette” on the six criteria and I start with the same story that starts the book – the kidney heist legend. I’ve done this in two classes now. The first class… very savvy. They’d either heard the legend, or they were Nip/Tuck fans. So that ruined the punchline (even though they still loved the example). The second class had never heard the story before! Not one! The looks on their faces were priceless.
We’ve been working with a lot of start-ups and small companies lately and for the work I do for them, the sticky criteria have been a great start to some creative thinking.
It’s an easy read with lots of fun stories (principle #6) and food for thought. You can read an excerpt here.
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Sam