Made to Stick

ironed my shirt!” The value of the stories does not come from unex-
pectedness in and of itself. The value comes from the perfect align-
ment between Nordstrom’s goals and the content of the stories.
These stories could just as easily be destructive in another context.
The 7-Eleven management does not want to face an epidemic of gift-
wrapping clerks.
Nordstrom’s stories are a classic example of the power of unex-
74
M A D E   T O   S T I C K

---

pectedness. There’s no danger that the stories will feel gimmicky, be-
cause the surprise is followed by insight—the stories tell us what it
means to be a good Nordstrom employee. It’s uncommon sense in
the service of a core message.
J o u r n a l i s m   1 0 1
Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When
Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for
Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the
New York Post and Esquire. She became a journalist because of her
high school journalism teacher.
Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Al-
though the students had no journalism experience, they walked into
their first class with a sense of what a journalist does: A journalists gets
the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five
Ws—who, what, where, when, and why.
As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron’s
teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of
a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: “Kenneth L. Pe-
ters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that
the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday
for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will
be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert May-
nard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund ‘Pat’ Brown.”
The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at
the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of
the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and con-
densed them into a single sentence: “Governor Pat Brown, Margaret
Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills
High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento . . . blah, blah, blah.”
The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then
he laid them aside and paused for a moment.
U N E X P E C T E D
75

---

Finally, he said, “The lead to the story is ‘There will be no school
next Thursday.’ ”
“It was a breathtaking moment,” Ephron recalls. “In that instant I
realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts
but about figuring out the point. It wasn’t enough to know the who,
what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant. And
why it mattered.” For the rest of the year, she says, every assignment
had a secret—a hidden point that the students had to figure out in
order to produce a good story.
T
his idea should be in the Sticky Hall of Fame. This teacher had a
huge impact not because he was a dynamic speaker or a caring
mentor—though he may have been both—but because he crafted a
brilliant idea. It was an idea that, in a matter of seconds, rewrote the
schema of journalism in the minds of his students. An idea that
changed a student’s career plans and stuck with her thirty years later.
What made this idea work? First, the teacher knew that the stu-
dents had a defective schema of journalism, and he knew how it was
defective. Second, he made them publicly commit to their defective
models with the “write the lead” assignment. Then he pulled the rug
out from under them with a well-structured surprise. By revealing the
right lead—“There will be no school next Thursday”—he took their
mental models, gave them a swift kick, and made them work better.
76
M A D E   T O   S T I C K

---

D o e s   A m e r i c a   S p e n d   To o   M u c h  
o n   F o r e i g n   A i d ?
T H E   S I T UAT I O N: