Made to Stick

Sports, Monday Night Football, 20/20, and Nightline. He won thirty-
six Emmys. The tool kit he developed for NCAA football stood the
test of time. The way to get people to care is to provide context. Today
that seems obvious, because these techniques have become ubiqui-
tous. But this avalanche of context started because a twenty-nine-
year-old wrote a memo about how to make college football more
interesting.
Many teachers use some version of the Arledge tool kit to prime
their students’ interest. Some label the strategy “advanced organiz-
ers.” The idea is that to engage students in a new topic you should
start by highlighting some things they already know. An earth-science
teacher might ask her students to bring in pictures of an earthquake’s
devastation, as a way of leading up to a discussion of plate tectonics.
Alternatively, the teacher can set the context, à la Arledge, so that stu-
dents start to become interested. A chemistry teacher might lead into
the periodic table of elements by discussing Mendeleyev and his
long, passionate quest to organize the elements. In this way, the peri-
odic table emerges from within the context of a sort of detective story.
Knowledge gaps create interest. But to prove that the knowledge
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gaps exist, it may be necessary to highlight some knowledge first.
“Here’s what you know. Now here’s what you’re missing.” Alterna-
tively, you can set context so people care what comes next. It’s no ac-
cident that mystery novelists and crossword-puzzle writers give us
clues. When we feel that we’re close to the solution of a puzzle, cu-
riosity takes over and propels us to the finish.
Treasure maps, as shown in the movies, are vague. They show a
few key landmarks and a big X where the treasure is. Usually the ad-
venturer knows just enough to find the first landmark, which becomes
the first step in a long journey toward the treasure. If treasure maps
were produced on MapQuest.com, with door-to-door directions, it
would kill the adventure-movie genre. There is value in sequencing in-
formation—not dumping a stack of information on someone at once
but dropping a clue, then another clue, then another. This method of
communication resembles flirting more than lecturing.
Unexpected ideas, by opening a knowledge gap, tease and flirt.
They mark a big red X on something that needs to be discovered but
don’t necessarily tell you how to get there. And, as we’ll see, a red X of
spectacular size can end up driving the actions of thousands of peo-
ple for many years.
Wa l k i n g   o n   t h e   M o o n   a n d   Ra d i o s   i n   Po c k e t s
In the rubble of Tokyo after World War II, a young company, later
named Sony, struggled to stay in business. It attracted a handful of
smart scientists and engineers, but its first innovation, an electric rice
cooker, was a failure. Initially, Sony survived by repairing shortwave
radios.
Around this time, Masaru Ibuka, Sony’s lead technologist, became
intrigued by transistors, which had recently been invented by a team
at Bell Laboratories. Ibuka craved a “substantial” project to motivate
his team of fifty scientists and engineers, and he saw tremendous
promise in transistors. But when he bid to license the technology from
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Bell Labs, the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry denied the li-
cense. It was skeptical of the young company’s ability to manage such
a cutting-edge technology.
In 1953, Ibuka secured permission to license transistors. He had a
vision for a radio that would be based on transistors. The advantage of
a transistor radio was obvious to engineers; it would free radios from
the big vacuum tubes that made them so bulky and unreliable. Bell
Labs told Ibuka that it didn’t think a “transistor radio” was possible.
His engineers began to pursue the vision anyway.
Let’s pause here for a moment to put ourselves in Ibuka’s shoes.
Your company has been struggling, and you’ve got a team of brilliant
people whom you need to inspire. You have the potential to lead
them in one hundred different directions—rice cookers or radios or
telephones or whatever else R & D could dream up. But you’re con-
vinced that the idea of a transistor-based radio is the most promising
path.
Your core message, then, is the dream of a transistor radio. How
do you make this message unexpected? How do you engage the cu-
riosity and interest of your team? The concept of a “transistor radio” is
probably not enough, in and of itself, to motivate your team. It’s fo-
cused more on technology than on value. A transistor radio—so
what?
What about tapping into some of the classic managerial themes?
Competition: “Sony will beat Bell Labs in making a transistor radio
work.” Quality: “Sony will be the world’s most respected manufac-
turer of radios.” Innovation: “Sony will create the most advanced ra-
dios in the world.”
Here’s the idea Ibuka proposed to his team: a “pocketable radio.”
It’s hard, in retrospect, to comprehend the hubris of that idea—
how utterly unexpected, how preposterous, it must have seemed the
first time a Sony engineer heard it. Radios were not things you put
into your pocket; they were pieces of furniture. At the time, radio fac-
tories employed full-time cabinetmakers.
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Furthermore, the idea that an upstart Japanese company would
deliver such an innovation, when the brilliant minds at Bell Labs
thought it impossible, was not credible. After all, the 1950s were a
decade when “Made in Japan” was synonymous with shoddy work-
manship.
But Sony engineers were talented and hungry. Ibuka’s idea of a
pocketable radio caught on internally and drove Sony through an in-
credible period of growth. By 1957, Sony had grown to 1,200 em-
ployees. In March 1957, just four years after Sony was grudgingly
granted permission to tinker with transistors, the company released
the TR-55, the world’s first pocketable transistor radio. The TR-55
sold 1.5 million units and put Sony on the world map.
A “pocketable radio”—isn’t this simply a brilliant product idea,
rather than a brilliant “sticky idea”? No, it is both, and both elements
are indispensable. There’s no question that someone in the world
would have invented a transistor radio, even if Ibuka had decided to
build the world’s fanciest rice cooker. Transistor radios were an in-
evitable technological progression. But the first transistor radios were
nowhere near pocket-sized, and without Ibuka’s unexpected idea his
engineers might have stopped pursuing the technology long before it
became small enough to be useful. Ibuka inspired years of effort be-
cause he came up with an unexpected idea that challenged hundreds
of engineers to do their best work.
In May 1961, John F. Kennedy gave a speech to a special session
of Congress. It was a time when the Cold War dominated global pol-
itics. The Cold War allowed for few ways to measure success—to
record gains and losses—but, in one highly visible field, the United
States was clearly lagging behind. That field was space.
Four years earlier, the United States—which had prided itself as
the most technologically advanced nation—was stunned when the
Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite. The United States
eventually responded with its own satellite launches, but the Soviet
Union maintained its lead, racking up first after first. In April 1961,
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Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.
U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard followed a month later.
In Kennedy’s address to Congress, he outlined a series of requests
to help the United States maintain its leadership during the Cold
War. He asked for funds to achieve a number of strategic goals: to es-
tablish the AID program for international development, to expand
the NATO alliance, to build radio and television stations in Latin
America and Southeast Asia, and to shore up civil defense.
But he ended the speech on a curious note. His final proposal had
nothing to do with international aid or civil defense. It was this: “I be-
lieve that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, be-
fore this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning
him safely to the earth . . . if we make this judgment affirmatively, it
will not be one man going to the moon, it will be an entire nation.
For all of us must work to put him there.”
Two unexpected ideas. Both create surprise. Radios are pieces of
furniture, not something to slip into a pocket. Men don’t walk on the
moon. It’s a long way up. The air is thin.
Both create insight. Rather than leading us along a plodding route
from one incremental step to the next, the ideas give us a sudden,
dramatic glimpse of how the world might unfold. And not just how
but why.
Both create knowledge gaps. Loewenstein, the author of the gap
theory, says it’s important to remember that knowledge gaps are
painful. “If people like curiosity, why do they work to resolve it?” he
asks. “Why don’t they put mystery novels down before the last chap-
ter, or turn off the television before the final inning of a close ball
game?”
Both of these unexpected ideas set up big knowledge gaps—but
not so big that they seemed insurmountable. Kennedy didn’t propose
a “man on Mercury,” and Ibuka didn’t propose an “implantable
radio.” Each goal was audacious and provocative, but not paralyzing.
Any engineer who heard the “man on the moon” speech must have
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begun brainstorming immediately: “Well, first we’d need to solve this
problem, then we’d need to develop this technology, then . . .”
The vision of a pocketable radio sustained a company through a
tricky period of growth and led it to become an internationally recog-
nized player in technology. The vision of a man on the moon sus-
tained tens of thousands of separate individuals, in dozens of
organizations, for almost a decade. These are big, powerful, sticky
ideas.
When we’re skeptical about our ability to get people’s attention, or
our ability to keep people’s attention, we should draw inspiration from
Kennedy and Ibuka. And, on a smaller scale, from Nora Ephron’s
journalism teacher and Nordstrom’s managers. Unexpectedness, in
the service of core principles, can have surprising longevity.
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C H A P T E R   3
C O N C R E T E
One hot summer day a Fox was strolling through an orchard. He
saw a bunch of Grapes ripening high on a grape vine. “Just the
thing to quench my thirst,” he said. Backing up a few paces, he
took a run and jumped at the grapes, just missing. Turning
around again, he ran faster and jumped again. Still a miss. Again
and again he jumped, until at last he gave up out of exhaustion.
Walking away with his nose in the air, he said: “I am sure they are
sour.” It is easy to despise what you can’t get.
T
he fable above, “The Fox and the Grapes,” was written by
Aesop. According to Herodotus, he was a slave (though he was
later freed). Aesop authored some of the stickiest stories in
world history. We’ve all heard his greatest hits: “The Tortoise and the
Hare,” “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” “The Goose That Laid the
Golden Eggs,” “The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” and many more. If
any story told in this book is still circulating a few millennia from
now, odds are it will be “The Fox and the Grapes.”
Even English speakers who’ve never heard “The Fox and the
Grapes” will recognize the phrase “sour grapes,” which encapsulates

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the moral of the story. Aesop’s lesson has traveled the world. In Hun-
gary, people say savanyu a szolo—“sour grapes” in Hungarian. In
China, they say, “Grapes are sour because you cannot reach them.”
In Sweden, a little local color was added; the Swedish expression Surt