Made to Stick

sa räven om rönnbären means “Sour, the fox said, about the rowan-
berries.”
Clearly, Aesop was illustrating a universal human shortcoming.
The fable would not have survived for more than 2,500 years if it
didn’t reflect some profound truth about human nature. But there
are many profound truths that have not seeped into the day-to-day
language and thinking of dozens of cultures. This truth is especially
sticky because of the way it was encoded. The concrete images evoked
by the fable—the grapes, the fox, the dismissive comment about sour
grapes—allowed its message to persist. One suspects that the life span
of Aesop’s ideas would have been shorter if they’d been encoded as
Aesop’s Helpful Suggestions—“Don’t be such a bitter jerk when you
fail.”
What the world needs is a lot more fables. On the Web, a satirical
site features a “Business Buzzword Generator.” Readers can produce
their own business buzzwords by combining one word each from
three columns, which yields phrases like “reciprocal cost-based re-
engineering,” “customer-oriented visionary paradigm,” and “strategic
logistical values.” (All of these sound eerily plausible as buzzwords, by
the way.) Teachers have their own buzzwords: metacognitive skills, in-
trinsic motivation, portfolio assessment, developmentally appropriate,
thematic learning. And if you’ve ever talked to a doctor, we don’t even
have to provide examples. Our favorite from medicine: “idiopathic
cardiomyopathy.” “Cardiomyopathy” means something is wrong with
your heart, and “idiopathic” means “we have no idea why yours isn’t
working.”
Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract. Teachers teach
students about battles and animals and books. Doctors repair prob-
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lems with our stomachs, backs, and hearts. Companies create soft-
ware, build planes, distribute newspapers; they build cars that are
cheaper, faster, or fancier than last year’s. Even the most abstract busi-
ness strategy must eventually show up in the tangible actions of
human beings. It’s easier to understand those tangible actions than to
understand an abstract strategy statement—just as it’s easier to under-
stand a fox dissing some grapes than an abstract commentary about
the human psyche.
Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remem-
ber it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others,
who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concrete-
ness helps us avoid these problems. This is perhaps the most impor-
tant lesson that Aesop can teach us.
T h e   N a t u r e   C o n s e r v a n c y
For fifty years, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has helped protect
environmentally precious areas in the world using the simplest possi-
ble method: It buys them. It buys land at market prices, making it off-
limits to environmentally damaging uses, such as development or
logging. This strategy has come to be known within TNC as “bucks
and acres.” It had appeal to donors and benefactors, because the re-
sults of their gifts were so clear. A big gift bought a big piece of land.
A small gift bought a small piece of land. As one donor commented,
TNC produced “results you could walk around on.”
In 2002, Mike Sweeney, the COO of TNC California, was facing
a big challenge. California is particularly important to TNC, because
it contains so many environmentally critical areas. California is one
of only five Mediterranean climate regions in the world. (The others
are the fynbos of South Africa, the matorral of Chile, the kwongan of
Australia, and, of course, the Mediterranean.) These Mediterranean
climate zones occupy only 2 percent of the world’s landmass but host
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more than 20 percent of its plant species. If you want to buy environ-
mentally precious land, Mediterranean climates give you a lot of
bang for your buck.
In 2002, Sweeney and his staff had taken a map of California and
colored in the most environmentally sensitive areas, the areas worth
preserving. Astonishingly, 40 percent of the map was colored. This
was a non-starter: There weren’t enough bucks out there to buy that
many acres.
Yet 9 percent of the state was classified as being in “critical dan-
ger.” Nine percent of California was still far too much to contemplate
purchasing, but these regions were environmentally essential; TNC
couldn’t simply give up on them.
TNC decided to implement some new approaches. “Bucks and
acres” couldn’t succeed with this vast quantity of land. So instead of
owning the land outright, TNC would ensure that the critical areas
were protected against damage. The organization would pay land-
owners not to develop their land, buying what’s known as a “conser-
vation easement.” It would work with local and state governments to
change policies and encourage conservation of private and public
land. It would focus on important marine areas, where there was no
land to buy.
These new strategies made sense—TNC could protect more areas
than it could reach through “bucks and acres.” But they also had
drawbacks. First, they were much less concrete to donors. Donors
can’t “walk around on” a favorable government regulation. Second,
they were also potentially demoralizing for employees—they made
progress less tangible. When TNC was focused on land deals,
Sweeney said, “it was easy to celebrate a deal closing, to tell everyone,
‘John and Mary got this land,’ and to pat them on the back.” These
“milestone moments,” so great for morale, were harder to find in the
new model. How could TNC make the new strategy more concrete?
What would you do in this situation? Is there a way to recapture
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the invaluable tangibility of the “bucks and acres” strategy in a con-
text that was necessarily more ambiguous? You’ve got 40 percent (or
at least 9 percent) of the state to protect, and you can’t buy it. How do
you explain yourself to donors and partners?
Chip has discussed this case with his students at Stanford, and in
grappling with the need for concreteness some students respond by
breaking up the impossibly large scale of the challenge—40 percent
of California! 9 percent in critical need!—by subdividing it into more
tangible “subgoals.” For example: “We will protect a 2 percent chunk
of California every year for twenty years.” Others try to invoke a unit
of measurement that we can understand, such as the acre. Most peo-
ple can visualize an acre. But the scale is too big: 2 percent of Cali-
fornia is about two million acres. No one can picture two million
acres.
The students are wisely trying to find a way to break up a big, ab-
stract goal into smaller, more concrete subgoals. This is the right
idea. But in this case the numbers are just too big. And “acreage” is
not necessarily the best way to think. There are 1,500-acre plots of
land that are more environmentally precious than other 90,000-acre
plots. Thinking about “acreage per year” is akin to a museum curator
thinking about “canvases per year,” without regard to period, style, or
painter.
Here’s what TNC did: Instead of talking in terms of land area, it
talked about a “landscape.” A landscape is a contiguous plot of land
with unique, environmentally precious features. The TNC set a goal
of preserving fifty landscapes—of which twenty-five were an immedi-
ate priority—over a ten-year period. Five landscapes per year sounds
more realistic than 2 million acres per year, and it’s much more con-
crete.
To the east of Silicon Valley there is a set of brown hills that are
the beginnings of a wilderness the size of Yosemite. The brown hills
are an important watershed for the San Francisco Bay, but they are
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quickly being chipped away by Silicon Valley sprawl. Although the
area is important ecologically, it is not like the redwoods or the coast,
with beautiful visuals that engage people’s imaginations. The hills are
covered with grass interspersed with a few oak trees. Most of the year,
the grass is brown. Sweeney admits that it’s not very sexy. Even local
groups in the Silicon Valley area that were interested in protecting
open spaces weren’t paying attention to the brown hills. But, says
Sweeney, “We don’t go after stuff because it’s pretty. We go after it be-
cause it’s an ecologically important part of creation.”
TNC named the oak savanna the Mount Hamilton Wilderness
(based on its highest peak, the site of a local observatory). Identifying
the area as a coherent landscape and naming it put it on the map for
local groups and policymakers. Before, Sweeney says, Silicon Valley
groups wanted to protect important areas close to their homes, but
they didn’t know where to start. “If you say, ‘There’s a really important
area to the east of Silicon Valley,’ it’s just not exciting, because it’s not
tangible. But when you say, ‘The Mount Hamilton Wilderness,’ their
interest perks up.”
The Packard Foundation, a Silicon Valley institution created by
one of the founders of the Hewlett-Packard Company, provided a
large grant to protect the Mount Hamilton Wilderness. Other envi-
ronmental groups in the Bay Area started campaigning to preserve
the area. Sweeney says, “We’re always laughing now, because we see
other people’s documents and they’re talking about the Mount Ham-
ilton Wilderness. We say, ‘You know we made that up.’ ”
People who live in cities tend to name and define their neighbor-
hoods: “the Castro,” “SoHo,” “Lincoln Park,” and so forth. These
names come to define an area and its traits. Neighborhoods have per-
sonalities. The Nature Conservancy created the same effect with its
landscapes. The Mount Hamilton Wilderness is not a set of acres; it’s
an eco-celebrity.
This is not a story about land; it’s a story about abstraction. TNC
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avoided the trap of abstraction—saving 2 million acres per year—by
converting abstract blobs on a map into tangible landscapes. TNC 
realized, wisely, that the context had grown more ambiguous, and the
solutions had grown more ambiguous, but that their messages could
not be allowed to grow more ambiguous. Concreteness is an indis-
pensable component of sticky ideas.
U n d e r s t a n d i n g   S u b t r a c t i o n
What makes something “concrete”? If you can examine something
with your senses, it’s concrete. A V8 engine is concrete. “High-
performance” is abstract. Most of the time, concreteness boils down
to specific people doing specific things. In the “Unexpected” chap-
ter, we talked about Nordstrom’s world-class customer service.
“World-class customer service” is abstract. A Nordie ironing a cus-
tomer’s shirt is concrete.
Concrete language helps people, especially novices, understand
new concepts. Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. If you’ve got to
teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren’t certain what
they know, concreteness is the only safe language.
To see this, we can start by studying math classrooms in Asia. We
know, from the news over the years, that East Asian children outper-
form American children in, well, just about everything (except the
consumption of fatty foods). This is especially evident in math. The
math skills of Americans fall behind those of Asians early—the gap is
apparent in the first grade, and it widens throughout elementary
school.
What are Asian schools doing differently? Our stereotype is that
these schools operate with almost robotic efficiency: Hours are long
and discipline is strict. We think of East Asian students as being less
“creative” somehow; we like to think they outperform our students
through rote mechanics and memorization. The truth, it turns out, is
almost exactly the opposite.
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In 1993, a group of researchers studied ten schools in Japan, ten in
Taiwan, and twenty in the United States. In each school, they picked
two different math teachers to observe, and they observed four lessons
with each teacher. The researchers found that all the teachers used
rote recall quite a bit; it was standard procedure in at least half the les-
sons observed in every country. But other techniques varied greatly
among the three countries.
For instance, consider this question by a Japanese teacher: “You
had 100 yen but then you bought a notebook for 70 yen. How much
money do you still have?” Or this question, posed by a teacher in Tai-
wan: “Originally there are three kids playing ball. Two more came
later, and then one more joined them. How many are playing now?”
As she talked, she drew stick figures on the board and wrote down the
equation 3 + 2 + 1.
Notice that these teachers are explaining abstract mathematical
concepts by emphasizing things that are concrete and familiar—
buying school supplies and playing ball. Their explanations take ad-
vantage of preexisting schemas, a tactic we explored in the “Simple”
chapter. Teachers take an existing schema—the dynamics of a six-
person ball game—and overlay a new layer of abstraction.
The researchers called this style of questioning Computing in
Context. It is pretty much the opposite of “rote recall.” And, contrary
to our stereotypes, it occurred about twice as much in Asia as it did in
the United States (61 percent of lessons versus 31 percent).
In another case, a Japanese teacher placed on a desk 5 rows of 10
tiles each. Then she took away 3 rows of 10 tiles. She asked a student
how many tiles were left, and he gave the correct answer: 20. The
teacher then asked the students how they knew that this was a sub-
traction problem. This teacher provided her students with a visual
image of subtraction. Students could build an abstract concept—
“subtraction”—on a concrete foundation: 30 tiles being yanked away
from an original set of 50. The researchers coded questions like this
one as Conceptual Knowledge questions. This type of question was
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asked in 37 percent of lessons in Japan, 20 percent in Taiwan, but
only 2 percent in the United States.
Using concreteness as a foundation for abstraction is not just good
for mathematical instruction; it is a basic principle of understanding.
Novices crave concreteness. Have you ever read an academic paper or
a technical article or even a memo and found yourself so flummoxed
by the fancy abstract language that you were crying out for an example?
Or maybe you’ve experienced the frustration of cooking from a
recipe that was too abstract: “Cook until the mixture reaches a hearty
consistency.” Huh? Just tell me how many minutes to stir! Show me a
picture of what it looks like! After we’ve cooked the dish a few times,
then the phrase “hearty consistency” might start to make sense. We
build a sensory image of what that phrase represents. But the first
time it’s as meaningless as 3 + 2 + 1 would be to a three-year-old.
This is how concreteness helps us understand—it helps us con-
struct higher, more abstract insights on the building blocks of our 
existing knowledge and perceptions. Abstraction demands some 
concrete foundation. Trying to teach an abstract principle without
concrete foundations is like trying to start a house by building a roof
in the air.
C o n c r e t e   I s   M e m o r a b l e
Concrete ideas are easier to remember. Take individual words, for in-
stance. Experiments in human memory have shown that people are
better at remembering concrete, easily visualized nouns (“bicycle” or
“avocado”) than abstract ones (“justice” or “personality”).
Naturally sticky ideas are stuffed full of concrete words and im-
ages—think of the Kentucky Fried Rat or the Kidney Heist’s ice-filled
bathtub. The Kidney Heist legend would have been far less sticky if
the man had woken up and found that someone had absconded with
his self-esteem.
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Yale researcher Eric Havelock studies tales that have been passed
down by word of mouth, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. He notes
that these tales are characterized by lots of concrete actions, with few
abstractions. Why? The ancient Greeks certainly had no problem
with abstraction—this was the society that produced Plato and Aris-
totle, after all. Havelock believes that the stories evolved away from
abstraction over time. When they were passed along from generation
to generation, the more memorable concrete details survived and the
abstractions evaporated.
Let’s skip to the modern world and another timeless and beautiful
domain of expression: accounting. Put yourself in the shoes of an ac-
counting professor who has to introduce accounting principles to col-
lege students. To a new student, accounting can seem bewilderingly
abstract—the income statement, the balance sheet, T-accounts, ac-
counts receivable, treasury stock. No people or sensory data in sight.
As the teacher, how do you make accounting concepts vivid? Two
professors from Georgia State University, Carol Springer and Faye
Borthick, decided to try something radically different. In the fall of
2000, Springer and Borthick taught a semester of accounting using,
as a centerpiece, a semester-long case study. The case study followed
a new business launched by two imaginary college sophomores, Kris
and Sandy, at LeGrande State University.
Kris and Sandy had an idea for a new product called Safe Night
Out (SNO), a device targeted at parents with teenagers who were old
enough to drive. Installed in the teenager’s car, the device would
record the route and speed of the car. For the first time, parents could
confirm whether their car was being driven responsibly.
At this point you, as a student in introductory accounting, become