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Has Bad Behavior Irreparably Damaged the Title CEO?

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Fortunately “Good” CEOs Are Still Out There

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Test your audience with these during an interview or on your website. Adapted from Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Test the Curse of Knowledge With Tappers and Listeners Take a song like "The Star-Spangled Banner" and tap out the rhythm to a friend on a table. Ask your friend to listen and guess the name of the song. Do you think your friend will guess right? A 1990 study on this experiment showed that listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs (3 out of 120 attempted). Before the listeners guessed the song, the tappers were asked to predict if the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 percent! Why the discrepancy? When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head, but the listener can't. The problem is that the tapper has been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for her to imagine what it's like to lack that knowledge. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. The tapper/listener experiment is reenacted every day across the world between CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers. All of these groups rely on ongoing communication, but, like the tappers and listeners, they suffer from enormous information imbalances. You can quash the Curse of Knowledge with the six principles of stickiness. The Simplicity Test Spend ten to fifteen seconds, no more, studying the letters below. Then write down as many letters as you can remember. J FKFB INAT OUP SNA SAI RS If you're like most people, you probably remembered about seven to ten letters. That's not much information. Compactness is essential because there's a limit to the amount of information we can juggle at once. Now try the exercise again. The letters are the same but are grouped differently. Once again, study the letters for ten to fifteen seconds, then close the book and test your recall. JFK FBI NATO UPS NASA IRS Chances are you did much better the second time. Suddenly the letters meant something, which made them easier to remember. In Round 1 you were trying to remember raw data. In Round 2, you were remembering concepts: John F. Kennedy, the FBI, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, UPS, NASA, the IRS. The Concreteness Test 1) Think of five silly things that people have done in the world in the past ten years. 2) Next, think of five silly things your child has done in the past ten years. Most people can think of about the same number of things for each exercise–even though your child's actions are a tiny fraction of the world! Why? Because concreteness focuses your brain. The Velcro Theory of Memory Test Read each sentence below slowly. As you move from one sentence to another, you'll notice that it feels different to remember different kinds of things. Remember the capital of Kansas Remember the first line of the song "Hey Jude" Remember the Mona Lisa Remember the house where you spent most of your childhood Remember the definition of "truth" Remember the definition of "watermelon" Each command to remember seems to trigger a different mental activity. Memory, then, is not like a single filing cabinet. It is more like Velcro. If you look at Velcro up close, you'll notice that one side has lots of tiny hooks and the other has lots of tiny loops. When you press the two sides together, a huge number of hooks get snagged inside the loops, and that's what causes Velcro to seal. Similarly, your brain hosts a staggering number of loops. The more "hooks" we can put into our ideas, the easier it will be for people to remember. The Choice Paralysis Test A group of students were given the following choice of how to spend one evening: 1. Attend a lecture by an author you admire who is visiting just for the evening, or 2. Go the library and study? 21 percent decided to study. Suppose instead they had been given three choices: 1. Attend the lecture by an author you admire who is visiting just for the evening. 2. Go to the library and study. 3. Watch a film that you've been wanting to see. Do you think they answered differently? Remarkably, when a different group of students were given the three choices, 40 percent decided to study -- double the number who did before. Giving students two good alternatives to studying, rather than one, paradoxically makes them less likely to choose either. This behavior isn't "rational," but it is human. A consistent finding in the psychology literature is that too many choices can be paralyzing. If your ideas help people prioritize among options, you can rescue them from the quicksand of decision paralysis. That's why finding the core of your idea is so valuable. Copyright © 2009 Chip and Dan Heath co-authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Author Bios Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He lives in Los Gatos, California. Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, is a Consultant to the Policy Programs of the Aspen Institute. A former researcher at Harvard Business School, he is a co-founder of Thinkwell, an innovative new-media textbook company. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. http://www.madetostick.com/

Top 10 List of Tips for Making Your Ideas Stick

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Tip 1: Break expectations. Your audience will walk in with certain assumptions about your message. If you believe those assumptions are mistaken, you've got to confront them directly. Effective teachers do this well. Imagine an eight-grade science class: "The earth feels pretty solid, right? But it turns out that the surface of the earth rides on large moving plates, and if we understand how they move, we can understand the shape of the continents on the globe and we can understand how mountains and volcanoes are formed." Tip 2: Create a "proverb." We tend to look down on soundbites, thinking that "shortness" must mean oversimplification. But use proverbs as your inspiration. Proverbs are short phrases that carry profound meaning -- think of the wisdom that is packed into a short sentence such as, "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush." Tip 3: Be concrete. Being concrete helps people make decisions and take action. The Saddleback Church in California has defined a fictional couple, Saddleback Sam and Samantha, who embody the prototypical traits of the kind of community member that the church wants to reach. It's easier for the members to plan outreach activities when they have "Sam and Samantha" in mind, as compared to a more abstract description, such as a "dual-income, upper middle-class, professional couple." Tip 4: Use stories. People will remember your stories, not your pontifications. Aesop's Fables have endured for centuries, but Aesop's Thesis Sentences wouldn't have made it 10 minutes. Choose your stories carefully, so that after the fact, your audience can reconstruct your core meaning, just like we can do with "The Fox and the Grapes." Tip 5: Use an analogy. You can get across complex ideas quickly by making use of what people already know. That's what analogies do -- they create links between new ideas and ideas that people have already learned. Movies in Hollywood, for example, are pitched in terms of analogies to other movies. The movie that becameAlien was pitched as "Jaws on a spaceship." That pitch conveys a tremendous amount of information in four words. Tip 6: Allow people to test for themselves. People love to try before they buy. The same is also true with your ideas. Give people a "test" that allows them to confirm, for themselves, whether your idea is credible. For instance, the Wendy's "Where's the Beef?" campaign depended on the customer's ability to see that Wendy's meat patties were larger than those of the competition. Tip 7: Create a curiosity gap. Research says that we feel curious when there's a gap between what we know and what we want to know. You should tease your audience with what they don't know. For instance, think of how your local evening news programs promote themselves: "There's a drug sweeping thru high schools -- and it may be in your medicine cabinet!" Tip 8: Focus on individuals, not the "big picture." Mother Teresa once said, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." Many charities attract our support by focusing on specific human beings -- "For $20 a month, you can sponsor Rokia, a 7-year-old girl, in Kenya" -- rather than huge abstract causes, such as African poverty. This phenomenon works just as well in business contexts. Don't talk about "improving customer service," talk about how specific people should behave differently. Tip 9: Use human-scale statistics. It is hard to make numbers stick, but when you must use statistics to boost your argument, make sure to frame them in a way that they can be understood. For instance, it's hard to picture the scale of a $300 million government program. But it's easier to picture the scale when you describe it as a program that spends about a dollar annually on every man, woman, and child in the United States. Tip 10: Say 1 thing, not 5 things. A famous trial lawyer said, "If you say five things, you say nothing." It's vital that we strip down our idea to its core. A famous example of useful simplicity was the theme of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, written by James Carville: "It's the economy, stupid." Copyright © 2009 Chip and Dan Heath co-authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Author Bios Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He lives in Los Gatos, California. Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, is a Consultant to the Policy Programs of the Aspen Institute. A former researcher at Harvard Business School, he is a co-founder of Thinkwell, an innovative new-media textbook company. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. http://www.madetostick.com/