Business Books:We're all faced with the problem of trying to persuade other people to do what we want them to do.
Parents are engaged in a continuous struggle to encourage their children to adopt certain forms of behaviour. Politicians, especially during the coming weeks, will be urging people to vote for them, and managers in businesses are always trying to encourage employees to change habitual ways of doing things so that the business can operate more efficiently.
Not all of these efforts are in vain but those seeking to get their ideas across often experience a sense of frustration that their audiences are not sufficiently responsive or that the desired behaviour change is not happening fast enough.
This is particularly true of business managers, many of whom have spent sizable sums of future profits hiring expensive "change management" consultants to effectively do what they themselves are supposedly being paid for.
Now along comes a book - Made to Stick - which claims to solve your communication problems. It is written by two American brothers, Chip and Dan Heath, the former a professor of organisation behaviour at Stanford and the latter involved in a number of educational publishing businesses.
Chip and Dan set out to demonstrate how you can make your ideas stick, ie that they are understood and remembered and have a lasting impact. They follow the time-honoured strategy of dividing their thesis into a number of bite-size chunks, in this case six, and come up with a cute little acronym, henceforth a CLA, to dramatise their conclusions. The CLA is SUCCES and the book explains how making ideas stick depends on their presentation in a way that is Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and told as a Story.
If this summary doesn't exactly rock your boat and you are beginning to agree with the critic of business books who said they needed to be ponderous enough to sound important but not so profound as to require any sustained intellectual thought, just hang on a minute!
Chip and Dan do manage to make some important, as opposed to profound, points. Under the "simple" heading they discuss the critical issue of a core proposition for the business, making the valid point that most vision or mission statements are "ambiguous to the point of being meaningless". They have a nice line to describe the task of inspiring a workforce with a rationale they can easily understand and have some degree of empathy with and pride in - "the need to wrestle priorities out of complexity".
The proposition - attributed to James Carville, Clinton's key strategist in the 1992 US presidential election - "It's the economy stupid" is praised as being one of the best examples.
Bored children, weary electorates and cynical employees are difficult audiences who assume they have heard it all before, and frequently have, so the more unexpected you can make your pitch the better. The Southwest Airline stewardess who managed the almost impossible task of getting passengers to listen to the flight safety announcement about the position of the exit doors deserves special praise. Her opening line was "there may be 50 ways to leave your lover but there are only six exit doors on this aircraft, one down there on the right . . ." That got their attention.
Making your ideas stick also depends on providing concrete examples as too many corporate objectives are couched in abstract terms. "World class customer service" or even worse, "best in class customer service", are meaningless abstractions but the Nordstrom employee who cheerfully gift-wrapped a product that a customer had bought at Macy's demonstrates a real customer service commitment and shows expected standards of service to all employees.
But the best example under this heading comes from an environmental group in California who were trying to raise funds for a vast area of wilderness facing erosion. They failed to attract any support until someone made up a name for the area, the Mount Hamilton Wilderness, after some local hill. Having been named, the money rolled in. The remaining three headings are all fairly obvious. Credibility is always going to be important if you want your idea to make an impact and we now know that the vast majority of the decisions we make have to be sanctioned by the emotional side of our brains so appealing for donations to help the poor of Africa is much less effective than appealing on behalf of a named individual with whom we can become more emotionally engaged.
The final section on the power of storytelling in communicating ideas is also widely accepted; a certain J Christ was a well-known exponent of this technique.
I'm afraid I finished this book with a distinct feeling of "Is that it?" I know it deals with an important issue and that the CLA represents a useful checklist for anyone faced with the task of trying to inspire some recalcitrant group or other to see things their way. But the back-up stories begin to pall and too many are interchangeable. Reading back on my notes I notice that the story of the Nordstrom shop assistant, which I used as a "concrete" example, actually occurs in the "unexpected" chapter.
On a more positive note there is no doubt that the next time you are faced with a tricky communications task your chances of success will be far greater if you plan what you have to say using the SUCCES formula.
John Fanning is chairman of McConnells Group
Made to Stick By Chip Heath and Dan Heath Random House, €14.99
