As the subtitle says, Made To Stick is a book about Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck. Chip and Dan Heath explore the naturally “sticky” ideas which penetrate your mind and stick around, without your knowledge or intention.

The book comes to life with constant examples; they cover false stories like the kidney heist, where a businessman wakes up in a bath tub full of ice to discover his kidney has been harvested by organ thieves, and true stories, like the guy who lost 200 pounds by eating Subway sandwiches every day.

There are also a number of case studies that explore how to turn an abstract idea, such as a CEO telling employees to “maximise shareholder value”, into something more concrete and sticky, which relates to actual day-to-day work of the employees and is therefore much more likely to be understood and applied!

Chip and Dan set forth the six aspects of generating a sticky idea as SUCCESs:

1. Simple
   Find the core of what you are trying to communicate. Strip back the detail and make it a simple message, but without dumbing down. (Think proverbs.) Relate it to things that your audience knows about already, to help it take hold.
   
2. Unexpected
   Capture attention with a surprise. Avoid gimmickry. Break people’s “guessing machines” by making them guess something counterintuitive about the core issue. Make it “postdictable” — it’s not predictable, but once you know the answer it all falls in to place and makes sense.
   
3. Concrete
   Make ideas easy to understand and remember. Strip down the abstractions to something concrete. Use specific and vivid examples; make it real. Involve the audience. Talk about people, not data. The more specific you are, the more sense it makes.
   
4. Credible
   Make your message easy for people to believe and agree with. Use external credibility from an authority (expert, celebrity) or anti-authority (regular Joe), or internal credibility derived from things like providing specific details.
   
5. Emotional
   Make people care by tapping in to the emotions that appeal to them, be it empathy or rebellion. Don't assume that others care at the same level that you do — make them care! Appeal to self-interest.
   
6. Stories
   Use stories as a simulation, to tell people how to act, or as an inspiration, to give people energy to act. Stories can be like a flight simulator to engage people an have them imagine themselves in a situation, play by play.

If these summary notes don't make a lot of sense to you, that's because you should go and read the book in its entirety. Then you'll know how to turn a phrase like "maximising shareholder value" into something a little more... 'sticky'.

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth."
  — John F. Kennedy, 1961