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Featured Faculty Books: Made to Stick

Chip Heath, Professor of Organizational Behavior

 

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Random House, 2007

• The official book site - Read excerpts, reviews, the authors' blog, and more
• Professor Bob Sutton's praise

 

 

 

Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas-businessmen, educators, politicians, journalists, and others-struggle to make their ideas "stick."

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that "stick" and explain sure-fire methods for making ideas stickier, such as violating schemas, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating "curiosity gaps." Made to Stick describes the traits that link sticky ideas of all kinds, from urban legends to corporate mission statements to advertisements to proverbs.

About the Authors:

 

[photo-C.Heath and D. Heath]

Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research examines why certain ideas - ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths - survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas. A few years back Chip designed a course, now a popular elective at Stanford, that asked whether it would be possible to use the principles of naturally sticky ideas to design messages that would be more effective. The material from that course, How to Make Ideas Stick, has been taught to hundreds of students including managers, teachers, nonprofit leaders, doctors, journalists, venture capitalists, product designers, and film producers. more ...

-C. Heath (left) and D. Heath

 

Dan Heath is a Consultant at Duke Corporate Education. His roles include developing and designing programs, teaching, and managing client relationships. He has worked with clients such as Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Dow and Ahold. Before joining Duke CE, Dan had a research fellowship at Harvard Business School, where he developed cases for the Entrepreneurial Management unit. Dan co-authored 10 HBS cases that are now in use in business schools across the nation.

Prior to Harvard Business School, Dan co-founded a company called Thinkwell in Austin, Texas. Thinkwell produces innovative new-media college textbooks that incorporate new approaches to learning: multimedia rather than print, interactive rather than static, engaging rather than encyclopedic. Dan was Editor-in-Chief of Thinkwell and also served on the company's Board of Directors. Thinkwell has been operating successfully since 1997, leading the launch of a new category of materials in the college publishing market.

Dan has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in the Plan II Honors Program from the University of Texas at Austin.