Stanford Business

FEBRUARY 2007


About This Issue

Fine-Tuning Your Idea Machine

Kathleen O'Toole, Editor
Kathleen O'Toole
Editor

In the gestation period for this issue, I wondered if we were nearing a miscarriage. “Simplify your ideas to make them stick,” Professor Chip Heath advises in his book Made to Stick [ read excerpt ]. I knew he was right, but getting there wasn’t so simple.

For this issue, our team had launched several messy projects. One was to get to the bottom of the often recited, usually undocumented statistics about how many women MBAs had left the paid workforce to raise families [ read story ]. Another had seemed like a straightforward story about baby-boomer business people “retiring” into nonprofit jobs, but our sources disagreed on projections [ read story ]. Yet another story on e-commerce fell apart each time Professor Haim Mendelson and I exchanged drafts. I was taking the consumer perspective, he was taking the business person’s perspective, and we seemed to be talking past each other [ read story ].

Gradually the co-creators of these articles zeroed in on their core ideas and simplified how they expressed them. When three readers who had not prepared the articles could agree on headlines for them, I knew we were ready to start the printing press.

Fresh viewpoints, such as those of our headline writers who get involved late in the game, can be invaluable when you have learned too much about your core subject to share its essence. In his book Heath tells an anecdote about an organization getting help finding its core idea from a grouchy outsider. At a seminar he taught for nonprofit arts organizations, members of one group told other participants their foundation existed to preserve and promote duo-piano music—a revelation that prompted polite silence. Then the class grouch spoke up: “I don’t want to be rude,” he began, “but why would the world be a less rich place if duo-piano music disappeared?”

Taken aback, members of the piano group responded with vigor, Heath writes. “The piano is this magnificent instrument. It was created to put the entire range and tonal quality of the whole orchestra under the control of one performer. There is no other instrument that has the same breadth and range. And when you put two of these magnificent instruments in the same room and the performers can respond to each other, it’s like having the sound of the orchestra but the intimacy of chamber music.”

“An audible murmur” broke out, Heath reports. “This phrase—‘the sound of the orchestra but the intimacy of chamber music’ was profound and evocative. Suddenly the people in the room understood” why the team was committed to duo piano. The piano group walked away with a better understanding too—of how to interest others in their message.

“Excuse me if I sound rude, but …” “Don’t take this personally, but …”

These are the sort of grouchy questions Mendelson and I asked each other in order to bring our business-consumer perspectives closer together. The writers of the other stories also resorted to questions of this “so what?” variety in order to help expert speakers address the mindsets of listeners who do not have deep knowledge or built-up interest in the topic at hand.

So, yes, the world is a better place because the duo-piano foundation exists, but don’t forget that a few slightly impolite grouches help us stay in tune too.

P.S. We welcome your letters about articles in this issue.

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