I read this about a month ago but forgot to throw down some thoughts on Made to Stick.
The truth is that it wasn’t that good for me. I know that by saying that I’m in the extreme minority, as most people on Amazon.com gave it 4-5 stars. But it’s true. It was dense.
In an effort to give it’s main points credibility and concreteness, they ended putting out way too much information for each point, which for me, ended up diluting it’s impact. It’s as if I got bored with each chapter after a page or two of grasping the point.
So what does it take for an idea to be “sticky”? The Heath brothers give the parameters:
- Simplicity
- Unexpectedness
- Concreteness
- Credibility
- Emotions
- Stories
Get the cute acrostic: succes? Herein lies the problem. I felt like the approach they took was somewhat superficial. It reminds me of a Rick Warren sermon I heard one time where he preached a New Year’s sermon called “How to Have a SMART Year,” or something to that effect, where SMART was some witty acrostic for being a better you.
So it almost seems like they started with this acrostic, and then they went searching about for examples to breathe life into it. It can’t be this easy to write a book is it?
What the book lacked was a unifying metaphor or example that went throughout the book, that truly unified these six principles. Without that I felt like they were just trying to be witty, without truly being substantive.
What about you? If you read it, what did you think?
