Sticky Ideas and the Power of Nice

My stacks runneth over – my book stacks that is. Yet, two more books will shortly arrive from Amazon.com because I just could not keep my fingers off the keyboard and my credit card in my pocket after reading about those two books in last week’s Time.

The first is the mind product of two brothers, one a psychologist, the other and education expert. The title? Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. It will arrive in book stores January 2007, but already it's making an impressive showing in advance orders at Amazon.com.

Authors Chip – the psychologist – and Dan Heath – the education specialist – extend Malcolm Gladwell’s ideas in Tipping Point for which he failed to give much guidance on how to make them work for a reader.

The brothers Heath have reduced the formula for getting ideas to stick to a simple but easily recalled acronym which they claim was accidental: SUCCESS.

S stands for Simple. Then comes Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Story.

The Time article gives solid examples for each lexical brick in the acronym – for example, James Carville’s “It’s the economy, stupid,” was seductively simple. However, I have to go to the horse’s mouth to get a more complete elucidation on how SUCCESS makes ideas stick.

The second book was penned by two members of the Kaplan Thaler Group, the high-flying New York based ad agency that gave the world the Aflack duck. Founder Linda Kaplan Thaler and colleague Robin Koval authored a book that on its face resonates with Firms of Endearment, the book I’m a co-author of coming out in February 2007 under the Wharton School Publishing imprint.

The Thaler-Koval effort is called, The Power of Nice: How to conquer the Business World with Kindness.  Its available now.

I have maintained for sometime that the zeitgeist of the corporate world is inexorably, if gradually, taking on a certain feminine affect. That this is happening is why the authors declare with certitude, “Mean to us is so last millennium.”

These two ladies make a strong argument that the old testosterone drenched mantra, “Nice guys finish last” just doesn’t hack it in the increasingly feminized ethos of business corporations which we found strongly present in every company we nominated as an “FoE” in Firms of Endearment.

Now, given that this is Election Day 2006, I can only dream of the day when The Power of Nice makes its way into the political arena.

Comments

[Michele Miller]

Thanks for the book recommendations, David. I had read about the The Power of Nice, but not the other. You're not helping me in my quest to diminish my pile of books!

[David Wolfe]

C'est la vie, Michele. You ought to see my stack! And its gertting worse because I've take to going back and re-reading some earlier gems.

David