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Phil Dusenberry, an advertising luminary, wrote a book that, by all accounts, was well-written, insightful, and full of fascinating industry scuttlebutt. It should have been a big hit. But first the book had to be titled. And, after a long series of negotiations and compromises, the parties involved decided to name the book “Then We Set His Hair On Fire.” And they used an illustration on the cover that looked like a cartoonish version of the top half of George W. Bush’s head.

This is cleverness that isn’t core. “Finding the core” is something we obsess about in the Simple chapter of our book. The title of a book is a great example of a message that should be core (i.e., it should be symbolic of the most important message the author wanted to communicate). An opaque title can kill interest in a good book.

So what do you do when you get an idea wrong the first time? You fix it. The happy ending: In the paperback version, the publisher nixed the Bush-esque illustration and renamed the book, “One Great Insight Is Worth a Thousand Good Ideas.” Which book do you want to read?

Here’s John Moore’s take on the before & after. Don’t forget to read his Money Quotes.

P.S. It was called “Then We Set His Hair On Fire” because of the Michael Jackson – Pepsi incident. No doubt you already made that connection. Ahem. And the graying white man on the cover may or may not be Phil Dusenberry, but either way, it seems weird, because unless you’ve made the Michael Jackson link, you kind of expect Phil’s hair to be on fire.

Imagine it’s your belief that American policymakers cannot possibly formulate effective policy in Iraq because they lack fundamental knowledge about the region and its players. You believe it’s as loony as someone writing an NFL game plan without knowing a cornerback from a quarterback. Except with stakes that are radically higher.

How would you get this message across? The most common approach would be to discuss the complexities of the region — thus demonstrating that YOU understand the issues — and to illuminate the ways in which our current policies ignore those complexities.

Jeff Stein, the national security editor at Congressional Quarterly, has come up with a much better approach. He doesn’t focus on what he knows. He focuses on what politicians don’t know. And it is shocking enough to stick.

Here’s Maureen Dowd relating an interview [subscriber only] that Stein conducted with Silvestre Reyes, who is the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee:

Stein … asked [Reyes] whether Al Qaeda was Sunni or Shiite.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” the lawmaker guessed.

As Mr. Stein corrected him in the article: “Al Qaeda is profoundly Sunni. If a Shiite showed up at an Al Qaeda clubhouse, they’d slice off his head and use it for a soccer ball.”

Mr. Stein followed up with a Hezbollah question: “What are they?” Again, Mr. Reyes was stumped.

“Hezbollah,” he stammered. “Uh, Hezbollah. Why do you ask me these questions at 5 o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish?” (O.K. ¿Que es Hezbollah?)

Sounding as naked of essentials as Britney Spears, the new intelligence oversight chief pleaded that it was hard to keep all the categories straight. Thank heavens Mr. Stein never got to Syrian Alawites.

Stein had articulated his approach in an earlier Times op-ed entitled, “Can You Tell a Sunni from a Shiite?” He explains why he has resorted to playing “gotcha” — asking lawmakers basic questions like, “What is Hezbollah?” — to prove his point. Stein points out: “After all, wouldn’t British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants?”

Stein is upending a belief that we have, which is that lawmakers in important positions know vastly more than we do. It isn’t surprising that most Americans don’t know the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni. But it’s SHOCKING that a policymaker, in the intelligence community, wouldn’t. It violates our conviction that the right people in the right positions know the right info. That unexpectedness, and the sense of betrayal that accompanies it, is why this idea will stick, and it’s why lawmakers will be scrambling to learn the answers to these questions. And if the threat of public shaming turns out to be a more powerful motivator than a public servant’s sense of obligation, then bully for Stein for engineering the approach.

Do people know how many calories they should be consuming on a daily basis to maintain their weight? And do they have an intuition about how many calories are in the food items they’re consuming?

No and no, according to this interesting NYT article. Many restaurants in New York City will soon have to display calorie information on their menus. But, in the absence of the necessary context, the data may not have much impact. Nutrition professor Marion Nestle sums it up nicely: “The idea of a calorie is a very abstract concept,” she said. “People have some vague idea that it involves energy and is somehow related to weight gain, but they have no idea what it means in relation to food. You can’t tell how many calories you’re eating by looking.”

Case in point: The Outback Steakhouse’s Bloomin’ Onion has 1,800 calories. And that’s supposed to be an appetizer. (Which is disappointing, because I adore the Bloomin’ Onion. But if I’m going to blow 1,800 calories on junk food, I’d look no further than 9 warm Krispy Kreme doughnuts. To each his own.)

In the first chapter of our book, we discuss an analogous case. The CSPI had discovered that a medium-sized bag of movie popcorn had 37g of saturated fat. So what? Is that good or bad? If bad, how bad? The CSPI found an ingenious way to communicate the unhealthiness of the movie popcorn without resorting to a lesson on daily fat allowances and that sort of thing. (We won’t give away the ending in case you want to read the chapter.)

So far, the government’s efforts to communicate basic information about calories have been ineffectual. The reporter, Kim Severson, gets in a nice zinger: “Trying to find out how many calories one should eat at mypyramid.com, the government’s latest effort to help the public interpret its Dietary Guidelines, is an exercise in frustration. Plug the word “calories” into the search engine and 254 entries pop up. After clicking through a few dozen, it seems easier to just give up and go out for a doughnut (180 calories).” My thoughts exactly.

The Food Pyramid is wondrously non-sticky. Preposterously non-sticky. After I plugged in my age, sex, and exercise habits, I was given the following helpful information:

• Aim for at least 4.5 whole grains a day
• Aim for 8 teaspoons of oil a day
• Have 2 ½ cups of “orange vegetables” weekly

Well, great, that clears it all up.

Who, on earth, thinks about their daily food intake in terms of the number of “teaspoons of oil” it contains? Who can define half a grain? Are you kidding me? I’m surprised they’ve left out the helpful advice about ensuring a daily intake of at least 10,000 IU of Vitamin A…

Concreteness—one of the six principles of sticky ideas—is what’s needed here. Here’s what I’d suggest: Given my recommended caloric intake, show me 6 daily menus – including pictures! – that would fit my budget. Paint a picture for me, using real-world products: “Dan, if you eat Dannon yogurt and coffee for breakfast, a Taco Bell quesadilla for lunch, and a can of Wolf-brand chili for dinner, you’re good.” And then, by way of comparison, show me 6 daily menus that will make me 10 pounds fatter at the end of the year. If I could see these kinds of real-world menus, I could start building an intuition about what’s “appropriate” for me. 8 teaspoons of oil leaves me intuition-free.

Welcome to the Made To Stick blog!

There, we broke the ice.