Author Archive

Check out this NYT article from Sunday — there’s a great high-concept pitch in it. Thanks to John Moore for the link. The money excerpt:

In 2000, Mr. Barr and Nils B. Lahr, a former Microsoft engineer, started Synergy Sports Technology in Phoenix, to bring together for N.B.A. coaches fine-grained statistics matched with associated video clips. Want to stop Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks? Synergy’s system has recorded every offensive step Mr. Nowitzki has made since he joined the league in 1998. Synergy has captured, for example, how successful he is driving right, or left, differentiating between home and away games, and further slicing and dicing into sub-sub-sub-categories. Click on any statistic and you can get video clips from the last three seasons of 20, or 50, or even 2,000 plays that show Nowitzki making that particular move.

Four teams signed up for Synergy’s beta service in the 2004-05 season. Mark Cuban, the owner of one of those intrepid first teams, the Dallas Mavericks, liked what he saw and became Synergy’s primary outside investor. When the service was formally rolled out for the 2005-06 season, the two teams that reached the finals happened to be the Mavericks and the Miami Heat, another Synergy client.

Most teams, however, did not jump to subscribe, and Mr. Barr groped for the most effective way of describing the value of his service to general managers. When he tried the phrase “it’s Google for basketball,” one manager excitedly said, “Now that’s something I can take to my owner.”

Our column “Polarize Me,” from the April issue of Fast Company, is now available online.

There are two bloggers who have done multi-post series on Made to Stick recently — they are nice introductions to the book and its concepts for people who haven’t read it. I am learning a lot from the insights that they are bringing to the book.

First, there’s Cam Beck at ChaosScenario. Here are the MTS-related posts: Boil it down to just one thing. Get their attention and keep it. Hit your audience with a ton of bricks. Earning the trust of strangers. [Stay tuned to Cam’s blog for posts on Emotion and Stories.]

Then, there’s Katya Andresen from Network for Good, whose blog is a must-read for non-profit marketers. She shows how the principles in MTS can be applied to social enterprise marketing, which is something that Chip and I are passionate about. Here are the posts: Finding your core aka sweet spot. Go for the unexpected. Hang your message on hooks. Emotion and calculation.

It’s a surprising fact, a fact that warns of overpopulation and a world teetering on the edge of exhaustion: The number of people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived.

And it’s dead wrong. Ciara Curtin in the Scientific American does a nice dismantling of this urban legend.

Why did this falsehood spread? It has the snap of unexpectedness that you find in a lot of scientific-ish urban legends. (You only use 10% of your brain!) It balances that surprise factor by tapping into our sense of concern and anxiety for the world. (Have we pushed the planet too far?)

The surprise value and emotional resonance are garden-variety strengths of urban legends. This legend has another tricky feature, though. It appeals to our intuition about exponential numbers — for instance, if you take a sequence like 3^2, 3^3, 3^4, …, each successive number is greater than the sum of all the numbers before it in the sequence. If we have the (mistaken) sense that the earth’s population works like this sequence, the urban legend would seem quite reasonable. (It might even, perversely, make us feel smarter to believe it than not to believe it, since in tracing the exponential logic in our heads, we might flatter ourselves to believe we had solved the logic puzzle that explained a surprising “finding.”)

Cory Doctorow likes the duct tape on our cover. Cool. I’ve been a Boing Boing fan for years — was quite a nice surprise to see a familiar image there.

There were some early cover designs of the book that included Post-It Notes. And we were thinking, is there anything less sticky than a Post-It? Isn’t that, in fact, the core value of Post-Its, that they aren’t so sticky? I guess we could have gone that direction and renamed the book: Made to Adhere Lightly.

We also played around with images of gum. Gum sticks, ya know. One design showed a woman’s foot in a high-heeled shoe, and she had just stepped in a huge wad of gum, and strands of the gum were trailing the heel into the air. It was a cool photo, almost beautiful. And yet the emotional resonance was, um, less appealing. “Our book — it’s like stepping in gum!”

Bless you, duct tape.