Credibility

It’s impossible to have an intuitive feel for a big number, like $1.2 trillion. It puts our intuition on TILT. We have a very real sense of how $1,200 is different than $200. With $1,200, you can make a mortgage payment (at least in my part of the country). With $200, you pay the cable & utility bills. But we have no intuitive feel for how $200 billion might be different than $1.2 trillion. What can you do with $1.2 trillion that you can’t do with $200 billion, or $50 billion? What is $1.2 trillion worth? And how do you manage to communicate its worth to others?

David Leonhardt of the Times has written a brilliant and hugely important column that grapples with this issue in the context of the Iraq war. It is essential reading.

When I read this fabulous Amy Sutherland piece in the Times last June, my Stickiness Radar started blazing. In fact, I wasn’t even aware that I HAD a Stickiness Radar until that moment. Much less that it could “blaze.” Does a radar “blaze”? Doubtful.

Sutherland discusses how, in the course of studying the methods used to train exotic animals (like elephants and baboons), she had a thought: Hey, I wonder if these methods would work on my husband. This piece is 6 for 6 on the principles of stickiness. After publication, she stayed on the Times Most E-Mailed List for what felt like 2 months. Now, bizarrely, she has re-emerged on the Most E-Mailed List, 7 months after the publication of her piece. That’s damn sticky. And it has given my blog post the veneer of topicality.

We worked with Guy Kawasaki (and the folks at Electric Pulp) to create a “Stickiness Aptitude Test.” It’s designed for entrepreneurs who want to assess the stickiness of their message. Check it out!

Also we had an interesting Q&A with him, including some discussion of the stickiness of products. In non-Made To Stick news, there’s a great blow-by-blow analysis of Guy’s LinkedIn page by two LinkedIn insiders. They’re essentially trying to make Guy’s page stickier (though they don’t use that language). Chip and I have been talking a lot lately about how to apply stickiness principles to personal promotion, as in a job interview situation. More to come.

This is from an email that I want to frame and put above the mantle:

“I am the president of a power tool company. I read your book on Monday on a flight from Charlotte, NC to San Jose, CA. I had a customer meeting on Tuesday and had to completely change my pitch. Instead of our typical power point telling the customer how much better our tools are, I decided to be “concrete”. I disassembled our power drill and a competitor’s drill right in the middle of the meeting to show the customer how our product stacks up to competition. They loved it.”

Saul Hansell has an interesting NYT piece on Google’s use of unorthodox interview techniques, like challenging applicants with brainteasers and asking people, “Have you ever made a profit from a catering business or dog walking?”

There is a brief mention in the piece of an earlier recruitment campaign that Chip and I think was ingenious Here’s the challenge for a recruiter: How do you lure in the right people while deterring the wrong people? One way to do that is to talk: “Google is looking for the brightest, most motivated technology whizzes in the universe!”

A better way to do it is to tease. Imagine a black equation on a white billboard (better seen than described). More precisely, an equation + a “.com” text string. No other markings. No clue as to why there’d be an equation on a billboard, or who was responsible for it. The “.com” ending hinted that if you could crack the equation, and then add a “.com” to the end of your answer, you’d be rewarded somehow. This is a great example of making an idea stick via a “curiosity gap.”

The answer led to another riddle. Eventually, having made the cut, you’d find out that Google was behind the mystery, and you’d arrive at a page where you could submit your resume to Google.

What a smart way of enticing the right people–people sufficiently analytical to solve a rather tough riddle–while remaining invisible to the wrong people.