Authors: Chip Heath
Made to Stick (16 page)
Concreteness helped this team of experts coordinate. A diverse group of engineers, accustomed to contemplating difficult technology problems, suddenly came face-to-face with the Ferrari family. By grappling with one family’s concrete needs—their tickets and reservations and photos—they did something remarkable: They took abstract ideas from their research labs and turned them into a family picture on a roller-coaster ride.
White Things
Grab a pencil and a piece of paper and find a way to time yourself (a watch, a spouse who likes to count, etc.). Here is a do-it-yourself test on concreteness. You’ll do two brief fifteen-second exercises. When you’ve got your supplies ready, set your timer for fifteen seconds, then follow the instructions for Step 1 below.
STEP 1 INSTRUCTIONS:
Write down as many things that are white in color as you can think of.
STOP.
Reset your timer for fifteen seconds.
STEP 2 INSTRUCTIONS:
Write down as many white things in your refrigerator as you can think of.
Most people, remarkably, can list about as many white things from their refrigerators as white anythings. This result is stunning because, well, our fridges don’t include a particularly large part of the universe. Even people who list more white anythings often feel that the refrigerator test is “easier.”
Why does this happen? Because concreteness is a way of mobilizing and focusing your brain. For another example of this phenomenon, consider these two statements: (1) Think of five silly things that people have done in the world in the past ten years. (2) Think about five silly things your child has done in the past ten years.
Sure, this is a neat brain trick. But what value does it have? Consider a situation where an entrepreneur used this neat brain trick to earn a $4.5 million investment from a savvy and sophisticated group of investors.
For an entrepreneur, having the chance to pitch a business idea to local venture capitalists is a big deal, like a budding actor getting an audition with an independent film director. But having a chance to pitch an idea to Kleiner Perkins—the most prestigious firm in Silicon Valley—is more like a private one-on-one audition with Steven Spielberg. You could walk out a star, or you could walk out having blown the biggest chance of your life.
And that’s why twenty-nine-year-old Jerry Kaplan was nervous as he stood in the Kleiner Perkins office in early 1987. His presentation would start in about thirty minutes. Kaplan was a former researcher at Stanford who had quit to work at Lotus in its early days. Lotus, with its bestselling Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, became a stock market darling.
Now Kaplan was ready for the next challenge. He had a vision for a smaller, more portable generation of personal computers.
He hung around outside the conference room as the previous entrepreneur finished his presentation. Watching the other entrepreneur, he felt underprepared. As he observed, his nervousness advanced toward panic. The other entrepreneur wore a dark pin-striped suit with a red power tie. Kaplan had on a sport jacket with an open-collared shirt. The other entrepreneur was projecting an impressive color graph onto the whiteboard. Kaplan was carrying a maroon portfolio with a blank pad of paper inside. This did not bode well.
Kaplan had thought that he was showing up for an informal “get to know you” session, but, standing there, he realized how naive he’d been. He had “no business plan, no slides, no charts, no financial projections, no prototypes.” Worst of all, the überprepared entrepreneur in the boardroom was facing a skeptical audience that now peppered him with tough questions.
When Kaplan’s turn arrived, one of the partners introduced him. Kaplan took a deep breath and started: “I believe that a new type of computer, more like a notebook than a typewriter, and operated by a pen rather than a keyboard, will serve the needs of professionals like ourselves when we are away from our desks. We will use them to take notes, send and receive messages through cellular telephone links; look up addresses, phone numbers, price lists, and inventories; do spreadsheet calculations; and fill out order forms.”
He covered the required technology, highlighting the major unknown: whether a machine could reliably recognize handwriting and convert it into commands. Kaplan recounts what happened next:
My audience seemed tense. I couldn’t tell whether they were annoyed by my lack of preparation or merely concentrating on what I was saying…. Thinking I had already blown it, and therefore had little to lose, I decided to risk some theatrics.
“If I were carrying a portable PC right now, you would sure as
hell know it. You probably didn’t realize that I am holding a model of the future of computing right here in my hands.”
I tossed my maroon leather case in the air. It sailed to the center of the table where it landed with a loud clap.
“Gentlemen, here is a model of the next step in the computer revolution.”
For a moment, I thought this final act of drama might get me thrown out of the room. They were sitting in stunned silence, staring at my plain leather folder—which lay motionless on the table—as though it were suddenly going to come to life. Brook Byers, the youthful-looking but long-time partner in the firm, slowly reached out and touched the portfolio as if it were some sort of talisman. He asked the first question.
“Just how much information could you store in something like this?”
John Doerr [another partner] answered before I could respond. “It doesn’t matter. Memory chips are getting smaller and cheaper each year and the capacity will probably double for the same size and price annually.”
Someone else chimed in. “But bear in mind, John, that unless you translate the handwriting efficiently, it’s likely to take up a lot more room.” The speaker was Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, who helped the partnership evaluate technology deals.
Kaplan said that from that point on he hardly had to speak, as partners and associates traded questions and insights that fleshed out his proposal. Periodically, he said, someone would reach out to touch or examine his portfolio. “It had been magically transformed from a stationery-store accessory into a symbol of the future of technology.”
A few days later, Kaplan got a call from Kleiner Perkins. The partners had decided to back the idea. Their investment valued Kaplan’s nonexistent company at $4.5 million.
What transformed this meeting from a grill session—with an anxious entrepreneur in the hot seat—to a brainstorming session? The maroon portfolio. The portfolio presented a challenge to the boardroom participants—a way of focusing their thoughts and bringing their existing knowledge to bear. It changed their attitude from reactive and critical to active and creative.
The presence of the portfolio made it easier for the venture capitalists to brainstorm, in the same way that focusing on “white things in our refrigerator” made it easier for us to brainstorm. When they saw the size of the portfolio, it sparked certain questions: How much memory could you fit in that thing? Which PC components will shrink in the next few years, and which won’t? What new technology would have to be invented to make it feasible? This same process was sparked in Sony’s Japanese engineering team by the concept of a “pocketable radio.”
Concreteness creates a shared “turf” on which people can collaborate. Everybody in the room feels comfortable that they’re tackling the same challenge. Even experts—even the Kleiner Perkins venture capitalists, the rock stars of the technology world—benefit from concrete talk that puts them on common ground.
CLINIC
Oral Rehydration Therapy Saves Children’s Lives!
THE SITUATION:
Each year more than a million children in countries around the world die from dehydration caused by diarrhea. This problem can be prevented, at very low cost, by getting kids the right kind of fluids. How do you get people invested in this idea?
• • •
MESSAGE 1:
Here’s an explanation from PSI, a nonprofit group that addresses health problems in developing countries:
Diarrhea is one of the leading killers of young children in developing countries, causing over 1.5 million child deaths annually. Diarrhea itself is not the cause of death, but rather dehydration, the loss of body fluid. Approximately three quarters of the body is composed of water, and if fluid loss exceeds ten percent of total body fluid, vital organs collapse, followed by death. If an episode is severe, as with cholera, death can occur within just eight hours.
To prevent life-threatening dehydration it is necessary to increase liquid intake in quantities sufficient to replenish the fluids and electrolytes lost with diarrhea. The best liquid for this purpose is a blend of electrolytes, sugar, and water, known as oral rehydration salts. ORS restores body fluid and electrolytes more rapidly than any other liquid, and does so even when the intestinal wall is compromised by disease.
COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 1:
Quick: How solvable is this problem? Suppose you were a health official in a developing nation. What would you do tomorrow to start saving kids?
To be fair, this message appears on a Web page that describes what PSI has been doing to solve this problem. The text doesn’t necessarily reflect how the organization might approach decision-makers to persuade them to act. The information is written in language that creates credibility; there is lots of scientific language and exposition. If the problem sounds too complex, however, that could deter people from trying to solve it.
• • •
MESSAGE 2:
This message is from James Grant, who was the director of UNICEF for many years. Grant always traveled with a packet filled
with one teaspoon of salt and eight teaspoons of sugar—the ingredients for Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT) when mixed with a liter of water. When he met with the prime ministers of developing countries, he would take out his packet of salt and sugar and say, “Do you know that this costs less than a cup of tea and it can save hundreds of thousands of children’s lives in your country?”
COMMENTS ON MESSAGE 2:
Quick: How solvable is this problem? What are you going to do tomorrow to start saving these children’s lives? Grant’s message brings you to the table, helps you bring your knowledge to bear. Maybe you’re brainstorming ways of getting salt/sugar packets to schools. Maybe you’re thinking about publicity campaigns to teach mothers the right ratio of salt and sugar.
Grant is clearly a master of making ideas stick. He brings out a
concrete
prop and starts with an attention-grabbing
unexpected
contrast: This packet costs less than a cup of tea, but it can have a real impact. Prime ministers spend their time thinking about elaborate, complex social problems—building infrastructure, constructing hospitals, maintaining a healthy environment—and suddenly here’s a bag of salt and sugar that can save hundreds of thousands of children.
Grant’s message does sacrifice the statistics and the scientific description that add
credibility
to the PSI message. But, as the director of UNICEF, he had enough credibility to keep people from questioning his facts. So Grant left the (uncontested) factual battle behind and fought the motivational battle. His bag of salt and sugar is the equivalent of Kaplan’s maroon portfolio in the venture-capital presentation: It helps the members of the audience bring their expertise to the problem. You can’t see it and
not
start brainstorming about the possibilities.
| SCORECARD | ||
| Checklist | Message 1 | Message 2 |
| Simple | - |  |
| Unexpected | - | |
| Concrete | - | |
| Credible | | - |
| Emotional | | |
| Story | - | - |
PUNCH LINE:
This Clinic is one of our favorite before-and-after examples in the book, because it shows how powerful a concrete idea can be. The moral is to find some way to invite people to the table, to help them bring their knowledge to bear. Here, a prop works better than a scientific description.