I just picked up this book two days ago from Barnes and Nobles.  I was intrigued by subtitle:  Why some Ideas Survive and Others Die.  So I bought the book.   Here is the scoop so far.  I see this book offering tremendous insight to the church world.  For many years we have taken the most amazing, life-changing message of Jesus, and somehow bored the snot out of people with it to the point that church and Jesus are nowhere on people’s radar.  I believe that many pastors, in the name of “preaching the word” have forgotten that they are not running seminaries where people have paid for an education but rather are speaking to everyday people who are caught up in the junk of day to day life.  I beleive this book will offer tremendous insight for me and all the others who are privileged to speak to audiences on a weekly basis.  Made to Stick centers on the idea that “sticky ideas” are built on six principles:  Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories.  SUCCESs.  Here are the highlights from chapter one:  SIMPLE

1. Commander’s Intent (CI) is a plain-talk statement that appears at the top of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state- of an operation.
2. You can lose the ability to execute the original plan, but you never lose the responsibility of executing the intent.
3. Officers arrive at the CI by asking themselves two questions:
   1. If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must ______________.
   2. The single, most important thing that we must do tomorrow is _____________.
4. Simple=finding the core of the idea.
5. Finding the core means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence…it’s about discarding a lot of great insights in order to let the most important insight shine.
6. A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
7. The core of Southwest Airlines–”We are THE low-fare airline.”
8. I’ve always been a believer that if I’ve got two hours in which to write a story, the best investment I can make is to spend te first hour and forty-five minutes of it getting a good lead, because after that everything else will come easily.
9. If you say three things, you don’t say anything.
10. Simple=Core + Compact
11. It’s a bandwith issue:  the more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.
12. We need ideas that are compact enough to be sticky and meaningful enough to make a difference.
13. Short sentences (compact) drawn from long experiences (core).
14. Feature Creep:  the tendency for things to become incrementally more complex until they no longer perform their original functions very well.  A VCR is a case in point.
15. The Curse of Knowledge:  the difficulty of remembering what it was like to not know something.
16. People are tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be usefu, then a little more, then a little more.

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