Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Chip and Dan Heath are brothers and co-authors of Made to Stick.

Dan is the co-founder of Thinkwell publishing and a speaker at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE). After a decade of researching why America’s most prominent professors and teachers are so successful to find a better way to design textbooks, Dan concluded that while great educators have individual styles, their instructional methodologies are the same.

Chip is the Thrive Foundation for Youth Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University, who previously taught negotiation, social entrepreneurship, and international strategy at the business schools of the University of Chicago and Duke University. He is the co-author of three other bestselling books on organizational behavior: Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard (2010), Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (2013), and The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact (2017).

The Heaths approach the subject of sticky ideas from different angles. Whereas Dan seeks pragmatic ways to make ideas stick, Chip analyzes why certain messages remain while others are forgotten. In learning what makes ideas stick, the brothers hoped to design a template for creating impactful messages.