Tom MacWright

tom@macwright.com

I read Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath on

Review

This is a decent book; a few of the concepts - styles of introducing gaps in knowledge and the idea of ‘commander’s intent’ were quite useful. However, it too-often falls into the pop-psych mold of “Researchers from X tested whether X is X. The results were surprising” (no citation). The fact that the authors pay all too much credit to Gladwell makes it clear that they haven’t woken up to the fact that many readers have grown beyond the enjoyment of such light science and the stratospheric concepts that authors try to wire together. I also wish that this sort of text would focus on one or a few industries or companies because the ‘whoah, this applies to farming and web 2.0 companies’ type of rhetoric is old and detracts from the storytelling by requiring too much setup and too little examination of each scene.

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