by Dan Heath
In the rubble of Tokyo after World War II, a young company, later named Sony, struggled to stay in business. It attracted a handful of smart scientists and engineers, but its first innovation, an electric rice cooker, was a failure. Initially, Sony survived by repairing shortwave radios.
Around this time, Masaru Ibuka, Sony’s lead technologist, became intrigued by transistors, which had recently been invented by a team at Bell Laboratories. Ibuka craved a “substantial” project to motivate his team of fifty scientists and engineers, and he saw tremendous promise in transistors. But when he bid to license the technology from Bell Labs, the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry denied the license. It was skeptical of the young company’s ability to manage such a cutting-edge technology.
In 1953, Ibuka secured permission to license transistors. He had a vision for a radio that would be based on transistors. The advantage of a transistor radio was obvious to engineers; it would free radios from the big vacuum tubes that made them so bulky and unreliable. Bell Labs told Ibuka that it didn’t think a “transistor radio” was possible. His engineers began to pursue the vision anyway.
Let’s pause here for a moment to put ourselves in Ibuka’s shoes. Your company has been struggling, and you’ve got a team of brilliant people whom you need to inspire. You have the potential to lead them in one hundred different directions—rice cookers or radios or telephones or whatever else R & D could dream up. But you’re convinced that the idea of a transistor-based radio is the most promising path.
Your core message, then, is the dream of a transistor radio. How do you make this message unexpected? How do you engage the curiosity and interest of your team? The concept of a “transistor radio” is probably not enough, in and of itself, to motivate your team. It’s focused more on technology than on value. A transistor radio—so what?
What about tapping into some of the classic managerial themes? Competition: “Sony will beat Bell Labs in making a transistor radio work.” Quality: “Sony will be the world’s most respected manufacturer of radios.” Innovation: “Sony will create the most advanced radios in the world.”
Here’s the idea Ibuka proposed to his team: a “pocketable radio.”
It’s hard, in retrospect, to comprehend the hubris of that idea—how utterly unexpected, how preposterous, it must have seemed the first time a Sony engineer heard it. Radios were not things you put into your pocket; they were pieces of furniture. At the time, radio factories employed full-time cabinetmakers.
Furthermore, the idea that an upstart Japanese company would deliver such an innovation, when the brilliant minds at Bell Labs thought it impossible, was not credible. After all, the 1950s were a decade when “Made in Japan” was synonymous with shoddy workmanship.
But Sony engineers were talented and hungry. Ibuka’s idea of a pocketable radio caught on internally and drove Sony through an incredible period of growth. By 1957, Sony had grown to 1,200 employees. In March 1957, just four years after Sony was grudgingly granted permission to tinker with transistors, the company released the TR-55, the world’s first pocketable transistor radio. The TR-55 sold 1.5 million units and put Sony on the world map.
A “pocketable radio”—isn’t this simply a brilliant product idea, rather than a brilliant “sticky idea”? No, it is both, and both elements are indispensable. There’s no question that someone in the world would have invented a transistor radio, even if Ibuka had decided to build the world’s fanciest rice cooker. Transistor radios were an inevitable technological progression. But the first transistor radios were nowhere near pocket-sized, and without Ibuka’s unexpected idea his engineers might have stopped pursuing the technology long before it became small enough to be useful. Ibuka inspired years of effort because he came up with an unexpected idea that challenged hundreds of engineers to do their best work.
In May 1961, John F. Kennedy gave a speech to a special session of Congress. It was a time when the Cold War dominated global politics. The Cold War allowed for few ways to measure success—to record gains and losses—but, in one highly visible field, the United States was clearly lagging behind. That field was space.
Four years earlier, the United States—which had prided itself as the most technologically advanced nation—was stunned when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite. The United States eventually responded with its own satellite launches, but the Soviet Union maintained its lead, racking up first after first. In April 1961,
Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard followed a month later.
In Kennedy’s address to Congress, he outlined a series of requests to help the United States maintain its leadership during the Cold War. He asked for funds to achieve a number of strategic goals: to establish the AID program for international development, to expand the NATO alliance, to build radio and television stations in Latin America and Southeast Asia, and to shore up civil defense.
But he ended the speech on a curious note. His final proposal had nothing to do with international aid or civil defense. It was this: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth … if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will not be one man going to the moon, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.”
Two unexpected ideas. Both create surprise. Radios are pieces of furniture, not something to slip into a pocket. Men don’t walk on the moon. It’s a long way up. The air is thin.
Both create insight. Rather than leading us along a plodding route from one incremental step to the next, the ideas give us a sudden, dramatic glimpse of how the world might unfold. And not just how but why.
Both create knowledge gaps. Loewenstein, the author of the gap theory, says it’s important to remember that knowledge gaps are painful. “If people like curiosity, why do they work to resolve it?” he asks. “Why don’t they put mystery novels down before the last chapter, or turn off the television before the final inning of a close ball game?”
Both of these unexpected ideas set up big knowledge gaps—but not so big that they seemed insurmountable. Kennedy didn’t propose a “man on Mercury,” and Ibuka didn’t propose an “implantable radio.” Each goal was audacious and provocative, but not paralyzing. Any engineer who heard the “man on the moon” speech must have begun brainstorming immediately: “Well, first we’d need to solve this problem, then we’d need to develop this technology, then …”
The vision of a pocketable radio sustained a company through a tricky period of growth and led it to become an internationally recognized player in technology. The vision of a man on the moon sustained tens of thousands of separate individuals, in dozens of organizations, for almost a decade. These are big, powerful, sticky ideas.
When we’re skeptical about our ability to get people’s attention, or our ability to keep people’s attention, we should draw inspiration from Kennedy and Ibuka. And, on a smaller scale, from Nora Ephron’s journalism teacher and Nordstrom’s managers. Unexpectedness, in the service of core principles, can have surprising longevity.
CONCRETE
One hot summer day a Fox was strolling through an orchard. He saw a bunch of Grapes ripening high on a grape vine. “Just the thing to quench my thirst,” he said. Backing up a few paces, he took a run and jumped at the grapes, just missing. Turning around again, he ran faster and jumped again. Still a miss. Again and again he jumped, until at last he gave up out of exhaustion. Walking away with his nose in the air, he said: “I am sure they are sour.” It is easy to despise what you can’t get.
The fable above, “The Fox and the Grapes,” was written by Aesop. According to Herodotus, he was a slave (though he was later freed). Aesop authored some of the stickiest stories in world history. We’ve all heard his greatest hits: “The Tortoise and the Hare,” “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” “The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs,” “The Wolf in Sheep’s Cl
othing,” and many more. If any story told in this book is still circulating a few millennia from now, odds are it will be “The Fox and the Grapes.”
Even English speakers who’ve never heard “The Fox and the Grapes” will recognize the phrase “sour grapes,” which encapsulates the moral of the story. Aesop’s lesson has traveled the world. In Hungary, people say savanyu a szolo—“sour grapes” in Hungarian. In China, they say, “Grapes are sour because you cannot reach them.” In Sweden, a little local color was added; the Swedish expression Surt sa räven om rönnbären means “Sour, the fox said, about the rowanberries.”
Clearly, Aesop was illustrating a universal human shortcoming. The fable would not have survived for more than 2,500 years if it didn’t reflect some profound truth about human nature. But there are many profound truths that have not seeped into the day-to-day language and thinking of dozens of cultures. This truth is especially sticky because of the way it was encoded. The concrete images evoked by the fable—the grapes, the fox, the dismissive comment about sour grapes—allowed its message to persist. One suspects that the life span of Aesop’s ideas would have been shorter if they’d been encoded as Aesop’s Helpful Suggestions—“Don’t be such a bitter jerk when you fail.”
What the world needs is a lot more fables. On the Web, a satirical site features a “Business Buzzword Generator.” Readers can produce their own business buzzwords by combining one word each from three columns, which yields phrases like “reciprocal cost-based reengineering,” “customer-oriented visionary paradigm,” and “strategic logistical values.” (All of these sound eerily plausible as buzzwords, by the way.) Teachers have their own buzzwords: metacognitive skills, intrinsic motivation, portfolio assessment, developmentally appropriate, thematic learning. And if you’ve ever talked to a doctor, we don’t even have to provide examples. Our favorite from medicine: “idiopathic cardiomyopathy.” “Cardiomyopathy” means something is wrong with your heart, and “idiopathic” means “we have no idea why yours isn’t working.”
Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract. Teachers teach students about battles and animals and books. Doctors repair problems with our stomachs, backs, and hearts. Companies create software, build planes, distribute newspapers; they build cars that are cheaper, faster, or fancier than last year’s. Even the most abstract business strategy must eventually show up in the tangible actions of human beings. It’s easier to understand those tangible actions than to understand an abstract strategy statement—just as it’s easier to understand a fox dissing some grapes than an abstract commentary about the human psyche.
Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems. This is perhaps the most important lesson that Aesop can teach us.
The Nature Conservancy
For fifty years, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has helped protect environmentally precious areas in the world using the simplest possible method: It buys them. It buys land at market prices, making it offlimits to environmentally damaging uses, such as development or logging. This strategy has come to be known within TNC as “bucks and acres.” It had appeal to donors and benefactors, because the results of their gifts were so clear. A big gift bought a big piece of land. A small gift bought a small piece of land. As one donor commented, TNC produced “results you could walk around on.”
In 2002, Mike Sweeney, the COO of TNC California, was facing a big challenge. California is particularly important to TNC, because it contains so many environmentally critical areas. California is one of only five Mediterranean climate regions in the world. (The others are the fynbos of South Africa, the matorral of Chile, the kwongan of Australia, and, of course, the Mediterranean.) These Mediterranean climate zones occupy only 2 percent of the world’s landmass but host more than 20 percent of its plant species. If you want to buy environmentally precious land, Mediterranean climates give you a lot of bang for your buck.
In 2002, Sweeney and his staff had taken a map of California and colored in the most environmentally sensitive areas, the areas worth preserving. Astonishingly, 40 percent of the map was colored. This was a non-starter: There weren’t enough bucks out there to buy that many acres.
Yet 9 percent of the state was classified as being in “critical danger.” Nine percent of California was still far too much to contemplate purchasing, but these regions were environmentally essential; TNC couldn’t simply give up on them.
TNC decided to implement some new approaches. “Bucks and acres” couldn’t succeed with this vast quantity of land. So instead of owning the land outright, TNC would ensure that the critical areas were protected against damage. The organization would pay landowners not to develop their land, buying what’s known as a “conservation easement.” It would work with local and state governments to change policies and encourage conservation of private and public land. It would focus on important marine areas, where there was no land to buy.
These new strategies made sense—TNC could protect more areas than it could reach through “bucks and acres.” But they also had drawbacks. First, they were much less concrete to donors. Donors can’t “walk around on” a favorable government regulation. Second, they were also potentially demoralizing for employees—they made progress less tangible. When TNC was focused on land deals, Sweeney said, “it was easy to celebrate a deal closing, to tell everyone, ‘John and Mary got this land,’ and to pat them on the back.” These “milestone moments,” so great for morale, were harder to find in the new model. How could TNC make the new strategy more concrete?
What would you do in this situation? Is there a way to recapture the invaluable tangibility of the “bucks and acres” strategy in a context that was necessarily more ambiguous? You’ve got 40 percent (or at least 9 percent) of the state to protect, and you can’t buy it. How do you explain yourself to donors and partners?
Chip has discussed this case with his students at Stanford, and in grappling with the need for concreteness some students respond by breaking up the impossibly large scale of the challenge—40 percent of California! 9 percent in critical need!—by subdividing it into more tangible “subgoals.” For example: “We will protect a 2 percent chunk of California every year for twenty years.” Others try to invoke a unit of measurement that we can understand, such as the acre. Most people can visualize an acre. But the scale is too big: 2 percent of California is about two million acres. No one can picture two million acres.
The students are wisely trying to find a way to break up a big, abstract goal into smaller, more concrete subgoals. This is the right idea. But in this case the numbers are just too big. And “acreage” is not necessarily the best way to think. There are 1,500-acre plots of land that are more environmentally precious than other 90,000-acre plots. Thinking about “acreage per year” is akin to a museum curator thinking about “canvases per year,” without regard to period, style, or painter.
Here’s what TNC did: Instead of talking in terms of land area, it talked about a “landscape.” A landscape is a contiguous plot of land with unique, environmentally precious features. The TNC set a goal of preserving fifty landscapes—of which twenty-five were an immediate priority—over a ten-year period. Five landscapes per year sounds more realistic than 2 million acres per year, and it’s much more concrete.
To the east of Silicon Valley there is a set of brown hills that are the beginnings of a wilderness the size of Yosemite. The brown hills are an important watershed for the San Francisco Bay, but they are quickly being chipped away by Silicon Valley sprawl. Although the area is important ecologically, it is not like the redwoods or the coast, with beautiful visuals that engage people’s imaginations. The hills are covered with grass interspersed with a few oak trees. Most of the year, the grass is brown. Sweeney admits that it’s not very sexy. Even local groups in the Silicon Valley area that were interested in protect
ing open spaces weren’t paying attention to the brown hills. But, says Sweeney, “We don’t go after stuff because it’s pretty. We go after it because it’s an ecologically important part of creation.”
TNC named the oak savanna the Mount Hamilton Wilderness (based on its highest peak, the site of a local observatory). Identifying the area as a coherent landscape and naming it put it on the map for local groups and policymakers. Before, Sweeney says, Silicon Valley groups wanted to protect important areas close to their homes, but they didn’t know where to start. “If you say, ‘There’s a really important area to the east of Silicon Valley,’ it’s just not exciting, because it’s not tangible. But when you say, ‘The Mount Hamilton Wilderness,’ their interest perks up.”
The Packard Foundation, a Silicon Valley institution created by one of the founders of the Hewlett-Packard Company, provided a large grant to protect the Mount Hamilton Wilderness. Other environmental groups in the Bay Area started campaigning to preserve the area. Sweeney says, “We’re always laughing now, because we see other people’s documents and they’re talking about the Mount Hamilton Wilderness. We say, ‘You know we made that up.’”
People who live in cities tend to name and define their neighborhoods: “the Castro,” “SoHo,” “Lincoln Park,” and so forth. These names come to define an area and its traits. Neighborhoods have personalities. The Nature Conservancy created the same effect with its landscapes. The Mount Hamilton Wilderness is not a set of acres; it’s an eco-celebrity.
This is not a story about land; it’s a story about abstraction. TNC avoided the trap of abstraction—saving 2 million acres per year—by converting abstract blobs on a map into tangible landscapes. TNC realized, wisely, that the context had grown more ambiguous, and the solutions had grown more ambiguous, but that their messages could not be allowed to grow more ambiguous. Concreteness is an indispensable component of sticky ideas.