Greatest Hits Blog

The one-sentence summary

You can make better choices by widening your options, testing your assumptions, attaining distance before deciding, and preparing to be wrong.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

· You can make better choices in life and work by following four simple principles (as ever, they encapsulate these in a mnemonic, WRAP)

· Widen your options

· Reality-Test your assumptions

· Attain distance before deciding

· Prepare to be wrong

· Stage 1 means avoiding a narrow time frame, multitracking (considering more than one option simultaneously), and finding someone who has already solved your problem.

· Stage 2 involves considering doing the opposite, zooming in and zooming out (big picture and detail), and ooching (a Southern US word for running small experiments to test theories).

· Stage 3 includes overcoming short-term emotion and honouring your core priorities.

· Stage 4 is bookending the future (setting a range of outcomes from very bad to very good) and setting up tripwires.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

· It’s another good synthesis of all things behavioural, well laid out with clear chapter summaries that you can grab.

· If you are a well-adjusted individual, you can navigate yourself through poor choices:

~ You encounter a choice – don’t let narrow framing exclude decent options.

~ You analyze your options – don’t let confirmation bias make you gather only self-serving information.

~ You make a choice – don’t let short-term emotion tempt you into the wrong one.

~ You live with it – don’t let overconfidence about the future warp your view.

· There is a decent blend of corporate and personal examples, and the narrative rolls along well, as ever with these authors.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

· Pretty much all of this has been discussed before elsewhere:

~ Framing has been covered extensively by Daniel Kahneman and others.

~ Ooching is the same as ‘First bullets, then cannonballs’ from Jim Collins.

~ Zooming in and out was also posited by Collins in Great by Choice.

~ The premortem (envisioning a disastrous outcome) was originated by Gary Klein.

~ …and tripwires were first suggested by me in Tick Achieve in 2008 (!)

The one-sentence summary

Businesses can be thoroughly distinctive and commercially successful if they pursue principles rather than just money.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• Business doesn’t have to be cold and unforgiving. Businesses are made up of people who come together to achieve more than is possible individually.

• In fact, taking this more thoughtful approach can be more distinctive – hence the book’s subtitle The hard art of standing apart.

• Over a series of case histories the book lays out five hallmarks that create success. These are:

• Integrity: beautiful businesses have a clear sense of purpose – a noble, unwavering belief that translates into firm principles for how to succeed.

• Curiosity: they do not stand still – they are restless, brave, intrepid, and constantly creating surprise.

• Elegance: they are pleasurably simple, finding intelligent ways of doing things, and understanding that persuasive presentation is a prerequisite for performance.

• Craft: they apply consideration to every last detail, no matter how small – beauty does not happen without devotion.

• Prosperity: they have a strong sense of value creation, and make positive contributions to all associated with them.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Each component is then broken down into four qualities that you can try to apply:

• Integrity: build around a purpose, embrace sacrifice, be authentic, commit openly.

• Curiosity: exercise imagination, redefine convention, encourage challenge, learn how to fail.

• Elegance: please through economy, design with empathy, demonstrate poise, invite interpretation.

• Craft: connect through stories, apply the human hand, develop a signature style, create a sense of theatre.

• Prosperity: care about people, establish a legacy, value what matters, assert influence.

• Rigorous examination of these 20 facets would provide a good template for most brands and companies.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• Case histories can be polarising in books – there are 20 here, which is either great because you can pick out what you like from a wide range, or far too many to wade through.

The one-sentence summary

If you want to be creative, you have to be curious and contrary.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• This is a series of blogs and anecdotes strung together to provide sage wisdom on all matters creative.
• Arguably the mainstay of the book is Dave’s legendary Binary Brief, which requires a straight answer to three questions:

1. WHO should buy it? Trialists or current users. You can’t have both. If it’s current users, you have to explain why they should buy more.

2. WHY should they buy it? Product or Brand. Rational or Emotional. Enjoyable things like beer are emotional. Functional areas such as insurance are rational.

3. WHAT should they buy it instead of? Brand Share or Market Growth. If you are market leader, all product use is good because you benefit. If you’re not, it has to be a competitive claim.

• Stick to a clear answer to all of these and you are much closer to an effective communication brief.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• The rules are a springboard, not a straitjacket. If you don’t like them, change them. Don’t let anyone else write your agenda.
• All you’ve got to beat is yourself – we stop us, not anyone else.
• You don’t have to win – you just have to make the other lot lose.
• Being interesting is much more interesting than being right.
• Scepticism is fine – cynicism is not. Creativity starts with curiosity.
• If you’re creative, then you have to create. If you don’t do it, it won’t happen.
• Form can be emotional function – a pleasing form can fulfil a purpose.
• No one knows what’s in your head – you choose your own reality.
• You need to know where your parachute is.
• Nothing is wrong – just inappropriate.
• People don’t think like we think they should think – punters haven’t read the brief.
• Simplicity is genius. Objectivity is good. Subjectivity is bad.
• When you train people, you train yourself.
• Where does an idea come from? It’s not who says it, it’s who spots it.
• Bad artists copy, great artists steal.
• You can make a creative pitch without creative work.
• Reasonable people don’t do much – be unreasonable.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• You can apply the morals broadly, but in the end all the stories come back to advertising.

The one-sentence summary

Your product or idea is more likely to catch on if you give it social currency, make it useful and emotional, and wrap it in an engaging narrative.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• The book is subtitled Why Things Catch On.
• It claims that you can increase your chances of your product or idea catching on (becoming contagious) by observing six specific approaches. The author presents these as a STEPPS mnemonic:

Social Currency: it needs to make people look intelligent if they pass it on. We share things that make us look good. Can you find an ‘inner remarkability’ and make people feel like insiders?

Triggers: provide related stimuli to remind people to talk about it. Top of mind leads to tip of tongue. Consider the context: what cues can make people think about your product or idea?

Emotion: when we care, we share. Ideas need to make people feel something. Concentrate on feelings: how can you kindle the fire and get people talking about it?

Public: we need to see other people engaging in the behaviour. If it’s built to show, it’s built to grow. Can people see when others are using your product, or create evidence that sticks around when they have done?

Practical Value: it needs to be useful – news you can use. Does the subject matter help people to help others?

Stories: narratives increase appeal and help engage people – information often travels under the guise of idle chatter. Is your product embedded in a broader narrative that people want to share?

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

• Word-of-mouth communication isn’t as random as one might think.
• Follow these components and your idea is more likely to ‘go viral’, or lead to social transmission.
• People don’t listen to advertisements – they listen to their peers, so this advice should help.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• There are many similarities to the work of Chip Heath, who is his teacher.

The one-sentence summary
Everyone has the potential to master something if they identify their true calling, serve their apprenticeship patiently, and put in enough effort.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS
• Mastery of a subject or skill is not down to luck or having innate skill. Anyone can achieve it with the right approach.
• It is attained through three stages: apprenticeship, the creative-active phase, and then mastery.
• It begins by discovering your calling – your life’s task. This could involve any or all of returning to your origins, occupying a particular niche, letting go the past and avoiding false paths.
• The apprenticeship phase involves deep observation, skills acquisition, and lots of experimentation – moving from passive to practice to active mode.
• True apprentices value learning over money, keep expanding their horizons, revert to a feeling of inferiority, move towards resistance and pain, and advance through trial and error.
• The Mentor Dynamic is important – masters choose their mentors according to needs and inclinations, transfigure their ideas, and create a back-and-forth dynamic that inspires them.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT
• Masters can see people as they are – they have true social intelligence.
• Seven Deadly Realities are the enemy of mastery: envy, conformism, rigidity, self-obsession, laziness, flightiness, and passive aggression. These can be offset by speaking through your work, crafting the appropriate persona, seeing yourself as others see you, and suffering fools gladly.
• Your original mind is open and inquisitive, like a child. As we grow, this becomes conventional. Masters open their dimensional mind through creative-active approaches and negative capability – the art of not judging outcomes in advance, and removing ego from the task.
• Neoteny is the retention of childish traits in adulthood – this is vital to non-judgemental learning.
• Masters connect to their environment with supreme focus and play to their strengths. It takes over 10,000 hours of practice to master something, but the best masters devote over 20,000 to their task. At this point they transform themselves through practice, emerging with ‘The Fingertip Feel’ that seems to others like pure intuition.
• Masters have a simultaneous grip on the tiniest details and a wide synthesising perspective that enables them to make apparently serendipitous connections – what most of us then think is some divine genius, but of course it isn’t.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH
• There are over 50 case histories of masters woven into the narrative, not all of which will appeal in their intense level of detail. Concentrating on the ones most relevant to your circumstances is recommended.