Pay attentionYou can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.
—Lee Iacocca
Communication takes place in the mind of the listener, not of the speaker.
—Peter Drucker
Alex Pentland, author of the 2008 book Honest Signals,1 wanted to study communication in business, so he asked two groups of investors to evaluate the same set of businesses and independently choose the ones they liked best. The catch? He asked one group to read the businesses’ execution plans and the other group to watch their live presentations. Pentland found that there was little similarity between the choices of the two groups. How is this possible? When investors read a business plan, all they have is the content, but when they watch a presentation, they have another source of information—the presenter. Pentland discovered that you, your body language, and the way you communicate are more important in getting a good result than your content is. How you say it can be more important than what you say.
Not all ideas are equal, but most of the time ideas have some kind of merit worth thinking about—call it a 90 percent success rate. Maybe 70 to 80 percent of execution plans have some kind of plausibility. However, when it comes to getting your idea and plan across to other people so that they understand it and can repeat it (never mind be persuaded by it), we find that the success rate drops to somewhere between 10 and 20 percent! One of the most difficult things you will face in launching and building your enterprise is effectively and persuasively communicating your vision, your idea’s essential elements, and your enthusiasm to listeners so that they understand it, can repeat the essentials accurately, and, one hopes, want in. There is no value in an idea or plan if no one understands and remembers it.
We assign only one book for our students to read each year in our advanced entrepreneurship course at Tuck: Chip and Dan Heath’s book on communication Made to Stick. If you haven’t read it, we suggest that you read it too. The Heaths write about “how ideas are constructed—what makes some ideas stick and others disappear.”2 They say, “A sticky idea is one that is understood, remembered, and creates some kind of change—in opinion, behavior, or values.”3 In another useful book, Words That Work, Frank Luntz added a subtitle that says it all in terms of how you should think about communication: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear.4
Good public speaking skills don’t necessarily mean effective communication. An experiment at Stanford found that the people rated as the best speakers did no better than anyone else at making their ideas stick. Foreign students who were rated poorly for their speaking skills in English did just as well as native English speakers.5
“Managerial communication is different from other kinds of communication. Why? Because in a business or management setting, the most brilliant message in the world will do you no good unless you achieve your desired outcome.”6
In this chapter we will talk about effective communication, focusing on the ultimate goal: getting the desired outcomes. We will talk about how you can help your readers and listeners do the following:
Pay attention
Learn—understand and remember
Agree and believe
Care
Be motivated to act
Chip and Dan Heath opened Made to Stick with this:
A friend of ours is a frequent business traveler. Let’s call him Dave. Dave was recently in Atlantic City for an important meeting with clients. Afterward, he had some time to kill before his flight, so he went to a local bar for a drink.
He’d just finished one drink when an attractive woman approached and asked if she could buy him another. He was surprised but flattered. Sure, he said. The woman walked to the bar and brought back two more drinks—one for her and one for him. He thanked her and took a sip. And that was the last thing he remembered.
Rather that was the last thing he remembered until he woke up, disoriented, lying in a hotel bathtub, his body submerged in ice.
He looked around frantically, trying to figure out where he was and how he got there. Then he spotted the note:
DON’T MOVE. CALL 911.
A cell phone rested on a small table beside the bathtub. He picked it up and called 911, his fingers numb and clumsy from the ice. The operator seemed oddly familiar with his situation. She said, “Sir, I want you to reach behind you, slowly and carefully. Is there a tube protruding from your back?”
Anxious, he felt around behind him. Sure enough, there was a tube.
The operator said, “Sir, don’t panic, but one of your kidneys has been harvested. There’s a ring of organ thieves operating in this city, and they got you. Paramedics are on their way. Don’t move until they arrive.”
The Heaths continue: “You have just read one of the most successful urban legends of the past fifteen years.”7 Having read this account just now, only once, in all likelihood a year from now you will have no trouble giving an account of this tale that’s accurate in most of the details you just read. Like most urban legends, this anecdote has all the elements that make for a communication that is easily understood and remembered for a long time.8
Contrast it with this communication, which the Heaths present next:
Comprehensive community building naturally lends itself to a return-on-investment rationale that can be modeled, drawing on existing practice … a factor constraining the flow of resources to CCIs is that funders must often resort to targeting or categorical requirements in grant making to ensure accountability.
Without going back to study this passage carefully, close your eyes, count to 10, and try to repeat the key points of what you just read. You probably will fail. What might be the odds you could remember a communication like this long enough to go into a business meeting next week and argue persuasively for the points you just read?
Certain ways of relating information are intrinsically memorable. Other ways make remembering almost impossible. Two important things can help you avoid useless and ineffective communications: avoiding the curse of knowledge and using some simple tactics anyone can master to turn information into effective communication.
If you know much of anything about your idea and your plans for the enterprise, you are already fatally and incurably infected with what the Heaths call “the curse of knowledge.” The curse of knowledge is arguably one of the greatest obstacles anyone faces in communication in business or anywhere else. Probably, the authors of the short passage about comprehensive community building in the previous section were having this problem.
Here is the problem: Once you know something, it is impossible to know what it’s like for someone else not to know it. The curse leaves you unwittingly assuming that your audience somehow knows far more background information than in fact it does. It frequently leaves you telling them nothing because what you say demands that they have supporting knowledge that they just don’t have.
In a 2006 Harvard Business Review article, “The Curse of Knowledge,”9 the Heaths reference an insightful Stanford psychology thesis about research into this all to a common communication problem. In that research, Dr. Elizabeth Newton, now a social and business psychologist at the University of British Columbia, showed how drastically people underestimate the curse of knowledge when they communicate with others. In her basic experiment she told subjects that they would be asked to have another person guess the name of well-known songs such as “Yankee Doodle,” but the only hint they could give that person was to tap out the song on a table. Newton asked the subjects to guess in advance what proportion of the songs their partners would guess correctly. The average guess was 50 percent. When the pairs actually tried the exercise, the average success rate was 2.5 percent. Some tappers couldn’t believe that the answers weren’t more obvious to their partners.10
This is the perceptual gap of the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, it’s impossible to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Once you have that knowledge, you make all sorts of wrong assumptions about what you need to say to communicate effectively to people who don’t have it. The curse hangs over every entrepreneur who has ever tried to pitch an idea to a listener who was not already well informed about the business and the opportunity. What to do?
Creating a meaningful context for your information in the minds of your listeners is the biggest problem you face. You want to help them catch up with all the knowledge you have accumulated about your idea. Learning research shows that context provides a framework to absorb information, understand it, and remember it. Mary Munter teaches business communication at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Mary has written a short, effective book, Guide to Managerial Communication.11 One of the important foundations of the book is simple: Think about who your audience is, what they know and expect, what they feel, and what might persuade them. That is, where are they starting from as they listen to you, and what will make your message stick?
There is no simpler framework to get people to pay attention, understand, remember, and act than the SUCCESs framework Chip and Dan Heath created in Made to Stick:
Blaise Pascal said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” (So, apparently, did Mark Twain.)
Long, complicated sentences and paragraphs bury meaning in camouflage.
“If you say three things, you don’t say anything” (James Carville, 1992).
Relentlessly exclude; prioritize.
Sound bites are not ideal; proverbs are more memorable. (“Sew slowly because the wrong stitch costs” versus “A stitch in time saves nine.”)
Make it simple and profound:
“Are you better off than you were four years ago?” (Ronald Reagan, 1980).
“It’s the economy, stupid” (James Carville, 1992).
Analogies create memorable frameworks. Example: Disney park employees are “cast members.” They don’t “interview” for a job; they “audition.” “Uniforms” are “costumes.”
You may be tempted to write something like: “Utilizing the 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman key exchange and 168-bit triple-DES, we provide intrusion protection for digital voice, fax, and wireless communications.” Cut the geek-speak. Say what you mean: “We safeguard your communications with state-of-the-art encryption technologies.”
Same with MBA-speak. This doesn’t work: “We provide the leading business-to-business solution for clinical data capture and management for the pharmaceutical and biotech industry.” This does: “We streamline information processes that speed new drug therapies to market.”
You can’t get through if you don’t get attention and interest.
Use surprise: break a pattern:
The brain suppresses consistent patterns; it watches for changes.
Mental schemas help us make predictions. Violating them opens the brain to absorb new information.
Be counterintuitive; violate people’s expectations. (Remember the “kidney heist.”)
Surprise increases alertness and attention.
Make the connection to the message.
Avoid “empty surprise”: Exploit riddles and mysteries:
Make listeners work, not just listen.
Open gaps in knowledge and fill them.
Something is concrete if it can be examined by the senses.
Research shows that the brain remembers object nouns better than concept nouns.
An example would be “high-performance” versus “450 hp V–8 engine.”
Avoid overuse of vague adjectives like unique and improved. Guy Kawasaki gives some good examples in The Art of the Start:
“Intuitive” versus “You can set it up in one day without training.”
“Fast” versus “Five times increase in throughput on tests”12
Corollary: Emphasize benefits, not features.
Communicate concepts with examples:
Use mental images; they are more easily grasped than concepts: “A bag of movie popcorn has 37 grams of fat” versus “more saturated fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries at lunch, and a steak dinner with trimmings—combined.”
Use unifying concepts. Example: Boeing told its engineers to design the new 727 to have 131 seats, be able to fly nonstop from New York to Miami, and land on LaGuardia Runway 4–22.
President John Kennedy didn’t say, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives.” He said, “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.”13
External authorities make people believe an idea.
Honesty and trustworthiness enhance credibility.
Details and examples are effective in a framework.
Emotional engagement enhances attention and retention.
We’re wired to feel more readily than to absorb abstractions. Abstract thinking inhibits emotion-driven reactions.
“If you want people to care, tap into things they care about.”
Our brains are wired to remember stories better than numbers, concepts, and statistics.
Stories invite simulation and identification.
“Mental simulation is not as good as doing something, but it’s the next best thing.”
Kawasaki adds two important points that we always pass on to entrepreneurs: Relevance is key. Facts are not. When talking, imagine there is a little man on your shoulder. Every time you say something, the little man says, “So what?” Here’s an example:
You: “Our hearing aids use digital signal processing.”
Little Man: “So what?”
You: “Our product increases the clarity of sounds.”
Little Man: “So what?”
You: “If you’re at a cocktail party with many conversations going on around you, you’ll be able to hear what people are saying to you.”14
Impersonal doesn’t arrest attention or stick. Make it personal:
“Reduce the size of the global ozone hole.”
Compared to:
“Prevent you from getting melanoma.”
“Increasing the mean test scores for children in your school district.”
Compared to:
“Ensuring that Johnny can read.”15
In 1936, if you wanted to convey the desperate plight of many people in the country, you might have published an account of your journey around the country as you photographed people. You probably haven’t read this account before:
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. … I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said they had been living on vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. …16
It’s not particularly memorable, and that is probably why no one would have remembered it even if it was published in 1936 (which it wasn’t). Countless similar accounts were published then, and no one remembers any of them today either. However, if you saw any of the photographs in Figure 17-1, you probably would get the point. In fact, you might think you actually do remember seeing them, even though it’s highly improbable that you have.
In contrast, the photograph by Dorothea Lange in Figure 17-2 is instantly recognized. (See page 277.)
This is arguably the most famous photograph from the Great Depression. Lange’s account above, first published in 1960, is all the more vivid when you have her pictures alongside, and it only takes one. Your brain is wired to absorb and remember information that the eye sees.
It is almost inconceivable how many images the brain can encode and remember. Think about a study published by the psychologist Lionel Standing in 1973.17 Standing showed subjects a long series of unrelated words or pictures for only a few seconds each and then, two days later, tested them for recall by showing them pairs: one the previous sample and the other a distracter. The question was how many discrete items people could remember they had seen. In a sample set of a thousand pictures from a single session, how many do you think the subjects remembered correctly? 99.6 percent! For single words, the comparable number was 61.5 percent. Imagine how much harder it would be to remember phrases and sentences. Pictures stick. Use them.
Figure 17-2 Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother.
As Pentland found in his MIT experiments comparing decisions based on presentations and decisions based on plans, the dynamics of presentation and people chemistry count a lot in how reviewers judge presenters. The amazing part is that it doesn’t take long.
In the early 1990s, Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal studied how people form impressions of strangers: how accurate early impressions are and how long it takes to form them. They were stunned to see how accurately people were able to form valid impressions of other people and, even more significantly, how quickly it happened. They had students passively review video clips of professors and then fill out ratings of the professors as if they had taken their courses. They found that students who had never seen the professors before could match ratings by students who had taken the professors’ courses by viewing only what Ambady and Rosenthal called “thin slices” of the professors’ behavior. What was even more impressive was how short a video slice it took for the students to reach this level of accuracy: as little as 6 to 15 seconds.18 These findings have held up in numerous studies since.
When you present, people form impressions of you even before you start talking. We’ve seen this happen numerous times in investor presentations. Pentland didn’t measure how long it took his business plan reviewers to form lasting impressions, but the Ambady and Rosenthal findings suggest that it wasn’t long. Other studies suggest that it’s the emotional brain at work, matching patterns to past experience. Since emotions tend to run in the background, most people don’t recognize that their impressions of others are being driven by their fast-thinking emotional brains. Think about how to make the best impression first and fast. It may be the only chance you get.
Emotions decide; reason explains. There is abundant psychology research literature arguing that emotions are not only important but essential in decision making. Chapter 18 will look more closely at the role of emotions in decision making. Emotions are the real drivers in getting your ideas across in a way that persuades a person to take action. If you want to engage people, talk to their emotions. If you wonder what touches emotions, start by looking in the mirror. The emotions you show will be mirrored in others—literally.
Arguably, one of the more profound findings from the exploding field of cognitive neuroscience is knowledge about what have come to be called mirror neurons. Mirror neurons allow us to read another person’s emotions by literally experiencing them through the firing of parallel neurons in our own brains. These specialized circuits read signals from another person and trigger the same emotion or motor centers in our brains. Whether kicking a soccer ball, picking up a teacup, or punching someone out, our brains not only mirror the action without actually doing it but intuit the motivation or emotion behind the action. It’s through mirror neurons that we’re moved by images, movies, or the characters in a book.19 “Vicarious is not a strong enough word to describe the effect of these mirror neurons. When we see people suffering or in pain, mirror neurons help us read their facial expressions and actually make us feel the suffering or the pain of the other person.”20 A German brain-scanning team even documented their role in the voyeuristic thrill of pornography.21
This has implications across the range of human experience. More concretely, for you as a presenter, understanding mirror neurons can help you be a more effective communicator and persuader. Giving new meaning to the expression “I feel your pain,” it’s literally true that people will mirror you. They can’t help it; it’s how their brains are wired (the same way as yours). Show people what you want them to mirror: confidence, enthusiasm, seriousness, resolve, how easy you are to work with. This is where those first impressions come from. Before people have even begun to size each other up systematically, their brains know how others make them feel.
First impressions apply to the first encounter people have with an idea. Therefore, it’s important to focus on the two ways (other than a referral) those encounters usually happen: the summary, or pitch sheet, and the so-called elevator pitch, the short, high-level persuasive summary you give verbally when someone asks you to describe your idea. Both of these have only one important goal: to get the response “I’d like to know more.” Pitches and summaries are valuable distillations. Don’t dilute them:
Don’t ramble.
Don’t repeat.
Get to the point.
The young founders of one of our companies, Sportspage, Inc., were visiting an advisor in Washington, D.C., shortly after they launched the company and started raising money. As they walked to the elevator, their advisor happened to mention that the building was owned by Ted Leonsis, one of the founders and the vice chairman of AOL, not to mention an owner of the Washington Capitals, the chair of SnagFilms, and an owner in Clearspring Technologies and Revolution Money. As they got in the elevator, the advisor said, “Well, speak of the devil, here’s Ted! Ted, meet my friends, David and Kase. They’re working on a sports-related Internet start-up.”
“Pleased to meet you, David and Kase,” Ted said as he shook hands. “Tell me about your company.”
It was a six-story building.
There are two takeaway lessons: Be ready any time, and be sure it’s short and memorable. Ted didn’t invest in the company, but according to the advisor, he liked it and summarized it faithfully a few days later in a meeting.
People are always asking about your deal. Sometimes they are even interested. Either way, you have only two goals: get the key information into their heads in a way that makes it stick and can come back out accurately later and get them to say, “I’d like to know more.” Pitches should be:
From memory. Never work from notes.
Conversational. Don’t recite a script.
Passionate. Remember first impressions and the role of emotions.
Relevant. Remember Guy Kawasaki’s little man: “So what?”
High-altitude. Stay at 30,000 feet. Details come later.
Seductive. Remember, the only words that matter are “I’d like to know more.”
Arguably, the most important document you will write—and write and write—is a one- or two-page summary. This is the written equivalent of the spoken pitch for the elevator. Sometimes it’s called the pitch sheet.
Summaries don’t sell deals. They invite interest. They frame the opportunity and quickly get across what you are trying to accomplish now. As with an elevator pitch, the goal is to get your chance to meet and tell more. This is a document you want anyone to get. It should never be more than two pages; most are one page. It’s not the same as an executive summary in a business plan; think of it as more like a brochure about your business.
This is not the place for confidential or proprietary information. The world is a tough place, and people sometimes inappropriately use (aka steal) ideas. But the fact is that investors generally won’t sign confidentiality agreements to look at an opportunity, nor should they. Later is the time for secret information; a first meeting is not the place for secrets. Every founder needs to learn what he or she can safely say and what to hold back. It’s a good idea to mark your materials “Copyright 20##” and “Proprietary and Confidential” and leave it at that. Remember that your goal is to spark interest in knowing more, to tell enough to get that reaction, not to tell everything someone might want to know.
One last point: Include contact information. This should seem so obvious that it doesn’t bear mentioning. Unfortunately, it’s amazing how commonly contact information is overlooked in summaries. In one of our Tuck classes in 2009, we had two student groups start food companies they planned to launch locally when they graduated. One, Red’s, planned to sell all-natural frozen burritos. The other, FONS, planned to sell a healthy and tasty breakfast food: Fruit-Oats-Nuts-Squares. All our students have to prepare pitch sheets for investors as part of their class assignment, which both did. And yes, we did remind them in class to include contact information. Both companies were getting good market validation with customer testing and local trial sales.
After the course ended, the local paper asked if it could have copies of the summaries on the businesses in the course. The editor planned to choose one and feature it in a series of articles over the coming year on the life of a start-up. When we checked back to see what had come if it, the writer told us that at first he thought the frozen burritos company sounded more interesting.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t find contact information on the company, and so he called the Fruit-Oats-Nuts-Squares guys instead. Their summary did have contact information and got the great press visibility for the next year. The founder of Red’s missed a great opportunity. Ironically, the founders of FONS eventually decided not to pursue the opportunity, whereas Red’s got off to a solid start and two years later was being sold in over 4,000 stores all over the country.
As often and emphatically as we reminded students about including contact information, before we told this story in class, we were lucky to see 50 percent of summaries turned in with contact information on them. Since then, we have yet to see one without. Stories are indeed made to stick.
As with business plans, pitch sheets should succinctly address the main questions that come to mind as people absorb your information. Pitch sheets represent your chance to create a good first impression, so they are about more than content. There is no single perfect format, and so we don’t give our students a cookbook of procedures and principles for writing effective summaries. Other than a reminder of a few main points, we find it’s more effective when we make available a collection of samples and suggest they find a few they like and imitate them. Usually the results are much better than they would be if we tried to explain a long list of abstract rules and practices, and it’s easier on everybody.
Appearance and readability count. Information should be easy to grasp. Readers should be able to see the structure and the key points at a glance and easily find what they are looking for. Strip it down to the minimum—no extra words. The goal is always the same: to get them to
Pay attention.
Learn—understand and remember.
Agree and believe.
Care.
Be motivated to act.
The pitch sheets Dartmouth and Tuck companies have created over the last few years adhere to a basic template, and so should yours. Think about the appearance and readability. Plain text may say it, but will readers find it? Will it stick? Headings help, and so do bullets and short phrases. Readers can scan to find what they want. Formatting helps readability. Diagrams can get across key points, and pictures are memorable, especially if they emphasize the points. Combinations of the two are even better, though. For examples of Dartmouth and Tuck companies’ pitch sheets, please see the resources section online at www.greggfairbrothers.com.
Remember, very few deals ever sell themselves. The best opportunity in the world is nearly worthless if people don’t understand it. The way they come to understand it is up to you. You can’t just give people information, no matter how good: It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear and understand and, most of all, are motivated to act on. You can never pay communication too much attention, and you can never practice too much. The more you pitch and (especially) the more you hear what people actually understood and remembered, the better your story will become and the more success you will have. Your company will never be better than you can make it, but if you can’t explain yourself clearly and compellingly, it can easily be far less.
Robert O. Wetzel, Investor
Bob Wetzel joined the management consulting division of Arthur Andersen and Co. in 1982. Over a 20-year leadership career at Anderson and Accenture, Bob was a founding partner of their Change Management Practice. He led the Insurance Industry Consulting Practice in Europe; the design, build, and marketing of software for insurance investment operations; and the Enterprise Management Practice to financial services companies. He is currently a gentleman farmer, private investor, and consultant to nonprofits and recently created a consulting practice to develop public speaking skills for managers and entrepreneurs. In 35 years as a consultant, executive, and private investor, through hundreds of presentations, Bob has one bottom line: The presenter is the project. If presenters are not passionate, articulate, confident, and engaging, their presentations will not be as compelling as their ideas. In his presentation teaching Bob focuses on five things:
Vocal and Personal Engagement
You have many tools at your disposal to take on the role of a successful entrepreneur. Use them all to engage your audience:
Voice: pitch, tempo, tonal variety, volume, and expression
Body: gesture, movement, eye contact, and personal engagement
Language: diction, enunciation, language choice and usage, and accent
Dress: matching your audience, but always slightly better
Structure
A presentation tells a story. Follow a clear and logical structure:
A beginning that tells the audience what you are going to tell them and why they should pay attention.
A clear exposition of the relevant facts, compiled in groups of three. A person generally can hold only three things in mind at one time.
A compelling conclusion that focuses on benefits, actions, and passionate belief in what is presented.
A presentation must fit the audience. If you are making the same presentation to every audience, you will fail. Audience analysis includes the following:
Know the cultural, generational, demographic, socioeconomic, psychographic, and other characteristics of the group.
Identify and understand the influencers in any room.
Evaluate and use the physical environment of the presentation.
A presentation is an introduction to an idea, concept, or project. Engage your audience but never overwhelm them:
Keep the content of any single slide to no more than two minutes.
Incorporate visual aids in a clear and compelling way.
Limit any slide to no more than three topics.
Avoid jargon, techno-speak, or insider language.
Audiences will believe you only if you believe yourself. Presenters who do not believe passionately in their subject and who are not supremely confident in their presentation will fail.
Be passionate about your subject matter.
Engage skeptics and questioners without malice.
You may be wrong, but never be in doubt!
What is your central message? Why is what you do valuable and important? Can you compress it to one or two sentences?
Can you write down what you want to happen before you communicate your message or present it in an important context? If you can, how will you evaluate whether you think your message and presentation will get you there?
Who in your team should do the presenting? How do you know this is the right choice?
1. Pentland, Alex, Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).
2. Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007): 13.
3. Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath, Teacher’s Guide to Made to Stick (New York: Random House, 2007): 2.
4. Luntz, Frank I., Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear (New York: Hyperion, 2007).
5. Heath and Heath, Teacher’s Guide, 2007: 23.
6. Munter, Mary, Guide to Managerial Communication (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009): 3.
7. Heath and Heath, Made to Stick, 2007: 3–4.
8. Heath, Chip, “Loud and Clear: Crafting Messages That Stick—What Nonprofits Can Learn from Urban Legends,” Stanford Social Innovation Review 1, issue 3 (Winter 2003): 18–27.
9. Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath, “The Curse of Knowledge,” Harvard Business Review 84, issue 12 (December 2006): 20–22.
10. Newton, Elizabeth, “Overconfidence in the Communication of Intent: Heard and Unheard Melodies,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1990: 33–46.
11. Munter, 2009.
12. Kawasaki, Guy, The Art of the Start (New York: Portfolio, 2004): 40.
13. President John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” May 25, 1961, before a joint session of Congress.
14. Kawasaki, 2004: 47.
15. Ibid.: 38.
16. Lange, Dorothea, “The Assignment I’ll Never Forget: Migrant Mother,” Popular Photography 126 (February 1960): 42–43.
17. Standing, Lionel, “Learning 10,000 Pictures,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 25, no. 2 (May 1, 1973): 207–222.
18. Ambady, Nalini, and Robert Rosenthal, “Half a Minute Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 3 (March 1993): 431–441.
19. Iacoboni, Marco, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).
20. Iacoboni, Marco, “Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others,” Wall Street Journal Online, May 30, 2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121191836113423647.html (accessed September 17, 2010).
21. Hotz, Robert Lee, “How Your Brain Allows You to Walk in Another’s Shoes,” Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2007: B1.
