Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of Chip Heath co-conducted by Lenny T. Mendonca and Matt Miller. It was featured in The McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete interview, check out a wealth of free online resources, and learn more about the firm, please click here.

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The key to effective communication: make it simple, make it concrete, and make it surprising.

The ability to craft and deliver messages that influence employees, markets, and other stakeholders may seem like a mysterious talent that some people have and some don’t. Jack Welch, for example, created ideas that inspired hundreds of thousands of GE employees. But many other leaders are frustrated to find that key messages sent one day are forgotten the next—or that stakeholders don’t know how to interpret them.

Why do some ideas succeed while others fail? Chip Heath, professor of organizational behavior in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, has spent the past decade seeking answers to that question. His research has ranged from the problem of what makes beliefs—urban legends, for instance—survive in the social marketplace of competing ideas to experiments that show how winning ideas emerge in populations, businesses, and other organizations. Earlier this year Heath published his findings in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, written with his brother, Dan, who founded a business that specializes in this very subject.

In July 2007 Chip Heath spoke with Lenny Mendonca, a director in McKinsey’s San Francisco office; Matt Miller, an adviser to McKinsey; and Parth Tewari, who was then a Sloan fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, about the key principles for making an idea “stick” and how executives can use them to communicate more successfully. The conversation took place at Stanford.

The Quarterly: Let’s start by defining success. What is a sticky idea?

Chip Heath: A sticky idea is one that people understand when they hear it, that they remember later on, and that changes something about the way they think or act. That is a high standard. Think back to the last presentation you saw. How much do you  remember? How did it change the decisions you make day to day?

Leaders will spend weeks or months coming up with the right idea but then spend only a few hours thinking about how to convey that message to everybody else. That’s a tragedy. It’s worth spending time making sure that the lightbulb that has gone on inside your head also goes on inside the heads of your employees or customers

The Quarterly: Give us an example of a sticky idea.

Chip Heath: John F. Kennedy, in 1961, proposed to put an American on the moon in a decade. That idea stuck. It motivated thousands of people across dozens of organizations, public and private. It was an unexpected idea: it got people’s attention because it was so surprising—the moon is a long way up. It appealed to our emotions: we were in the Cold War and the Russians had launched the Sputnik space satellite four years earlier. It was concrete: everybody could picture what success would look like in the same way. How many goals in your organization are pictured in exactly the same way by everyone involved?

My father worked for IBM during that period. He did some of the programming on the original Gemini space missions. And he didn’t think of himself as working for IBM—he thought of himself as helping to put an American on the moon. An accountant who lived down the street from us, who worked for a defense contractor, also thought of himself as helping to put an American on the moon. When you inspire the accountants you know you’re onto something.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His research examines why certain ideas – ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths – survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas. His research has appeared in a variety of academic journals, and popular accounts of his research have appeared in Scientific American, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Psychology Today, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Los Gatos, California. He has co-authored two books with his brother Dan: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and  Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. 

Lenny Mendonca is a director in McKinsey’s San Francisco office, and Matt Miller is an adviser to McKinsey. The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Parth Tewari, who helped initiate and shape this interview. Tewari recently left Stanford to become the India director of TechnoServe (a nonprofit organization that helps create business solutions to fight poverty), where he is using these ideas to shape his communications.