Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath, Dan Heath
Narrated by Charles Kahlenberg
Why Listen to This Audiobook?
Most business books teach you what to say — this one rewires how you think about why anything lands.
- Great if you want: practical frameworks for communication, teaching, or persuasion
- Listening experience: brisk and example-driven — each chapter feels like a case study
- Narration: Kahlenberg delivers the conversational Heath brothers style cleanly
- Skip if: you've already read Influence or Switch — heavy overlap in examples
Listen to Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die on Audible →
About This Audiobook
Chip and Dan Heath have a question that has puzzled them since school: why do urban legends stick in memory for years while carefully researched policy arguments evaporate in hours? Made to Stick examines the anatomy of ideas that persist, identifying six qualities — SUCCESs: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories — that predict whether an idea will lodge in minds or slip away. The book is itself an argument for its own principles, built from memorable examples rather than abstract frameworks.
Charles Kahlenberg narrates with a storyteller's instinct that serves a book about storytelling well — his pacing allows the case studies to build before the theoretical frame arrives, which is exactly the pedagogical approach the Heaths recommend. At just over eight and a half hours, Made to Stick is a business book that reads like a series of interesting stories, which was presumably the point. One of the more influential communication books of the 2000s.
