Made to Stick (30 page)

Blumkin started a furniture business in 1937 with $500 that she had saved. Almost fifty years later, her furniture store was doing $100 million in annual revenue. At age one hundred, she was still on the floor seven days a week. She actually postponed her one-hundredth birthday party until an evening when the store was closed. At one point her competitors sued her for violating the fair-trade agreement because her prices were so much lower. They thought she was selling at a loss in order to put them out of business. Buffett says, “She demonstrated to the court that she could profitably sell carpet at a huge discount and sold the judge $1,400 worth of carpet.”

The story of Rose Blumkin isn’t from the book
Chicken Soup for the Soul
, but it could be. The
Chicken Soup
series has become a publishing phenomenon, with more than 4.3 million books sold and thirty-seven
Chicken Soup
titles in print, including
Chicken Soup for the Father’s Soul, Chicken Soup for the Nurse’s Soul
, and
Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul
.

The
Chicken Soup
books traffic in inspirational stories—stories that uplift, motivate, energize. In that sense, these stories are the opposite of urban legends, which tend to reinforce a cynical, pessimistic, or paranoid view of the world. (Strangers will steal your kidneys!
Snapple supports the KKK! McDonald’s puts worms in its burgers!)

What’s amazing about these stories is that the authors didn’t write them—they merely spotted and collected them. We wanted to understand what made these inspirational stories tick. We pored over inspirational stories—hundreds of stories, both from
Chicken Soup
and elsewhere—looking for underlying similarities.

Aristotle believed there were four primary dramatic plots: Simple Tragic, Simple Fortunate, Complex Tragic, and Complex Fortunate. Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, lists twenty-five types of stories in his book: the modern epic, the disillusionment plot, and so on. When we finished sorting through a big pile of inspirational stories—a much narrower domain—we came to the conclusion that there are three basic plots: the Challenge plot, the Connection plot, and the Creativity plot.

These three basic plots can be used to classify more than 80 percent of the stories that appear in the original
Chicken Soup
collection. Perhaps more surprisingly, they can also be used to classify more than 60 percent of the stories published by
People
magazine about people who aren’t celebrities. If an average person makes it into
People
, it’s usually because he or she has an inspiring story for the rest of us. If our goal is to energize and inspire others, these three plots are the right place to start. (By the way, if you’re a more jaded type of person who finds the
Chicken Soup
series treacly rather than inspirational, you’ll still find value in the three plot templates. You can always turn down the volume on the plots a bit.)

The story of David and Goliath is the classic Challenge plot. A protagonist overcomes a formidable challenge and succeeds. David fells a giant with his homemade slingshot. There are variations of the Challenge plot that we all recognize: the underdog story, the rags-to-riches story, the triumph of sheer willpower over adversity.

The key element of a Challenge plot is that the obstacles seem daunting to the protagonist. Jared slimming down to 180 pounds is a Challenge plot. Jared’s 210-pound neighbor shaving an inch off his waistline is not. We’ve all got a huge mental inventory of Challenge plot stories. The American hockey team beating the heavily favored Russians in the 1980 Olympics. The Alamo. Horatio Alger tales. The American Revolution. Seabiscuit. The
Star Wars
movies. Lance Armstrong. Rosa Parks.

Challenge plots are inspiring even when they’re much less dramatic and historical than these examples. The Rose Blumkin story doesn’t involve a famous character. Challenge plots are inspiring in a defined way. They inspire us by appealing to our perseverance and courage. They make us want to work harder, take on new challenges, overcome obstacles. Somehow, after you’ve heard about Rose Blumkin postponing her one-hundredth birthday party until an evening when her store was closed, it’s easier to clean out your garage. Challenge plots inspire us to act.

Today the phrase “good Samaritan” refers to someone who voluntarily helps others in times of distress. The original story of the Good Samaritan from the Bible is certainly consistent with this definition, but it’s even more profound.

The story begins with a lawyer who approached Jesus with a question about how to get to heaven. The lawyer was more interested in testing Jesus than in learning from him. When Jesus asked the lawyer what
he
thought the answer was, the lawyer gave a reply that included the notion “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus accepted the lawyer’s answer. Then the lawyer (perhaps wanting to limit the number of people he’s on the hook to love) says, “And who is my neighbor?”

In response, Jesus told a story:

What’s missing from this tale, for modern-day readers, is a bit of context. The Samaritan in the story was not simply a nice guy. He was a nice guy crossing a huge social gulf in helping the wounded man. At the time, there was tremendous hostility between Samaritans and Jews (all the other main characters in the story). A modern-day analogy to the outcast status of the Samaritan might be an “atheist biker gang member.” The lesson of the story is clear: Good neighbors show mercy and compassion, and not just to people in their own group.

This is what a Connection plot is all about. It’s a story about people who develop a relationship that bridges a gap—racial, class, ethnic, religious, demographic, or otherwise. The Connection plot doesn’t have to deal with life-and-death stakes, as does the Good Samaritan. The connection can be as trivial as a bottle of a Coke, as in the famous Mean Joe Greene commercial. A scrawny young white
fan encounters a towering famous black athlete. A bottle of Coke links them. It ain’t the Good Samaritan, but it’s clearly a Connection plot.

Connection plots are also fabulous for romance stories—think of
Romeo and Juliet
(or the top-grossing movie of all time,
Titanic)
. All Connection plots inspire us in social ways. They make us want to help others, be more tolerant of others, work with others, love others. The Connection plot is the most common kind of plot found in the
Chicken Soup
series.

Where Challenge plots involve overcoming challenges, Connection plots are about our relationships with other people. If you’re telling a story at the company Christmas party, it’s probably best to use the Connection plot. If you’re telling a story at the kickoff party for a new project, go with the Challenge plot.

The third major type of inspirational story is the Creativity plot. The prototype might be the story of the apple that falls on Newton’s head, inspiring his theory of gravity. The Creativity plot involves someone making a mental breakthrough, solving a long-standing puzzle, or attacking a problem in an innovative way. It’s the
MacGyver
plot.

Ingersoll-Rand is a giant company that makes nonsexy products such as industrial grinders, used in auto shops to sand down auto bodies. Historically, Ingersoll-Rand had been slow at bringing new products to market. One employee, frustrated by the average four-year product life cycle, said, “It was taking us longer to introduce a new product than it took our nation to fight World War II.”

Ingersoll-Rand decided to do something about the slow development cycle. The company created a project team whose goal was to produce a new grinder in a year—one quarter the usual time. Standard theories of organizational culture would have predicted a slim chance of success. The grinder team, however, did a lot of things right, including the use of stories to emphasize the group’s new attitude
and culture. One story, for instance, involved a critical decision about whether to build the new grinder’s casing out of plastic or metal. Plastic would be more comfortable for the customer, but would it hold up as well as metal?

The traditional Ingersoll-Rand method of solving this problem would have been to conduct protracted, careful studies of the tensile and compression properties of both materials. But this was the Grinder Team. They were supposed to act quickly. A few members of the team cooked up a less formal testing procedure. While on an off-site customer visit, the team members tied a sample of each material to the back bumper of their rental car, then drove around the parking lot with the materials dragging behind. They kept this up until the police came and told them to knock it off. The verdict was that the new plastic composite held up just as well as the traditional metal. Decision made.

In the history of the Grinder Team, this story has become known as the Drag Test. The Drag Test is a Creativity plot that reinforced the team’s new culture. The Drag Test implied, “We still need to get the right data to make decisions. We just need to do it a lot quicker.”

The famous explorer Ernest Shackleton faced such enormous odds in his explorations (obviously a classic Challenge plot) that unity among his men was mission-critical. A mutiny could leave everyone dead. Shackleton came up with a creative solution for dealing with the whiny, complaining types. He assigned them to sleep in his own tent. When people separated into groups to work on chores, he grouped the complainers with him. Through his constant presence, he minimized their negative influence. Creativity plots make us want to do something different, to be creative, to experiment with new approaches.

T
he goal of reviewing these plots is not to help us invent stories. Unless you write fiction or advertisements, that won’t help much. The goal here is to learn how to spot the stories that have potential.
When the Jared article hits our desk, we want to spot the crucial elements immediately.
Guy faces huge obstacles and overcomes them—it’s a Challenge plot
. Challenge plots inspire people to take on challenges and work harder. If that feeling is consistent with the goal you want to achieve, run with the story; don’t tack it on the bulletin board.

If you’re running the Grinder Team, and you’re trying to reinvent the company culture, then you need to be on the lookout for Creativity plots. When you hear that some of your men dragged metal around a parking lot, you’ve found something.

Know what you’re looking for. You don’t need to make stuff up, you don’t need to exaggerate or be as melodramatic as the
Chicken Soup
tales. (The Drag Test isn’t melodramatic.) You just need to recognize when life is giving you a gift.

In 1996, Stephen Denning was working for the World Bank, the international institution that lends money to developing countries for infrastructure projects such as building schools, roads, and water-treatment facilities. At the time, he managed the bank’s work in Africa—the third-largest area of the bank—and seemed to be on a fast track to the top of the organization.

Then one of his two main mentors retired and the second left. Shortly thereafter he was asked to step down from his Africa position and “look into the issue of information.” His superiors asked him to explore the area of knowledge management. Denning said, “Now this was a bank which cared about flows of money, not information. The new assignment was the equivalent of being sent to corporate Siberia.”

The task was not just organizationally unattractive, it was daunting. The World Bank knew a lot about how to achieve results in developing nations, but that information was scattered about the
organization. The World Bank conducted projects in dozens of countries all over the world—and while there was a central bureaucracy, much of the operational know-how was naturally at the local level. Each project was, in a sense, its own universe. A water-treatment guru in Zambia might have figured out a great way to handle local political negotiations, but he was unlikely to have the opportunity to share it with a highway-construction guru in Bangladesh. Neither manager would know the other existed, unless they happened to be in the same circle of friends or former colleagues.

A month after accepting his assignment, Denning had lunch with a colleague who had just returned from Zambia. This colleague was working on a project to improve health care, particularly for mothers and children. While he was in Zambia he had met a health-care worker in Kamana—a small town 360 miles from Zambia’s capital—who was struggling to fight malaria in the community and was trying to find information on how to combat the disease. The worker had found a way to log on to the Internet and had discovered the answers he needed on the website of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. (Keep in mind that this was in 1996, when the Internet would not have been the obvious first stop for someone in search of information, especially in Africa.)

Denning says that he didn’t give the story much thought at the time; it was just an interesting anecdote about the resourcefulness of a colleague. Later, it dawned on him that the Zambia story was a perfect example of the power of knowledge management. Someone in charge of a vital operation needed information. He went looking for it, found it, and, as a result, was able to act more effectively. That’s the vision of knowledge management—except that the health-care worker shouldn’t have been forced to conduct a trial-and-error search, ending at the CDC’s website, to get the right information. He should have been able to tap the knowledge of the World Bank.