It’s the golden egg for any business: getting your idea(s) to stick with your customers or clients and influence how they think or how they act.

Chip Heath is Professor of Organisational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and has consulted to organisations such as Nike and Microsoft on the topic of ‘making ideas stick‘. He is also co-author, alongside his brother Dan,  of one of our favourite business books at Anthill. (You guessed it, Made to Stick.)

Here he examines why it is that certain ideas, such as unsubstantiated urban myths and folk medicinal cures, can penetrate minds to the point that they will actually influence individual behaviour, while we struggle in the board room or sales floor to get our point across.

Is it true that we only use 10% of our brains? No, yet many believe it. Remember the tale of the guy waking up in a bath of ice with a missing kidney after accepting a drink from an attractive stanger in a hotel bar? Well, it actually never happened.

Heath and his brother have studied many of the legends that seem to draw us in so that he can apply their common traits and help people (and companies) create messages that will break through the mass of ideas we’re confronted by every day and stay lodged in our heads.

This clip is long at 60 minutes but very interesting viewing with valuable lessons to learn. Perhaps grab your earphones and listen while performing a mundane task. (That method of influencing behaviour is called ‘contextualisation’).