edition of each paper if we had the names to fill them up.
He’s willing to be boring for local focus:
I’ll bet that if the
Daily Record
reprinted the entire Dunn telephone directory tonight, half the people would sit down and check it to be sure their name was included…. When somebody tells you, “Aw, you don’t want all those names,” please assure them that’s exactly what we want,
most of all!
He gleefully exaggerates in order to emphasize the value of local focus, quoting a saying of a friend, Ralph Delano, who runs the local paper in Benson:
If an atomic bomb fell on Raleigh, it wouldn’t be news in Benson unless some of the debris and ashes fell on Benson.
In fact, asked why the
Daily Record
has been so successful, Adams replies, “It’s because of three things: Names, names, and names.”
What’s going on here? Adams has found the core idea that he wants to communicate—that local focus is the key to his newspaper’s success. That’s Step 1. Step 2 is to communicate the core to others. And he does that brilliantly.
Look at the techniques Adams uses to communicate his seriousness about local focus. He uses an analogy: comparing the mayor of Angier to the mayor of New York. (We’ll have more to say about analogy later in this chapter.) He says he’d hire more typesetters if the reporters could generate enough names. This is forced prioritization: Local focus is more important than minimizing costs! (Not a common sentiment among small-town papers. See the “Unexpected” chapter.)
He also speaks in clear, tangible language. What does he want? Names. He wants lots of individual names in the newspaper every day. (See the “Concrete” chapter.) This idea is concrete enough that everyone in the organization can comprehend and use it. Is there any room for misunderstanding? Is there a staffer who won’t understand what Adams means by “names”?
“Names, names, and names” is a simple statement that is symbolic of a core truth. It’s not just that names are helpful. In Adams’s mind, names trump costs. Names trump well-written prose. Names trump nuclear explosions in neighboring communities.
For fifty-five years, since Adams founded the paper, his core value of community focus has helped hundreds of people at the paper, in thousands of circumstances, make good decisions. As a publisher, Adams has presided over close to 20,000 issues. And each of those issues involved countless decisions: Which stories do we cover? What’s important in the stories? Which photos do we run? Which do we cut out to save space?
Adams can’t possibly be personally involved in the vast majority of these hundreds of small decisions. But his employees don’t suffer from decision paralysis, because Adams’s Commander’s Intent is clear: “Names, names, and names.” Adams can’t be everywhere. But by finding the core and communicating it clearly,
he has made himself everywhere
. That’s the power of a sticky idea.
Simple = Core + Compact
Adams is a clever wordsmith, but his most useful bit of wordplay is probably his least clever: “Names, names, and names.” This phrase isuseful and memorable because it is highly concrete, but also because it is highly succinct. This example illustrates a second aspect of simplicity: Simple messages are core and
compact
.
At one level, the idea of compactness is uncontroversial. Rarely will you get advice to make your communications lengthy and convoluted, unless you write interest-rate disclosures for a credit card company. We know that sentences are better than paragraphs. Two bullet points are better than five. Easy words are better than hard words. It’s a bandwidth issue: The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.
But let’s be clear: Compactness alone isn’t enough. We could latch on to a compact message that isn’t core; in other words, a pithy slogan that doesn’t reflect our Commander’s Intent. Compact messages may
He’s willing to be boring for local focus:
I’ll bet that if the
Daily Record
reprinted the entire Dunn telephone directory tonight, half the people would sit down and check it to be sure their name was included…. When somebody tells you, “Aw, you don’t want all those names,” please assure them that’s exactly what we want,
most of all!
He gleefully exaggerates in order to emphasize the value of local focus, quoting a saying of a friend, Ralph Delano, who runs the local paper in Benson:
If an atomic bomb fell on Raleigh, it wouldn’t be news in Benson unless some of the debris and ashes fell on Benson.
In fact, asked why the
Daily Record
has been so successful, Adams replies, “It’s because of three things: Names, names, and names.”
What’s going on here? Adams has found the core idea that he wants to communicate—that local focus is the key to his newspaper’s success. That’s Step 1. Step 2 is to communicate the core to others. And he does that brilliantly.
Look at the techniques Adams uses to communicate his seriousness about local focus. He uses an analogy: comparing the mayor of Angier to the mayor of New York. (We’ll have more to say about analogy later in this chapter.) He says he’d hire more typesetters if the reporters could generate enough names. This is forced prioritization: Local focus is more important than minimizing costs! (Not a common sentiment among small-town papers. See the “Unexpected” chapter.)
He also speaks in clear, tangible language. What does he want? Names. He wants lots of individual names in the newspaper every day. (See the “Concrete” chapter.) This idea is concrete enough that everyone in the organization can comprehend and use it. Is there any room for misunderstanding? Is there a staffer who won’t understand what Adams means by “names”?
“Names, names, and names” is a simple statement that is symbolic of a core truth. It’s not just that names are helpful. In Adams’s mind, names trump costs. Names trump well-written prose. Names trump nuclear explosions in neighboring communities.
For fifty-five years, since Adams founded the paper, his core value of community focus has helped hundreds of people at the paper, in thousands of circumstances, make good decisions. As a publisher, Adams has presided over close to 20,000 issues. And each of those issues involved countless decisions: Which stories do we cover? What’s important in the stories? Which photos do we run? Which do we cut out to save space?
Adams can’t possibly be personally involved in the vast majority of these hundreds of small decisions. But his employees don’t suffer from decision paralysis, because Adams’s Commander’s Intent is clear: “Names, names, and names.” Adams can’t be everywhere. But by finding the core and communicating it clearly,
he has made himself everywhere
. That’s the power of a sticky idea.
Simple = Core + Compact
Adams is a clever wordsmith, but his most useful bit of wordplay is probably his least clever: “Names, names, and names.” This phrase isuseful and memorable because it is highly concrete, but also because it is highly succinct. This example illustrates a second aspect of simplicity: Simple messages are core and
compact
.
At one level, the idea of compactness is uncontroversial. Rarely will you get advice to make your communications lengthy and convoluted, unless you write interest-rate disclosures for a credit card company. We know that sentences are better than paragraphs. Two bullet points are better than five. Easy words are better than hard words. It’s a bandwidth issue: The more we reduce the amount of information in an idea, the stickier it will be.
But let’s be clear: Compactness alone isn’t enough. We could latch on to a compact message that isn’t core; in other words, a pithy slogan that doesn’t reflect our Commander’s Intent. Compact messages may
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