Mary Stutts, senior vice president and head of corporate relations for Élan Corp. PLC

Élan Corp. PLC., a neuroscience biotechnology company specializing in biopharmaceuticals and drug technologies that support the research and treatment of major health concerns such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Crohn’s and multiple sclerosis, prides itself on leading the industry in conversations on changing clinical trial methodologies.

“Our stance on these issues is an outgrowth of our company’s value proposition,” states Mary Stutts, senior vice president and head of corporate relations for the Dublin-based firm. “Élan’s message energizes workers to excel, motivates patients to participate in clinical trials, secures the help of regulators, and attracts the necessary investment and buy-in from shareholders,” says Stutts.

Messages that are most likely to make their target audience pay attention, understand and remember them, believe or agree with them, or care and consider taking action, are those that are sticky, write Dan and Chip Heath, authors of Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House; $26).

Stutts leverages these traits to transform the way Élan communicates the importance of its work and the impact of its results to employees, investors, regulators, physicians, patients, and third-party consumers:

Tell a story. “Opaque, abstract missions don’t captivate and inspire people. Stories provide both the needed knowledge of how to act and the inspiration to do it,” note the Heaths.

Stutts’ team has collaborated with constituents throughout the enterprise to develop Élan Excellence, a compelling, easy-to-tell narrative that melds the company’s successful breakthrough therapies and cures for degenerative diseases with its corporate macro messages of business strategy and organizational direction.

Keep it simple. The Heaths insist that sticky messages cannot have multiple goals of equal importance. It’s important to focus on core messaging even if it means discarding other great stories in order to let the most truly important one reverberate.

Stutts articulates the core of Élan’s work as: defining the future of neurological therapies. The company’s one-sentence mission statement and six core principles are simple, yet profound enough to perpetually align stakeholder behaviors without requiring “play-by-play” instructions from senior management.

Tap emotions. Ideas should be personal and relational, the Heaths suggest, in an effort to create empathy.  Even with Élan’s 40-year history of medical success, Stutts keeps the spotlight on people by capturing online stories of patients and their families affected by specific neurological diseases Élan works to cure.

This article originally appeared in the June 2010 issue of Black Enterprise magazine.

Wesley Poriotis, founder of Wesley, Brown and Bartle, a diversity-focused executive-search firm says there’s a dearth of African Americans wielding decision making power in the cable field. “Among the management in operations, those six figures and above, it’s still less than 1% [representation].”

In an effort to promote diversity and inclusion in the cable television industry, the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications is hosting its annual conference in New York this week. The conference is designed to provide strategies and resources to help companies maximize the potential of a multicultural employee base. The conference will include sessions on increasing diversity in company advertising sales, increasing operational sales and harnessing digital media.

“Companies need to make diversity part of DNA,” says Kathy Johnson, president of NAMIC. “I think the message needs to be communicated from the top down.”

Johnson adds that it is important for an organization to make the business case for diversity. “Some companies that are not visionaries are slow to recognize it,” she says. “It’s an ongoing challenge.”

In addition to the conference, NAMIC has hosted a diversity roundtable since 2001 for cable industry practitioners to discuss and share diversity challenges and best practices.

Attendees of the three-day event, which started Sunday, will have the opportunity to participate in several workshops and a career expo of up to 35 companies, including Comcast, Emmis Communications, NBC Universal, and Time Warner.

In Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House; $24.95) authors Chip Heath, a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, and his brother Dan, a consultant and former Harvard Business School researcher, make a convincing case for their belief that sticky ideas don’t have to happen by chance; creating or spotting them is a skill that can be learned and mastered. For anyone, including educators, professional speakers, team leaders, managers, journalists, advertisers, and business owners, success hinges on the ability to get others to believe, care about, and act on their messages. Your ability to deliver ideas that produce a desired reaction from your audience can determine everything from whether you can get an investor to finance your business to your chance of convincing your child to abstain from experimenting with drugs.

How do you construct sticky ideas? The authors propose that all understandable, memorable and effective ideas are: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and are delivered in the form of stories (S.U.C.C.E.S.S.). The problem is that most of the ideas we deliver, especially in professional circles, are just the opposite: complicated, predictable, abstract, technical, and fraught with statistics, jargon, and facts. After all, which message is more memorable and easily understood by most people: “It is advisable to mitigate risk through diversification” or “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket?”

Knowing how to generate worth-their-weight-in-gold ideas can enrich, empower, and enable you to maximize your potential as an effective communicator.

Use these six principles to deliver messages that are impossible to ignore–or forget:

1. Simple: Determine the core, single most important thing and then share it.
2. Unexpected: Get attention with surprise and hold attention through interest.
3. Concrete: Help people understand, coordinate, and remember. Provide a solid context.
4. Credible: Help people agree and believe by readily offering statistics and/or testable credentials and convincing details.
5. Emotional: Make people care through the power of association or appeal to their identity and self-interest.
6. Stories: Get people to act by either telling them how to act (stimulation) or giving them the energy to act (inspiration).