Memetic Communication for Leaders

The Problem

You spent hours crafting that memo. You rehearsed your message, stayed up late adjusting slides, or put your heart into communicating a new strategy. But a week later, when you ask your team about priorities or takeaways, you are met with blank stares. Clearly, the message didn’t stick. Many leaders we work with encounter this frustration.

After all, modern organizations are buried in noise. Organizations used to die from information deprivation; now they drown in information oversaturation. Constant notifications, torrents of emails, endless reports and memos create what Cal Newport calls a "hyperactive hivemind": an churn where signal and noise become nearly indistinguishable.

The solution to this isn't to communicate more. The answer is to communicate differently, using principles of memetic communication.

Some messages are ‘sticky.’

Everyone knows some messages are stickier than others. You will likely be familiar with phrases or words like:

• "Just do it" - Nike's advertising slogan symbolizing overcoming hesitation

• "Ubuntu" - Southern African philosophy meaning "I am because we are," emphasizing communal interdependence

• "Kaizen" - Toyota's principle of continuous improvement through small, incremental changes

• "Fail fast, learn faster" - Silicon Valley startup culture message encouraging rapid experimentation

• "Do unto others…" - The Golden Rule, found across religious traditions, from Jesus's teachings in Christianity

• "100% opportunity, 0% expectation" - This is an internal Lead Beyond meme that guides our ethos of high inclusion

These messages spread and persist, in part, because they are memetic. You likely know ‘memes’ as pieces of viral content that populate your social media feed: funny cartoons, weird GIFs, or iconic photos likely come to mind. But the concept is deeper than entertainment bytes bumped by the algorithm or passed along for a laugh.

The term comes from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who proposed that ideas evolve through variation, selection, and replication, just like organisms in the natural world. The strongest memes spread, while others disappear. They are one of the most powerful tools of human society. For as long as humans have engaged in what anthropologists call “symbolic thought” (a very long time), memes have existed. Memes can be logos, diagrams, meeting formats and more, but for now we’ll focus on verbal or written communication.

Organizations already use memes, whether leaders recognize it or not. Mission and vision statements are often 'official memes,' though many are clunky and fail to replicate beyond the conference room where they were born. Other memes emerge organically: acronyms, nicknames, or technical jargon that circulates within a system and persists for years, sometimes long after anyone remembers why.

Too many leaders underestimate memetic communication and under-deliver on their potential as a result. In the current information environment, executives must manage memes in addition to strategy. The ideas, values, and slogans that define your company spread, mutate, and compete for attention. Leaders who understand this can intentionally shape culture and influence behavior. Those who default to generic corporate-speak or unwieldy acronyms will find their messages rapidly forgotten.

You don’t need a marketing team to communicate effectively.

How memes help you

Leaders can use memetic principles to package information in a way that cuts through the noise. In repetition, these compressed units of meaning also reinforce organizational identity. When your message is memorable, people repeat it. And repeated messages influence action.

Making your communication more mimetic

Here are a few steps you can use to make your communication more memetic:

1. Find the core.

Memes often look simple, but capture ideas of utmost importance. Effective memes possess what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called "simplicity on the other side of complexity." They distill essence without sacrificing meaning. Leaders often fail to make their communication replicable because they haven’t done this distilling process. One way to get to this is to ask yourself, if you could ensure people remembered only one thing, what would it be?

It takes time to find the core of your message, often because we don’t know what it is before we have expressed all of our ideas. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote to a friend: “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it short.”

2. Activate Emotions

Organizations naturally gravitate toward technical details and industry-specific terminology. These can become their own kind of internal meme, sticky due to contextual necessity rather than inspirational pull. But they don’t make people feel anything. Leaders trying to cut through the noise need to excavate the more compelling emotional idea buried at the center of what they want to communicate.

There is a sweet spot between jargon and generalization. Leaders typically stumble in one of two directions: either they become way too technical ("improve cross-functional synergies") or too general ("more teamwork"). Memetic communication threads the needle between these extremes. (A clichéd example could be "Teamwork makes the dream work", which also uses the principle of rhyme, which we talk about below.) The technical and the general fall flat, but the middle space has potential.

Ask yourself how you want people to feel when they hear you, not just what you want them to take away.

3. Drive with Identity

The best memes tap into who we are or who we aspire to become. Viral marketing campaigns tend to show this: Apple's "Think Different" ad was about identity, not computing power. Nike's "Just Do It" addresses internal resistance we all face, not athletic footwear. Patagonia's "Don't Buy This Jacket" signals valuing environmental conviction over quarterly earnings. These are more than catchphrases, they capture the ethical imagination of employees and buyers alike. Sometimes this might require highlighting a paradox or a tension, e.g. “strong opinions, loosely held” or “100% opportunity, 0% expectation.”

4. Compress & Stylize:

Things become memes because they feel good to repeat. This is subjective; don’t hesitate to put on your poet’s hat. There are some proven tools you can use to make things more replicable.

• Alliteration

  • “Progress over perfection”

  • “Good to great”

• Rhyme

  • “Hire slow, fire fast”

  • “Name it to tame it”

  • “Click it or ticket”

  • “stranger danger”

• Rule of 4

  • Almost all memetic phrases contain less than four words. At most, they will have no more than 4 key ideas, since that is the maximum number of details our short-term memory can hold easily at oncce.

• Rhetorical formulas.

  • Some memes lean on reliable formulas, like "X is the new Y" ("Data is the new oil," "Remote is the new normal"), "If you can't X, you can't Y" ("If you can't measure it, you can't manage it"), and "Every X is a Y" ("Every employee is a recruiter").

So What?

Memetic communication isn't about manipulation or dumbing down complex ideas. It's about respecting the limits of the people you lead and the chaotic information environment they navigate daily. It's about doing the hard work of distillation so they don't have to. The phrases you choose, refine, and repeat become the operating system of your organization. They're the voice people hear in their heads when making decisions. They're the shortcuts that determine whether your culture thrives or drifts. Your culture isn’t defined by what you say as a leader, but by what people repeat.

Some Action Steps:

• Ask someone you work with what messages they hear you repeat.

• Listen for whatever memes already exist in your org. Do they need to be refined or eliminated?

• Find your key messages, distill them, and test them. Repeat.