Synopses & Reviews
Why is change so difficult and frightening? How do you create change when you have few resources and no title or authority to back you up? Chip and Dan Heath, the best-selling authors of Made to Stick, are back with a ground-breaking book that addresses one of the greatest challenges of our personal and professional lives how to change things when change is hard.In their follow-up book to the critically acclaimed international bestseller Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath talk about how difficult change is in our companies, our careers, and our lives, why change is so hard, and how we can overcome our resistance and make change happen. The Heaths liken the human mind to two distinct entities the animal mind, or what psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the elephant, and the logical brain, which Haidt describes as the rider. The elephant is instinctive; it acts on emotion. It likes gorging on Oreos and sleeping in. And it loves routines doing things the same old way, every day.
The rider is the planner and thinker. The rider obsesses about the future. He or she wants to stop eating junk food and stop hitting the snooze button. But its hard, because when the rider and elephant disagree on where to go, the rider usually loses. And that describes the essential tension between our primitive emotional brain and our high intellect, and helps to explain why changing how we behave is so difficult. The secret to making a switch is understanding this odd couple relationship. Direct the Rider. Motivate the Elephant. Shape the Path.
Throughout Switch, Chip and Dan Heath illustrate and explain situations in which sweeping change was adopted, from a university researcher who ended the cycle of child abuse in a group of families, to an entrepreneur who turned his skeptical employees into customer service zealots and saved his company.
In the tradition of Made to Stick, Blink, and Outliers, Switch is filled with engaging and entertaining stories of how companies and individuals have brought about and sustained significant change. An indispensable guide to making change happen, it is certain to become a classic.
Synopsis
Why is change so difficult and frightening? How do you create change when you have few resources and no title or authority to back you up? Chip and Dan Heath, the best-selling authors of Made to Stick, are back with a ground-breaking book that addresses one of the greatest challenges of our personal and professional lives how to change things when change is hard.In Switch, bestselling authors Chip and Dan Heath tackle perhaps the single greatest issue of our lives: how hard it is to bring about genuine, lasting change, in our work lives, in our social endeavours and in ourselves. In these troubled economic times, many of us need to rethink or retool our careers. Switch shows us why our minds have such difficulty in embracing and sustaining change and what exactly we can do to overcome what they call the "elephant" part of our brain, driven by emotion and instinct, and to reinforce and strengthen the brain's "rider" control of that elephant by the intellect.
Throughout Switch, the Heaths show us situations in which people make sweeping change happen, from a couple who helped their teenage daughter overcome anorexia, saving her life, to an entrepreneur who turned his skeptical employees into customer-service zealots and saved his company. As they demonstrate so eloquently and ably, to change your behaviour, you have to learn how to motivate the elephant, orient the rider, and clear the trail…
Synopsis
Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives?The primary obstacle is a conflict that's built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems - the rational mind and the emotional mind - that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort - but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.
In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people - employees and managers, parents and nurses - have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results:
- The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients (see page 242)
- The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping (see page 130)
- The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service (see page 199)
In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.
About the Author
Chip Heath is the Thrive Foundation for Youth Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Dan Heath is a consultant to the Aspen Institute. Together, they are the authors of the national bestseller Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. They write a regular column in Fast Company magazine, and have appeared on Today, NPR's Morning Edition, MSNBC, CNBC, and have been featured in Time, People and US News and World Report.
Table of Contents
1. Three Surprises About Change
DIRECT THE RIDER
2. Find the Bright Spots
3. Script the Critical Moves
4. Point to the Destination
MOTIVATE THE ELEPHANT
5. Find the Feeling
6. Shrink the Change
7. Grow Your People
SHAPE THE PATH
8. Tweak the Environment
9. Build Habits
10. Rally the Herd
11. Keep the Switch Going
How to Make a Switch
Overcoming Obstacles
Next Steps
Recommendations for Additional Reading
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index