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United Nations NGO Committee on Sustainable Development
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Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard |  | Authors: Chip Heath, Dan Heath
Publisher: Broadway Business
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $11.40
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Seller: luisa1310
Rating:  31 reviews
Sales Rank: 26
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.2
ISBN: 0385528752
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4
EAN: 9780385528757
ASIN: 0385528752
Publication Date: February 16, 2010 (New: Last 30 Days)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| • | ISBN13: 9780385528757 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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Product Description
The Heath brothers (coauthors of Made to Stick) address motivating employees, family members, and ourselves in their analysis of why we too often fear change. Change is not inherently frightening, but our ability to alter our habits can be complicated by the disjunction between our rational and irrational minds: the self that wants to be swimsuit-season ready and the self that acquiesces to another slice of cake anyway. The trick is to find the balance between our powerful drives and our reason. The authors' lessons are backed up by anecdotes that deal with such things as new methods used to reform abusive parents, the revitalization of a dying South Dakota town, and the rebranding of megastore Target. Through these lively examples, the Heaths speak energetically and encouragingly on how to modify our behaviors and businesses. This clever discussion is an entertaining and educational must-read for executives and for ordinary citizens looking to get out of a rut. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Amazon.com Review
Chip Heath and Dan Heath on Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
 "Change is hard." "People hate change." Those were two of the most common quotes we heard when we began to study change. But it occurred to us that if people hate change, they have a funny way of showing it. Every iPhone sold serves as counter-evidence. So does every text message sent, every corporate merger finalized, every aluminum can recycled. And we havenât even mentioned the biggest changes: Getting married. Having kids. (If people hate change, then having a kid is an awfully dumb decision.) It puzzled us--why do some huge changes, like marriage, come joyously, while some trivial changes, like submitting an expense report on time, meet fierce resistance? We found the answer in the research of some brilliant psychologists whoâd discovered that people have two separate âsystemsâ in their brainsâa rational system and an emotional system. The rational system is a thoughtful, logical planner. The emotional system is, well, emotionalâand impulsive and instinctual. When these two systems are in alignment, change can come quickly and easily (as when a dreamy-eyed couple gets married). When theyâre not, change can be grueling (as anyone who has struggled with a diet can attest). In those situations where change is hard, is it possible to align the two systems? Is it possible to overcome our internal "schizophrenia" about change? We believe it is. In our research, we studied people trying to make difficult changes: People fighting to lose weight and keep it off. Managers trying to overhaul an entrenched bureaucracy. Activists combatting seemingly intractable problems such as child malnutrition. They succeeded--and, to our surprise, we found striking similarities in the strategies they used. They seemed to share a similar game plan. We wanted, in Switch, to make that game plan available to everyone, in hopes that we could show people how to make the hard changes in life a little bit easier. --Chip and Dan Heath (Photo © Amy Surdacki)
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 31
The elephant and the rider February 20, 2010
P. Chen
79 out of 83 found this review helpful
Just finished Switch and it's a fascinating book with a single, important premise: our minds are driven by two, main components, one emotional and one rational. The Heath brothers liken the emotional mind to an elephant and the rational mind to a rider. The elephant's sheer force results in it directing most of our behavior, while the rider is often passively on top thinking he's steering.
The authors use copious real-world examples to make their point, such as an employee at a company who realized they could save millions annually by purchasing a single type of work-glove, instead of the current method of purchasing 324 different brands of gloves. Instead of hitting the executive team with spreadsheets and a fancy presentation to make his point, the employee simply had an intern put all 324 brands of gloves onto the table in the boardroom. By appealing to their elephant, he was able to persuade the board to make the switch.
The book outlines a process for helping the reader to initiate change, which goes like this:
SECTION ONE: DIRECT THE RIDER
i. Find the Bright Spots
ii. Script the Critical Moves
iii. Point to the Destination
SECTION TWO: MOTIVATE THE ELEPHANT
i. Find the Feeling
ii. Shrink the Change
iii. Grow Your People
SECTION THREE: SHAPE THE PATH
i. Tweak the Environment
ii. Build Habits
iii. Rally the Herd
iv. Keep the Switch Going
In a nutshell, Switch is a book that gives a new slant on emotional intelligence. If the topic interests you, you might want to check out another book I read recently that I loved (it even let me go online and test my emotional intelligence): Emotional Intelligence 2.0
Several sticky insights February 16, 2010
Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas)
46 out of 51 found this review helpful
Chip and Dan Heath have once again summoned a lively writing style to present a series of compelling insights that make this book even more interesting as well as more valuable than its predecessor, Made to Stick. As they explain in the first chapter, "In this book, we argue that successful changes share a common pattern. They require the leader of change to do three things at once: To change someone's behavior, you've got to change that person's situation...[to cope with the fact that change] is hard because people wear themselves out. And that's the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion...If you want people to change, you must provide crystal clear direction [because what] looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity." Throughout, the Heaths work within a narrative, best viewed as a "three-part framework," as they provide countless real-world (as opposed to hypothetical or theoretical] examples and - to their great credit - also provide a context or frame-of-reference for each.
Moreover, the Heaths invoke a few extended metaphors. The most important of these are the Rider (i.e. our rational side), the Elephant, (i.e. our emotional and instinctive side) and the Path (i.e. the surrounding environment in which change initiatives will be conducted). The challenge is to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path to make change more likely, "no matter what's happening with the Rider and Elephant...If you can do all three at once, dramatic change can happen even if you don't have lots of power or resources behind you."
Donald Berwick offers an excellent case in point. In 2004, in his position as a doctor and the CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), he had developed some ideas as to "how to save lives - massive numbers of lives" and his ideas were so well-supported by research that they were indisputable and yet "little was happening" until he spoke at a professional meeting and proposed six very specific interventions to save lives. Within two months, more than 1,000 hospitals had signed up. Eighteen months later, to the day (June 14, 2006) he had previously announced that he'd promised to return, he announced the results: "Hospitals enrolled in the 100,000 Lives Campaign have collectively prevented an estimated 122,300 avoidable deaths and, as importantly, have begun to institutionalize new standards of care that will continue to save lives and improve health outcomes into the future." He had directed his audience's Riders (i.e. hospital administrators), he had motivated his audience's Elephants by making them feel the compelling need for change, and he had shaped the Path by making it easier for the hospitals to embrace the change. The Heaths offer more than a dozen other prime examples (e.g. Jerry Sternin in Vietnam, the Five-Minute Room Rescue, "Fataki" in Tanzania) that also demonstrate how the same three-part framework resulted in the achievement of major changes elsewhere despite great difficulty.
Near the end of the book, the Heaths summarize the key points they have so thoroughly made while explaining to their reader how to make a switch. "For things to change, somebody somewhere has to start acting differently. Maybe it's you, maybe it's your team. Picture the person (or people). Each has an emotional Elephant side and a rational Rider side. You've got to reach both. And you've also got to clear the way for them to succeed." By now, the Heaths have explained how others have directed the Rider, motivated the Elephant, and shaped the Path. They conclude their book with a Q&A section during which they advise how to resolve twelve problems that people most often encounter as they fight for change. They suggest, and I agree, that this advice "won't make sense to anybody who hasn't read the book." The same can probably be said about much of what I have shared in this review.
Although, in my opinion, this is one of the most important business books published during the last several years, no commentary such as mine can do full justice to it. It simply must be read and read carefully, preferably then re-read carefully. Otherwise, it makes no sense to visit www.switchthebook.com/resources to obtain additional information and assistance.
I offer my congratulations to Chip and Dan Heath on a brilliant achievement. Bravo!
Grabs you from the 2nd page February 23, 2010
D. Cragin
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
This book is great follow-on to Made-to-Stick. If you're like me, you have too much to read and not enough time. This book is definitely worth the time. It had me hooked after I had read only a few pages.
After reading just the first chapters you will already have new ideas on how to identify & overcome barriers to change, both in your personal and professional life. Some of the ideas I couldn't wait to use with my kids. As Heath & Heath offer positive approaches to instituting change, there is no downside to experimenting with their ideas.
For example, if your child is getting good grades in every subject but one, you tend to focus on the one, rather than trying to figure out why he/she excels in the others. I'm looking forward to using the ideas at work at well. The company I work for is ungoing a merger and there is much need to trigger change.
Another strength of the book is that it follows the Made-to-stick approach, i.e., you'll remember most of what you read. Once I started the book, I used examples from it in daily conversations with many many colleagues. You'll find reading it a valuable investment of time that pays many dividends.
Keys for making change happen, from the grassroots on up February 16, 2010
Amy Tiemann (North Carolina, USA)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
I am a big fan of the Heath brothers' first book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and I am happy to report that they have stepped up to the plate and hit another home run. As a writer and someone who works for social change, I found "Switch" to be even more engaging and applicable to my own work.
In "Switch," the Heaths once again take the kernel of a good idea originated by someone else and build an expansive original work around it. In "Made to Stick" that kernel was Malcolm Gladwell's concept of "stickiness," what makes ideas memorable. In "Switch" the core is psychologist and The Happiness Hypothesis author Jonathan Haidt's analogy for the mind: that the emotional side of our mind is like a headstrong Elephant, and the rational side of our mind is the guiding Rider. The Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader, but we all know what it's like for an emotional Elephant to overpower a rational Rider. (For example, this is why many of us would say that a pint of Ben & Jerry's ice cream should be labeled one serving and not four. Once a worked up Elephant digs in, the Rider has a hard time reining her in. Um, speaking hypothetically, of course.)
Add in the third element to this framework, the Path, and you have three elements that can be worked on to address change. "Switch" addresses each of these elements in detail; Directing the Rider, Motivating the Elephant, and Shaping the Path, bringing in research-tested solutions and real-world success stories. What I liked best was the simplicity of many of the examples. To encourage people to "eat healthier," an initiative that could go in so many directions, rather than doing something complicated like following an illogically-designed government "Food Pyramid," a West Virginia initiative instead encouraged people to take one step, to buy 1% or skim milk. That is simple, and creates change at the level of purchasing behavior rather than altering drinking or eating behavior. (If the Ben & Jerry's isn't in the freezer in the first place, the Rider doesn't have to worry about controlling the Elephant.) And by narrowing the change down to one action, that eliminated choice paralysis and ambiguity that arise with more complicated directives.
"Switch" is a book for anyone from the grassroots, to cubicle nation, to CEOs. Most of the examples consciously focus on people who needed to effect significant change with little power and few resources available to them. How could a low-level NGO employee make a difference in alleviating the malnourishment of Vietnamese children, in only six months? By finding "bright spots," identifying children who were thriving, finding out what their mothers were doing differently, and spreading that knowledge to other families. Stories like this are both inspiring and practical for all of us. This is really what I appreciated most about "Switch." I found myself taking notes that were not only about the book itself, but about how I could apply this knowledge to challenges I am working on. The Elephant-Rider-Path metaphor helped me see my own work in a new light. What more can a reader ask for?
C-Suite required reading February 22, 2010
Reg Nordman (Vancouver, BC Canada)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The best selling authors of Made to Stick have another winning book. I am going through several books on change at the moment and this one is so far the best. A couple of early insights set the tone:
* Change requires the exertion of self control
* Self control is an exhaustible resource
* Change is hard because people wear themselves out.
The book then goes on to very simple lay out the critical steps in making change easier, and what one needs to look for. Also by imbedding case studies that encourage you to use their ideas before reading their suggested answer, your learning grows. (The design of the book follows their own findings! ) Lots of great information at [..]/resources. The ideas that we are driven at the same time by a logical driver ( The Rider) and an emotional one (The Elephant) is a very useful metaphor.Its an easy read but as very valuable one. C-suite required reading for sure.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 31
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