Chip and Dan Heath co-authored the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die that I reviewed on this blog in November 2008.  Chip is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Dan is a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE).  Their latest book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, is a theoretical and practical cookbook for individuals who are interested in making lasting changes in their companies, communities, and/or their lives.

The authors point out that for an individual to make a change, changes must be made in their environment, heart, and mind.  Unfortunately for most of us, the heart and the mind generally do not agree.  The Heaths cite more than a few psychological studies that profile the conflicts and benefits between the emotional and rational sides of our thinking.  In order to make change successful, both sides have to be satisfied.  Companies have people who are more emotional and people who are more rational.  Successful teams need to recommend solutions that meet the needs of both of those emotional/rational profiles.

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The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was a week ago on November 9.  I remember it well.  CNN was still in its infancy and yet its coverage of the emotion of the crowd was worth watching long into the night.

Precedents for the fall of the wall were the discussions between the West and Mikhail Gorbachev.  Because of those discussions, President Reagan made one of the most famous speeches of the time at the Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987.   The most famous line of President Reagan’s speech was:  “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

I grew up during the Cold War.  In the 1960’s and 1970’s, all public schools held Air Raid drills.  We were taught where the fallout shelters were.  Our enemies were the Russians and Chinese.  As an undergraduate at Duke University, I was fascinated with American diplomacy and followed the policy of containment favored by George Kennan and the policy of arms superiority favored by Paul Nitze.  In the end, Kennan’s policy worked because of Nitze’s interpretation that the Soviets would only respect strength.

Twenty years after the fall of the wall, there’s now a generation of Americans who were born after the end of the Cold War.  Unfortunately, the world is not at peace.  The same technologies that have “flattened” the world (according to author Tom Friedman) have also provided terror groups with access to like-minded members around the world.  Fighting these groups will require a sophisticated alignment between domestic and international intelligence agencies as well as state and local law enforcement departments.  While this is not my area of expertise, I sense that this effort will require unprecedented cooperation and that some of the cooperation will be encumbered with political roadblocks.  Academic institutions can do our part by providing relevant courses and programs ranging from National Security and Diplomacy to Strategic Intelligence and Homeland Security.  I hope the era of terrorism falls sooner than it took for the wall to fall.

Some time ago, I thought about writing an article about writing.  While I have read articles and research about some of the new words in the English language created through texting shorthand and the impact of the pace of quickened communication on our written language, I note that there is no substitute for a well-written book, document, article, memo, etc.

I make no claims to being a writer, professional or amateur.  I do not publish academic research at the present time.  However, I have enjoyed reading since the beginning (first grade for me), and the enjoyment of reading has given me an appreciation for the quality of writing.

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Michael Rabjohns sent me a note informing me of an article in the July Harvard Business Review written by Anita Elberse.  Elberse is an associate professor of business administration in the marketing department at Harvard Business School.  Her article leads off with a portrayal of Grand Central Publishing, a company that lists 275-300 books each year in its catalog and identifies two (my emphasis) for which it will pull out all the stops in marketing.  Grand Central pursues a blockbuster strategy for which Elberse gives credit to economists Robert Frank and Phillip Cook (an economist at my alma mater, Duke University) for endorsing in their 1995 book, The Winner-Take-All Society. 

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Some time ago, I read The University, an Owner’s Manual (published in 1990), by Henry Rosovsky former Dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.  Rosovsky’s book focuses on his experiences as the undergraduate Dean and a faculty member at Harvard and provides commentary on managing academics at universities.  There is a dialogue in Rosovsky’s book that I think of often.  As Dean, he entertained a group of prospective students who had been admitted to Harvard through its Early Decision process.  One of the students asked for a special meeting and told Rosovsky that he was being pressured to select Harvard by his father (a Harvard alum) but that he had also been accepted into Haverford and Brown and was considering Haverford.  Rosovsky provides an explanation of the differences between liberal arts colleges (Haverford) and university colleges (Harvard).  He provides a definition of teaching versus research (approximately 50/50) and teaching undergrads versus graduates (approximately 50/50) at Harvard and other universities.  He contrasts that with the liberal arts colleges where most of the focus is on classroom teaching.

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