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.

The Heaths have a three-pronged framework for initiating successful change.  They refer to the heart/emotional side as the Elephant, the mind/rational side as the Rider, and the environment as the Path.  Simplistically, their theory is that Riders need direction.  What is sometimes perceived as resistance is in reality a lack of clarity.  Elephants may appear to be lazy when in reality they may be exhausted from trying to keep up with the Riders in the group.  Appealing to their emotions rather than ignoring them will help move them toward the change.  Lastly, individuals who can shape the Path, i.e., change the environment around the situation, will move the Riders and the Elephants toward making the change.

Dan and Chip introduce their framework concept early in the book and provide a significant amount of content with psychological studies that support their theory and practical examples that demonstrate how individuals were able to make changes happen through either influencing the Riders, Elephants, Paths, or all three.  One of my favorite chapters entitled “Shrink the Change” is about making the change seem smaller so that the Elephant can be persuaded to move rather than resist the change.  According to the authors, “when you engineer early successes, what you’re really doing is engineering hope.”

I enjoyed reading Switch.  Once again, the Heaths have taken a topic related to psychology, built a framework, and grounded it with a simplistic explanation of the theory and research and supported it with numerous examples of successes of the framework’s components.  It’s an easy-to-read book and one that might easily be pulled off the shelf and re-read before initiating the next change project in your company or at home.

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.

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.

During my elementary and secondary years, I benefited by having dedicated teachers who guided the development of my writing through the typical structural development prescribed in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  By the time I reached high school, we focused less on the structure of a sentence (no more sentence diagramming) and more on the prose itself.  As a precursor to college, my high school classmates and I were given a copy of The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White and were told that everything we ever wanted to know about good writing was contained in that book (William Strunk was a professor at Cornell University who began his guide for writing in 1918 and E.B. White was an editor at the New Yorker who studied under Strunk.  White revised Strunk’s guide in 1958).

As a freshman at Duke University in 1972, I suffered through the standard required English composition class in which little guidance was given about how to write other than analyzing the literary context of the novel and writing argumentatively.  The course was graded on a C curve and those of us who achieved an A or B were grateful that we did not receive a C and were perplexed given the limited opportunity to receive personal advice about our writing.  When I decided to be a liberal arts major, most of my subsequent courses required writing papers and making educated arguments about the assigned readings.  Education about writing had ceased with English composition.  It was expected that your writing would improve as you continued to progress (and write) in your upper level liberal arts classes.

When I attended graduate business school at Tulane, there was little room for the type and style of writing embraced in history, philosophy, and English classes.  Analysis was best when it was brief and to-the-point.  That same style of brevity was important for writing memos throughout much of my business career.

After a long respite from being a student, I entered a doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania.  One of our professors recommended that we read a book entitled Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott.  Lamott’s lessons are less about the techniques of writing and more about the importance of writing often, in essence practicing and perfecting the art of writing.  The title of her book stems from an incident in her childhood when her brother complained that he did not know where and how to start a paper about birds.  Her father, a writer, instructed her brother to write about the birds, “bird by bird.”

I shared my thoughts about Bird by Bird with a friend of mine who teaches English composition in high school.  He recommended Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.  Roughly two-thirds of the book is autobiographical, but the middle section provides some good tips on writing.

While Bird by Bird and On Writing provide coaching tips and ideas, they are not as instructional as The Elements of Style.  I agree with King’s and Lamott’s advice that the more you write, the easier it will be to write.  That does not necessarily mean that the writing will be better.  Few writers are gifted enough to write a flawless novel or article at one sitting.  I review and edit until I am comfortable with the flow of the document.  In some cases, I ask someone to review it and provide me with edits or comments.

Alex Reid, the author of The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition, recently commented on his blog, Digital Digs, that “The more we write and the greater variety of genres in which we write, the better prepared we will be to write in a variety of genres in the future.”  Reid’s post is a response to an article by Josh Keller in The Chronicle of Higher Education in which Keller reports about longitudinal studies at Stanford and Michigan State that explore whether the internet makes students better writers.  Reid bills himself as an academic writer, and his conclusion is similar to the tips from Lamott and King who are professional writers.  Reid not only comments about the importance of writing frequently, but also about the importance of writing frequently in multiple genres.

Whether writing at work, at school, or on the internet, I agree that the frequency of writing should improve the quality of your written output.  Constructive criticism from bosses, professors, or friends is helpful as well.  If you feel uninspired during your next effort at writing, read Bird by Bird or On Writing.  Good luck and good writing!

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. 

Elberse states that this strategy conflicts with the long tail theory espoused by Chris Anderson.  She reviewed sales data from Rhapsody (used by Anderson) and Quickflix (an Australian DVD rental company).  She states that the data shows that seldom rented DVD’s shift into the tail and their usage doubles over a five year period of time.  However, the number of DVD’s with no usage quadruples over the same period of time.  She states that the tail is becoming longer and flatter, not bulkier.  During the same period of time, the number of titles in the top 10% dropped by 50% which demonstrates that the “winner-take-all” strategy is winning.  Elberse’s data for music tracks confirms a similar trend where the tail lengthens, but grows flatter and fewer tracks are in the top 10%.

Elberse concludes her article with recommendations to producers and retailers.  The only finding where she directly supports the long tail is in her recommendation to retailers stating that if the goal is to cater to the heaviest volume customers, include a diverse assortment of titles since her research indicates that the buyers of the obscure titles tend to be the heaviest users of the online services.

Anderson doesn’t dispute Elberse’s research; in fact, he praises it.  But he claims that Elberse’s portrayal of the “head” of the tail at 32% and the tail at 68% confirms his theory about the size of the tail.  Elberse responds to Anderson’s comments by stating that he is inconsistent about the definition of size of the tail and head and that consistency in definition would verify her findings that the tail is bigger but flatter and that analysis has repercussions for producers and retailers in the strategy that they should pursue.

All in all, this is a great debate and I thank a reader for pointing this out to me.  I’m sure the dialogue will continue.  I think Anderson and Elberse are accurate in their claims and I like Elberse’s caution to certain businesses, particularly producers.

When I first read Rosovsky’s book, I thought about my experience as a student, which was similar to the description under the university college. I thought about the teachers that I considered great teachers during my years as an undergraduate at Duke University.  Seymour Mauskopf (history), James Charlesworth (religion) (currently the George L. Collord Professor of New Testament Language and Literature and Director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at Princeton Theological Seminary), James Bonk (chemistry), Richard Hodel (mathematics), and Calvin Davis (history) were at the top of my list for instructors who provided me with inspiration in my learning.  I created a similar list for my graduate school experience at Tulane University.  Stephen Zeff (accounting) (now the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at Rice University), Larry Arnold (operations research), Ed Strong (marketing), Jim Murphy (finance), Anthony Hope (accounting), Richard Hays (organizational behavior), Bill Mindak (marketing), James Linn (accounting), Kenneth Boudreaux (finance), Victor Cook (marketing), and David Harvey (accounting) came to mind.  

Thirty years later, the number of memorable instructors for my graduate school is double the number of memorable instructors for my undergraduate years which were also double in length (four versus two).  I don’t know if others who attended university colleges had a similar experience or not.  I enjoyed my years at both institutions.  I waived out of a number of required general education courses at Duke through Advanced Placement and Achievement tests, so I don’t attribute my lower number of memorable teachers to a year or two of required courses similar to my high school curriculum.  I happen to believe that the diversity of the undergraduate curriculum, the restricted access of some upper level courses to program majors only, the fact that some courses were taught by graduate students versus full professors, AND the more focused nature of graduate school provided me with more qualified instructors and led to a better teaching/learning experience as a graduate student.  I would be interested in others’ perspectives on this topic, particularly if you attended a liberal arts college before attending graduate school.