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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I bought the first version of the book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, which was written by Chip and Dan Heath and published in 2007.  I just read on the authors’ blog that the new version is available which essentially adds a chapter and some additional 30 pages of content.

Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  Dan Heath is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education and is a co-founder of Thinkwell, an enterprise dedicated to figuring out how to build a textbook without text but with using videos and other technologies.  Chip’s research led him to wonder why urban legends and conspiracy theories had a way of spreading around socially, “sticking” so to speak.  Dan’s research at Thinkwell led him to conclude that the best professors and lecturers had a similar way of conveying the point to their students and classes.  Being brothers with a keen interest in education, the two decided to write and publish this book.

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