Like Made to Stick, The Heath brothers’ latest feels very much like a Malcolm Gladwell book—full of well-told anecdotes that demonstrate each chapter’s message. They also again include numerous “clinics” which are real or fictional situations posed to the reader as problems needing to be solved through the book’s offered techniques.
Switch is written with sticky stories, but it’s focus is change—specifically change in organizations and groups. Thousands of books have written about how to affect change in business and at times this one feels like it’s bobbing in that sea. But instead of a 12 part system with biz school case studies, Chip and Dan view change as a process broken down into 3 parts:
- Direct the Rider
- Motivate the Elephant
- Shape the Path
It sounds a little hokey, but it never feels like it. The representative stories all serve to exemplify solutions under each of the 3 parts: find the bright spots [in a problem], script the critical moves [for the players], point to the destination, shrink the change, grow your people, build habits, rally the herd, etc.
If for no other reason, the stories make this an enjoyable read: the college student who rallied a whole island nation to save an endangered parrot (grow your people), an NGO worker who dramatically reduced malnutrition in Vietnamese children by first studying not the rule, but the exceptions to the rule (bright spots) and how a simple change of phrase on bathroom signs reduced a hotel’s laundry bill (rally the herd.)
