Dan Heath

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About Dan Heath
Dan Heath is the co-author, along with his brother Chip, of four New York Times bestsellers: Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, and The Power of Moments. The Heaths' books have sold over 3 million copies worldwide and been translated into 33 languages.
Heath's fifth book, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen, will be released on March 3, 2020. Heath is a Senior Fellow at Duke University's CASE center, which supports entrepreneurs who are fighting for social good. A graduate of the University of Texas and Harvard Business School, he lives now in Durham, NC.
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Titles By Dan Heath
The primary obstacle is a conflict that's built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems - the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort - but if it is overcome, change can come quickly.
In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people - employees and managers, parents and nurses - have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results:
• The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients
• The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping
• The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots by removing a standard tool of customer service
In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.
While human lives are endlessly variable, our most memorable positive moments are dominated by four elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection. If we embrace these elements, we can conjure more moments that matter. What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember twenty years later? What if a manager knew how to create an experience that would delight customers? What if you had a better sense of how to create memories that matter for your children?
This book delves into some fascinating mysteries of experience: Why we tend to remember the best or worst moment of an experience, as well as the last moment, and forget the rest. Why “we feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they’re not.” And why our most cherished memories are clustered into a brief period during our youth.
Readers discover how brief experiences can change lives, such as the experiment in which two strangers meet in a room, and forty-five minutes later, they leave as best friends. (What happens in that time?) Or the tale of the world’s youngest female billionaire, who credits her resilience to something her father asked the family at the dinner table. (What was that simple question?)
Many of the defining moments in our lives are the result of accident or luck—but why would we leave our most meaningful, memorable moments to chance when we can create them? The Power of Moments shows us how to be the author of richer experiences.
“Anyone interested in influencing others—to buy, to vote, to learn, to diet, to give to charity or to start a revolution—can learn from this book.”—The Washington Post
Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus news stories circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas—entrepreneurs, teachers, politicians, and journalists—struggle to make them “stick.”
In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds—from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony—draw their power from the same six traits.
Made to Stick will transform the way you communicate. It’s a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures): the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the Mother Teresa Effect; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice.
Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas—and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.
Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle one of the most critical topics in our work and personal lives: how to make better decisions.
Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We’re overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn’t. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn’t fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better?
In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively readable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star’s ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO’s disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions.
Along the way, we learn the answers to critical questions like these: How can we stop the cycle of agonizing over our decisions? How can we make group decisions without destructive politics? And how can we ensure that we don’t overlook precious opportunities to change our course?
Decisive is the Heath brothers’ most powerful—and important—book yet, offering fresh strategies and practical tools enabling us to make better choices. Because the right decision, at the right moment, can make all the difference.
New York Times bestselling author Dan Heath explores how to prevent problems before they happen, drawing on insights from hundreds of interviews with unconventional problem solvers.
So often in life, we get stuck in a cycle of response. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems. Cops chase robbers, doctors treat patients with chronic illnesses, and call-center reps address customer complaints. But many crimes, chronic illnesses, and customer complaints are preventable. So why do our efforts skew so heavily toward reaction rather than prevention?
Upstream probes the psychological forces that push us downstream—including “problem blindness,” which can leave us oblivious to serious problems in our midst. And Heath introduces us to the thinkers who have overcome these obstacles and scored massive victories by switching to an upstream mindset. One online travel website prevented twenty million customer service calls every year by making some simple tweaks to its booking system. A major urban school district cut its dropout rate in half after it figured out that it could predict which students would drop out—as early as the ninth grade. A European nation almost eliminated teenage alcohol and drug abuse by deliberately changing the nation’s culture. And one EMS system accelerated the emergency-response time of its ambulances by using data to predict where 911 calls would emerge—and forward-deploying its ambulances to stand by in those areas.
Upstream delivers practical solutions for preventing problems rather than reacting to them. How many problems in our lives and in society are we tolerating simply because we’ve forgotten that we can fix them?
En la vida, a menudo nos quedamos atascados en un ciclo de respuesta. Apagamos los fuegos. Tratamos las emergencias. Nos quedamos atrapados en la corriente, intentando solventar un problema tras otro, pero nunca intentamos ir a contracorriente para arreglar los sistemas que causan esos problemas. El autor de bestsellers del New York Times, Dan Heath explica cómo anticipar los problemas antes de que ocurran, y lo hace basándose en los conocimientos adquiridos en cientos de entrevistas a personas que resuelven los problemas de una forma poco convencional.
A CONTRACORRIENTE ofrece soluciones prácticas para prevenir los problemas en lugar de reaccionar a ellos. ¿Cuántos problemas en nuestras vidas y en nuestra sociedad estamos tolerando por el mero hecho de olvidar que podemos anticiparnos y evitar que se originen?
¿Por qué es tan difícil lograr cambios duraderos en nuestros trabajos, nuestras comunidades y nuestras propias vidas? El obstáculo principal es un conflicto intrínsico en el cerebro, nos dicen Chip y Dan Heath, dos reconocidos especialistas en comportamiento organizacional. Los psicólogos han descubierto que la mente está gobernada por dos sistemas diferentes la mente racional y la mente emocional que compiten por el control. La mente racional quiere un cuerpo perfecto; la mente emocional quiere comerse esa galleta. La mente racional quiere cambiar el trabajo; la mente emocional ama la comodidad y la rutina. Esta tensión puede causar que muchos esfuerzos por cambiar fracasen, pero si se superan, el cambio puede llegar rápidamente. En Switch, los hermanos Heath muestran cómo personas normales y corrientes han unido estas dos mentes, logrando espectaculares resultados: · La directora quien ayudó a Target, a pesar de ser una compañía minorista regional que facturaba tres billones de dólares, a convertirise en un gigante de más de 63 billones dólares. · La directora de servicios clínicos que, junto con su equipo de enfermeras, logró reducir drásticamente los errores en la administración de medicamentos en su hospital. · El director de atención al cliente que transformó a su compañía de una que ignoraba totalmente el servicio al cliente a ser una compañía definida por él. En este convincente relato, los Heath reúnen décadas de investigación en los campos de psicología, sociología y negocios entre muchos otros, para explicar por qué cambiar es tan difícil y dar a conocer nuevas maneras de lograr cambios duraderos. Switch muestra que los cambios exitosos siguen un modelo, un modelo que puedes utilizar para lograr los cambios que tú quieras, tanto si tu interés se centra en cambiar el mundo como en cambiar tu cintura.
From Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, comes The Myth of the Garage ... and other minor surprises, a collection of the authors' best columns for Fast Company magazine. There are 16 pieces in all, plus a previously unpublished piece entitled 'The Future Fails Again'.
In Myth, the Heath brothers tackle some of the most (and least) important issues in the modern business world:
- Why you should never buy another mutual fund ('The Horror of Mutual Funds')
- Why your gut may be more ethical than your brain ('In Defense of Feelings')
- How to communicate with numbers in a way that changes decisions ('The Gripping Statistic')
- Why the 'Next Big Thing' often isn't ('The Future Fails Again')
- Why you may someday pay $300 for a pair of socks ('The Inevitability of $300 Socks')
- And 12 others . . .
Punchy, entertaining, and full of unexpected insights, the collection is the perfect companion for a short flight (or a long meeting).
Qu'est-ce qui rend les cours de ce professeur si passionnants au point que son amphi est toujours plein ( et celui de son collègue toujours vide ... ) ? Comment ce manager s’y prend-il pour être aussi persuasif ? Qu’est-ce qui fait qu’un message de santé publique nous frappe durablement ? Pourquoi certaines idées (fausses) ont la vie si dure ? Et certaines idées (brillantes) le destin d’étoiles filantes ? Bref, qu’est-ce qui fait qu’une idée « colle » ? Ou meurt... ?
Les deux frères Chip et Dan Heath, chacun à partir de sa propre expérience, l’un d’éditeur, l’autre d’enseignant, ont réfléchi à ce qui fait qu’une idée adhère. Les proverbes, les légendes urbaines, les idées reçues leur ont fourni un matériau particulièrement riche de réflexions et d’exemples. Ils en ont acquis la conviction que certaines idées possédaient des caractéristiques qui les rendaient « collantes », et qu’en étudiant leur structure on pouvait concevoir des idées qui marquent les esprits et qui durent.
Six principes doivent guider ceux qui cherchent à faire passer leurs messages, de la simplicité à l’impact émotionnel, en passant par l’imprévisibilité. Ces six principes, déclinés tout au long du livre, doivent contrecarrer ce que les auteurs appellent la « malédiction du savoir ». Autrement dit, le fait que nous tenions pour évidents les messages que nous voulons faire passer ! C’est pourquoi ces six principes devraient constituer la feuille de route de tous ceux qui cherchent à créer ou transmettre, qu’ils soient managers, hommes politiques, éditorialistes, enseignants, créateurs d’entreprises, etc.