Book Review: Switch by Chip & Dan Heath

I’m just finishing “Switch: How to change things when change is hard” by Chip and Dan Heath.  As I’m sure everyone who knows me knows, Chip & Dan Heath wrote one of my all time favorite “business” books, “Made to Stick” which talks about how to express ideas so they’re memorable and make an impact.  When I found out they had a new book coming out, I immediately placed a pre-order with Amazon.  Shortly before the release, when I got an email from one of their assistants asking me if I’d like a copy sent to me, I said “Of course!”  I was flattered that they knew I was a fan of their work and reached out, and I was excited to be able to read the new book.

I’ve ended up with two copies of Switch now (my pre-order and the promotional copy) and I am thrilled to have two, since it’s a book my husband is now starting as well, and this will eliminate any book battles at bed time, akin to our competition to read the last Harry Potter, when the first one to bed got to read the book and the other had to wait until the next night for a crack at it.

I love books that seem to get to the fundamental nature of problems and conflict, boiling things down into their essence and parts, so you have a new lens or template through which to view the world.  Made to Stick did this very well, condensing disparate parts and pieces of what makes stories, ideas, and messages of any sort memorable into a template of sort that helps me every day when I look at how to present ideas to others in a compelling way.

Switch takes on the huge problem of why change seems so almost physically painful, whether that change is personal or professional.  When we look at a big problem, like education or healthcare, it can seem impossible to tackle.  The problem seems too big.  There seems to be no good place to dig in and start making a change, and there seems to be too many external restraints that need to be overcome to make the problem seem remotely doable.  It may be written off as a “cultural problem” or a “system”problem or even a “few bad apples” problem, but in the end, a few small changes can often lead to cascading change, much like Malcolm Gladwell talked about in The Tipping Point.

Switch starts out with an analogy that change can be like a rider on an elephant on a path.  The rider is analytical by nature, the elephant is big and emotional, and the path is the things that need to be done to move forward to get to the destination that we all aspire to by creating change.  While I was initially not in love with this analogy, but it works in the book as a tool to frame out the different parts of creating successful change or innovation in any group or situation.

For change to be successful, all three of these components need to work together- the facts and numbers analytical portion must be happy; the moody and resistant portion of the group must be reasonably happy and convinced that they’ll give change a try, and the pathway needs to be clear enough and short enough to motivate the riders and elephants to choose it as an option or alternative to the status quo.

Let’s take a personal situation and apply this formula. (It’s easier than solving healthcare in a blog post.)

I just walk/ran my second half marathon.  For someone who just really started a concerted fitness program seven months ago, this would have seemed like a silly and crazy thing to even consider a year ago.  My elephant knew I needed to get in shape and get healthier, but there always seemed to be a reasonable excuse to avoid the gym- the pathway to health and fitness seemed foggy and the goal was noble but not specific and defined.  My “rider” knew what I needed to do, but we needed to construct a path to get there.

One of the steps was finding a personal trainer.  This way, I get to work out privately, and I’m coached so I pushed myself more than I would on my own- I have someone to impress.  I have an appointment to keep, and I’m not discouraged by the extra-fit others that are already at my destination, but just show me how much farther I have to go, causing a distraction from the smaller steps I need to take every day.

Another huge step was to find big external goals to work for, like these half-marathon events.  The distance events are like the end of a semester exam, as much as measurements of strength or pounds or inches lost are.  They are a test of strength, endurance and preparation, and show me what I can accomplish, as well as providing a comparison point for past performance.

By creating a pathway with many little goals along the way and big tests, the goal of better health becomes more achievable and more doable.  Every day behavior like skipping workouts or eating too much crap has its own built in penalties- for any endurance event, you pay the price for everything you did right or wrong along the training path.  This then makes the daily changes a bit easier to do as well, knowing the big wall is coming up fast as the race approaches.

I need the numbers- the analysis of the progress to satisfy my rider.  I need to feel good about myself and the changes that are occurring to satisfy the elephant, who might rather be eating girl scout cookies and watching Project Runway.  And all of this is easier when the path is much more specific, clear, and the change looks doable in its chunked-out parts.  It makes even thinking about doing another half-marathon possible, because I know the change is possible and the next goal is attainable, because I’ve done it before.

The brilliance of Switch is that this formula is tied into Maslow’s heirarchy of needs and one that applies to almost any situation.  For example, most of the strategies suggested to help kids with ADHD succeed in school involve not trying to fundamentally change the child, but change the environment to help the child do what’s needed.  Checklists of chores takes the amorphous “Do your chores” and breaks it down into specific, doable tasks, itemized and specific.  Showing a child how to be a bit more organized, and giving them tools that help ensure that they can keep the system up, with frequent checks, develops new, more constructive habits.  Getting rid of the daily speedbumps that turn a child off course- whether that’s always having things ready the night before to avoid morning panics, or smoothing the homework path by putting all their tools in one box and having a set place and time for work, or even putting hooks by the door so everything is available and convenient are small changes that can lead to big results.  Change can occur even in kids known to struggle in school, but they need those small successes to satisfy the elephant who needs to feel good, and they need “stuff to do” to satisfy the rider, but the pathway and environment are just as critical to success.

IDEO, the legendary design firm, works so well because their template works to make change of systems or design of new products integrate almost seamlessly into the way things are done.  they start out with understanding the problems or issues at hand- really getting to know what’s going on and how the situation isn’t working.  They then observe people using current products, or working with a customer, to understand how things are done now, and to start to get ideas about where a system or process might eb breaking down. Then they start the brainstorming and visualizing possible solutions ot the problem.  They rapidly put together prototypes, and then evaluate and refine what worked or didn’t work with the inital attempts, to tweek and further diagnose what will work in the end.  Then, they take their final product and implement it- what Seth Godin calls “shipping”- because all the greatest ideas in the world are worth nothing if they aren’t actually put into use.  Success means shipping- you’ve got to get the ideas out the door and into the real world- where the rubber meets the road.

While I’m still thinking a lot about Switch, it’s a book that helps me tie together all the separate ideas discussed above:

- how personal change and cultural change aren’t really so different;

-how many people problems can be solved by tweeking external environments and expectations;

-how good design and understanding problems are both key to making change successful,

and how in the end, it’s all measured by the implementation, and satusfying both the numbers people and the emotional folks as well- it’s a good change if people can see the difference and that how they feel about the change may be as critical to the outcome as any other part.   Never short-change the power of dedication, passion and enthusiasm- they will carry you pretty far down even a murky path, provided the obstacles aren’t too big at first.

I would definitely recommend Switch, another excellent book by Chip & Dan Heath- and don’t worry if you don’t love the metaphor of the rider and the elephant.  Like all good mysteries, it makes more sense in the end than in the beginning.

Tags: books, change, chip & dan heath, culture, economics, education, elephant, path, rider, switch

First Impressions of Linchpin by Seth Godin

I was one of the lucky early few that signed up by making a donation to the Acumen Fund, to get an advanced copy of Linchpin by  Seth Godin.

Seth has asked people to read it, think about it and give a thoughtful review.  I couldn’t wait to tell you about it until I finished the book- I’ve found myself quoting concepts in the first few chapters to friends  already, so I thought it was time to share.

Seth starts out the book by talking about how the old American dream and template we’ve all been fed is history.  There are tons of people who still believe all you have to do is follow the rules and you’ll get a job where you then follow the rules and get rewarded.  But the bottom line that many folks are finding out is that following the rules has ended up being a sucker’s deal, a bait and switch bargain.  The safety and security of jobs and pensions and retirement at a reasonable age, in reasonable health, where you enjoy a permanent vacation until you die is history, and we just have to accept that.  It sounds harsh, but I think we all know that’s true.

As someone with young kids, I know I have to prepare them for a very different world than the one I grew up in, and  that is both scary and challenging.  They’re going to need flexibility, maintain those qualities of being curious, being creative and innovative problem solvers for the rest of their lives.  With schools still programmed, in many sectors, to produce widgets for giant “work”  machines, how can I counteract this effectively?  Certainly, my kids are growing up exposed to innovative thinkers making their own game every day, but I know I still have to find more opportunities for them to flex these muscles on their own now, so they are willing to do so as they get older as well.

Seth encourages all of us to be creative, to be artists, to become remarkable and indispensable.  I wanted to find an exception to this rule, but I found I can’t.  At first, I thought- well, you know the professions- Doctors, Lawyers- we need those folks to make everything else work- how much real creativity do you have as a physician?  Well, and then I took a closer look at what my husband does every day.  Sure, he’s an OB-GYN, but he’s involved with research, working on projects including looking at fetal growth curves, how they can eventually eliminate prematurity, and other projects that at the heart of them require this creative problem solver mentality.  He has to take everything he knows, figure out the problems that are still there, that cause problems big and small every day, and design research protocols to try to make them better, so each patient coming through his clinic gets the best care possible.  It means getting the doctors and nurses and patients in the practice to consider different schedules, to try new clinics like “birth control before breakfast” and step out of their own comfort zones and potential myopia.  He has to ask people to try to do things differently and make a difference- not just by bringing new people into the world (which is pretty amazing in and of itself) but to be able to do so in a constantly changing environment, with financial pressures, with each patient having their own unique set of problems, and being able to improvise on the fly.  The best doctors do this well, and do become linchpins, not only to their patients, but to their colleagues and institutions where they practice.

I wanted to find some exception to Seth’s rule, being a believer that education and formal college educations are not worthless, but have value beyond memorizing facts. I want to believe we do teach people things in school that matter and its not all about grinding creativity out of people.   But I think becoming a linchpin is not about whether you’ve had any formal training or education in anything- it’s ultimately about taking your cumulative knowledge and experience from every thing you have ever done, and be willing to use all of it, at any time, as tools to solve the next problem.

For example, I started reading Seth Godin and a bunch of books in the “business/management” section of the bookstore, not long after my husband introduced me to Marcus Buckingham and the Strength-based approach to, well, everything.  I rapidly found that all the books in the education and parenting section of the book store, where I frequently spent time, were missing the boat.  The really interesting stuff about managing people, developing them to reach their full potential, and the like were all sitting in the business section.  I realized that running a family is exactly like running a small business, and everything I knew had infinite applications outside of the box one might put them in.  “Pediatric logisitics”- managing kids/people, schedules, activities, performance (grades), camp, and keeping an eye on the larger issues at the same time are all the same skill sets I use in my business, in running Podcamps, in every other aspect of my life as well.

The main point here is this- you have to be a person who strives to make a difference in everything you do.  You have to care.  You need to look out for yourself, but you also can’t afford not to look out for others as well.  You need to be able to use all of your experience, no matter where it’s from, and weave it into a new solution to try and make a change for the better.  There are no more silos.  There are no more boxes.    It’s all about bringing all your resources to bear to try to solve problems big and small, and not being afraid of having a “crazy” idea.  Those crazy ideas in the hands fo the right people, shared with other people who care, mean all sorts of resources can be marshaled and then moving the needle becomes easier than ever.

Thanks, Seth, for the jolt of espresso to my creativity, and for reminding me how important it is to care .  Thanks for the reminder that we have  to be willing to try the “impossible” (which turns out only to be a bit difficult) and can be accomplished if we just try to see the possibilities rather than shut down because it seems risky or scary.

I look forward to the chapters to come.

Tags: creativity, education, linchpin, seth godin, taking risk

Too Much Information

When is sharing your life online with others crossing over into  TMI  (Too Much Information) territory?

Like it or not, we make judgments about people based on the integral of all we know about them.  The baseball player who bets on sports in Vegas is assumed to have a vested interest in tailoring his own play to affect his financial bets, whether or not anyone can prove that that’s true.  We assume Tiger Woods credibility as a spokesperson for various corporations is called into question because of what he has done, or hasn’t done in his personal life.  Bill Clinton apparently had a long reputation of “being a dog that was hard to keep on the porch”, but somehow, he still manages to be a brilliant guy and a pretty great president, overall.

We learn about friends and family these days, not just by our own experience, but by the deluge of information available about them on the web.  Before I meet with a client or speak to a group, I do a Google search to find out a bit about them in advance.  It helps me feel prepared, have a sense of who I think they are, and a chance on meeting in person, to match that preconceived notion, based on web data, with what I see in person.

This is why I try to teach my kids and constantly remind myself that everything I say or do online is the most public of records.  The DM’s I get on twitter, the text messages sent to my phone, my email- all of that- has an illusion of privacy, but it is still discoverable by others, in some way, at some point in the future, legally or illegally.

If you note the recent media discussions about controlled leaks from Apple about the upcoming tablet computer, and rumors of similar controlled leaks in government, you’ll note that these conversations all occur over the phone or preferably in person, aren’t taped or recorded, and provide both parties with plausible deniability because there’s no documented paper trail.

The clear lesson here is that if you want to have a private conversation, clearly don’t leave a voicemail message and don’t put any of it in writing- don’t leave a web or digital or actual paper trail.

This brings me to the point of this post, which is a new service called Blippy, where you can share your recent purchases (and the amount spent) on various sites, including Amazon.com, Netflix, Threadless and iTunes.  You can link a credit card as well, so every time you make a purchase at the convenience store, that, too, is posted to this social network.

Here’s a list of the accounts you can link to Blippy:

iTunes	Amazon	Zappos	Audible
GroupOn	Threadless	StubHub	GoDaddy
Netflix	Blockbuster	SeamlessWeb	Wine Library
Credit card (Visa, MasterCard, AMEX), debit card, or bank account

I am all for living life out loud.  I know people can find almost an infinite set of information out about me- but this crosses the line into kind of stalker-ish territory.  It’s one thing to get pointed to cool apps , books, and music that your friends are buying.  In fact, when looking around Blippy, I found a bunch of great things my friends had purchased, especially books and iphone apps,  that makes it almost certain I will purchase the same, which I am sure is Blippy’s whole marketing attempt.  After all, if you can find out, passively, what your friends are up to and what they’re getting, what better way to keep up with the digital Joneses?  Or even better, find out what your friends are into when it comes to birthday times, or for marketers doing blogger outreach?

However, it’s another thing to be updated every time they buy milk or cigarettes at the convenience store.

And let’s talk about the judgments people make about our private spending habits.

Say I get an account and share with my friends and co-workers.  How long before my boss finds out I rent weird films from Blockbuster?  Or am ordering books on how to develop a side career on Amazon?  How long before a health insurance company figures out you never did quit smoking like you swore you did on those forms?  What if they never see me paying for a gym membership?  What happens if you are buying books on how to make a career transition or how to pad your resume?  What if you ordered books about medical issues?  Or your bill from Wine Library TV seems to indicate you have a serious drinking problem?

Yeah, I don’t much care if all my friends learn I have an old school Tretorn addiction and Zappos is my favorite supplier, but does my husband need to know every single penny I spent there?  What if he gets notifications of things meant as gifts for him?

While it’s great all this information can be aggregated in one spot and I can see it being useful even for companies to track what employees are spending on Company credit cards, this is the first social network in a long time asking us to share information that has long been isolated in your credit card bills, email accounts and the sanctity of your ipod and cell phones.  (I’ve long thought you can learn a ton about someone by seeing the contents of their ipod alone- often leading me to be a bit cautious about giving mine to friends and seeing the plethora of various kid tunes (What? an addiction to Trout Fishing in America?  Really?), my secret like of old school hip-hop, and other music that leads to raised eyebrows in some social circles).

After only a few minutes of poking around, I’m getting more information than I planned about my friends.    Not only did I find out about a great analytics app, but the same person also downloaded the  Playboy app as well.  Clearly  information I probably didn’t need, even if it’s clearly nothing to be prudish about.  Likewise, a recent troll through the people my friends are following led me to Leo Leporte’s account, and the multiple $1,500 purchases he made in a short period of time at the Renaissance in Vegas.   People commented on the site about whether he was paying for his team’s hotel rooms or having a bad night at gaming tables,  but is this information everyone should have? Should Leo have to justify what he was buying to everyone on the internet, or his sponsors?   Likewise, Ev Williams bought a Pregnancy Tracker app for his iPhone.  Does that mean I should offer my husband’s services as an OB-GYN?  Should I start knitting a baby present?  I don’t think so, and that’s why I think Blippy, while a marketer’s dream, is a privacy nightmare.

Feel free to make your own conclusions, but for now, for better or for worse, I think I’ll be keeping my purchases to myself.

Tags: Blippy, information, Leo Laporte, privacy, TMI

Cyclical Economics And Issues of Scale

Businesses have cycles of good times and bad times.  there also seems to be a larger trend of mergers and acquisitions, followed by splintering, spinoffs, and the rise of the small but feisty competition.

Back when I was an undergrad in the mid-eighties, the Wharton kids were all looking to join big Wall Street firms  and do mergers and acquisition work.  By the time we graduated, the heyday for this was coming to a close, and instead the recent grads had to readjust their expectations because the days of wining and dining newly minted graduates from one of the country’s most prestigious business schools had begun to dry up.

Mergers and acquisitions has always been about buying up smaller companies and acquiring talent you don’t have one your own.  It can be an extremely strategic and cost effective move.  But the bigger firms and businesses become, the harder they become to manage.  There are more and more moving parts.  Instead of trying to satisfy a niche audience very well, there becomes a push to satisfy the most number of people possible.  So instead of rabid fans of the special, businesses begin to play to the ubiquitous middle of the road.  And this works, sometimes for years.  But eventually, they become vulnerable to the small, nimble and risky competitor, which has less to lose by taking chances.

Seth Godin wrote about this in a recent blog post about the publishing industry.  What would happen if your profits dwindled?  What would you do differently?  Because that is the exact mindset of your competition.  They don’t need to clear millions of dollars of profit every year- they are perfectly happy just taking a small chunk of your business, until the point when you can no longer continue as is and they have sunk you, one small bite at a time.

Looking at retail, the big department stores have consolidated, in part, because there’s been a development of many brands with their own stores, own infrastructure, that no longer depend on the buyers for a big store for placement and sales.  In fact, with the internet, they can set up their own store for very little, and avoid placement in your big store at all.

Our local malls are experiencing a large amount of turnover, in part due to the failure of the anchor stores and their diversity, but also because of the rise of more and more small brands competing in the same niche you could find in the Department store.  Should I buy a Coach bag from Macy’s or the Coach Store, three doors down?  At this point, price only matters.  And Macy’s is no longer the only place to go to obtain this same merchandise.  Their shelf space has become more and more irrelevant in distribution.

My husband even remarked that health care is entering the same cycle we’ve seen in family farms.  Small individual businesses (independent doctors and their practices) are gradually consolidating and often coming under the wing of one larger entity (first large practice groups, or practices are bought outright by a hospital) for the sake of scale, the benefits of negotiating price and taking advantage of larger discounts, lowering administrative costs and the like, until very few individual small businesses will exist outside these larger entities, for good or for ill.

The problem with this consolidation/splintering cycle is that the large businesses become vulnerable to poaching by the specialty/niche providers, because the niche providers have less to lose.  the large firms can take advantage of economies of scale, but it also becomes easier for them to lose their way, lose their compass, manage all the different parts and cease to worry about pleasing the customer but instead become more interested in whatever they have to do to maintain themselves.  They start to think like sheep and less like scrappy entrepreneurs that are willing to take risks and try new things.

It’s the gradual onset of “This is the way we’ve always done it” that becomes the vulnerable Achilles Heel- the inability or unwillingness to take a look at what you are already doing, and imagine that it could be done differently, or better.

None of this is to say that big is bad or entrepreneurs get it right.  I’m trying to say that if big has its very clear advantages, is there opportunity for them to develop sections, departments, or even a think tank that has the task of looking at the business as a competitor might, but from inside the gates?  In there room to constantly challenge the status quo?  Or is there just a balance between big and small that can be managed the way W.L. Gore does, by not letting any one building or division grow beyond a certain size, because it eliminates the intimacy and flow of ideas that they value so highly?

As I see big industries disrupted by the way the internet is changing our decision making process, I wonder if what the big boys need is as simple as remembering what it was like for them before they were big.  And I wonder if the small guy, looking to become a part of something larger have to be equally concerned how to maintain their edge once they are in a safer harbor.

Sometimes security and safety is a panacea- an alleged cure-all that instead of solving all of our problems, actually creates some of its own in the process.  It can make us forget what it was like to be hungry and struggle, and we need just enough of that struggle to remain competitive and innovative.  Without it, we get lazy and complacent.  And striking a balance between these two extremes is not easy at all.

Tags: acquisitions, business scale, business size, consolidation, cycles, cyclical economics, issues of scale, mergers, Scale

Why Should You Share?

I had someone ask me a question about sharing and linking at my recent presentation about Blogging for Business at AGS University.  They said someone had told them they shouldn’t link out to others because it was taking traffic away from your website and giving it to others.  I thought this was a strange perspective and strategy to take, and here’s why.  If you never link to anyone else, why should they link to you?  You will then be limited to only the traffic you can generate yourself, and very little referral or word of mouth traffic from others, which is how most people generate new business.  It seems to be a short-sighted strategy, like overbuying food you’ll never be able to consume- it’s hoarding your own traffic at the expense of others, but it’s also not doing you very much good, either.

There’s a chapter looking at Altruism in the new Super Freakanomics book. (There seems to be some controversy around, especially regarding the chapter on global warming, but the most relevant chapter to me was about altruism.)  In this chapter, the authors discuss how part of altruism and doing good things for others that may not always serve you the best, is the side effects of being seen as a good and trustworthy person.  The warm feeling you get from helping other people is one of the benefits of altruism, and it’s why most people who volunteer will say things like “I get as much out of it as I put in.”

On the web, trust, authority, search engine optimization and the like are all geared towards measuring whether or not your business/blog/website is relevant to people searching for information.  The more links, tags, keywords and the rest on your site, the more the search engines can parse whether your site is a good match for people searching for “dog food” “specialty gifts” or even “consultants.”  The more other people consider you an authority, the more authoritative by default you become.  It’s a positive (or negative) feedback loop, that you grow by being generous with others.

This is a concept at the heart of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s Trust Agents- how you can build your “juice” online by being someone worthy of trust, by becoming an authority, by helping other people.  This is the old “bread on the water” strategy, that often you help other people without charging, with a tacit if unspoken understanding that if you are asked for a favor in return, it’s more likely than not someone will help you out in return.  It’s “paying it forward”.  It’s the old cliche of “you get more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

And if you want to get down to the neuro- and behavioral science, people remember positive experiences- positive reinforcement is the greatest tool to help alter behavior, where negative reinforcement or bad experiences tend to cut off a behavior, but doesn’t necessarily replace it with a new behavior.  So for example, if I want my kids to clean up after themselves, small amounts of praise is more likely to get them to comply next time than yelling at them ever will.  Likewise, if I want people to come back to my website, I better offer them useful information, a product they can use or take advantage of, or share  resources- something to make it worth their time and attention.

Personally, I use Google reader and Delicious, a social bookmarking site, to save and share blog posts, websites, and other online information sources for myself, but also offer it up for others who are interested.  I tell people in seminars that if you really want to know what I am up to, a check of my Delicious site will give you an idea of what I’m finding new and notable and what I’m researching.  I check on the sites of friends for the same reason, because usually I find something there that I haven’t come across on my own.  Rather than keep these bookmarks private on my computer, these bookmarks are web based, meaning I can access them from anywhere and use this information more efficiently than if it’s locked up at home on my machine.

Likewise with Google Reader- there are gazillions of blog posts everywhere online.  Using my friends as a filter, I get pointed to some of the best stuff around, on topics I may be interested in, that I might not have found on my own.  Over time, these tools build my personal library of information, making it more useful for me, but also to everyone I know.

Keeping this information a “secret” helps no one.  When we’re taking about information out there on the web, we can’t possibly keep up with it all, yet it’s all public, so how “secret” can it be, anyway?  By taking a sharing mentality, I help myself, but I help others at the same time.  I become a resource for information, which helps my reputation and consulting business.  This “looking to help others” mindset therefore also pays off for me personally, creating another positive loop.  It also has the side benefit of just being good karma, which I can live with as well.

So in the end, I honestly believe sharing information online helps you more than it hurts.  While you might not share a secret pharmaceutical formula or the 7 secret herbs and spices on the web (some things are industry secrets), anything available on the web, openly, you might consider sharing- you become an aggregator, a reference source, and a trust agent, just by sharing a bit of what you know and think.

Plain and simple- people you like you more and pay attention- and that’s not something that you can discount these days.