Legal Research

"Excerpt from Dan and Chip Heath's New Book SWITCH"

This post was written by StephanieWestAllen: "Because I liked their book Made to Stick so much, I am looking forward to the Heath brothers' new book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. Fast Company has published an excerpt of the book. Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:

...Our focus, in times of change, goes instinctively to the problems at hand. What's broken and how do we fix it? This troubleshooting mind-set serves us well -- most of the time. If you run a nuclear power plant and your diagnostics turn up a disturbing signal once per month, you should most certainly obsess about it and fix the problem. And if your child brings home a report card with five As and one F, it makes sense to freak out about the F.

But in times of change, this mind-set will backfire. If we need to make major changes, then (by definition) we don't have a near-spotless report card. A lot of things are probably wrong. The "report card" for our diet, or our marriage, or our business, is full of Cs and Ds and Fs. So if you ask yourself, What's broken and how do I fix it?, you'll simply spin your wheels. You'll spend a lot of time agonizing over issues that are TBU.

Click to read the rest of "Switch: Don't Solve Problems--Copy Success" (Fast Company)."

Full text and active links are available by clicking on the author's name.

Source: idealawg, 21 January 2010 Reproduced with permission of the author. 

Full post as published by Stark County Law Library Blawg on January 22, 2010 (boomark / email).