Search  for anything...
Currency

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

    • Based on 5,813 reviews
Condition: New
Checking for product changes
$12.37 Why this price?
Save $20.61 was $32.98

Buy Now, Pay Later

As low as $3 / mo
  • – 4-month term
  • – No impact on credit
  • – Instant approval decision
  • – Secure and straightforward checkout

Ready to go? Add this product to your cart and select a plan during checkout. Payment plans are offered through our trusted finance partners Klarna, PayTomorrow, Affirm, Afterpay, Apple Pay, and PayPal. No-credit-needed leasing options through Acima may also be available at checkout.

Learn more about financing & leasing here.

Free shipping on this product

30-day refund/replacement

To qualify for a full refund, items must be returned in their original, unused condition. If an item is returned in a used, damaged, or materially different state, you may be granted a partial refund.

To initiate a return, please visit our Returns Center.

View our full returns policy here.

Availability: Only 3 left in stock, order soon!
Fulfilled by Amazon
Arrives Apr 29 – May 14
Order within 8 hours and 14 minutes
Available payment plans shown during checkout

Description

Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives? 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. Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown Currency; 1st edition (February 16, 2010)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385528752


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 57


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.69 x 1.17 x 8.5 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #7,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #16 in Business Decision Making #22 in Decision-Making & Problem Solving #136 in Leadership & Motivation


#16 in Business Decision Making:


#22 in Decision-Making & Problem Solving:


Frequently asked questions

If you place your order now, the estimated arrival date for this product is: Apr 29 – May 14

Yes, absolutely! You may return this product for a full refund within 30 days of receiving it.

To initiate a return, please visit our Returns Center.

View our full returns policy here.

  • Klarna Financing
  • Affirm Pay in 4
  • Affirm Financing
  • Afterpay Financing
  • PayTomorrow Financing
  • Financing through Apple Pay
Leasing options through Acima may also be available during checkout.

Learn more about financing & leasing here.

Similar Products

Top Amazon Reviews

    • Understanding The Fundamentals of Change!
Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful: 1) "What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem." 2) "Now you've had a glimpse of the basic three-part framework we will unpack in this book, one that can guide you in any situation where you need to change behavior: 1) Direct the Rider. What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction. 2) Motivate the Elephant. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. The Rider can't get his way by force for very long. So it's critical that you engage people's emotional side—get their Elephants on the path and cooperative. 3) Shape the Path. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. We call the situation (including the surrounding environment) the "Path." When you shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter what's happening with the Rider and Elephant." 3) "The Miracle Question doesn't ask you to describe the miracle itself; it asks you to identify the tangible signs that the miracle happened...Once they've helped patients identify specific and vivid signs of progress, they pivot to a second question, which is perhaps even more important. It's the Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even just for a short time?"" 4) "Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions. Instead, they are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades. And this asymmetry is why the Rider's predilection for analysis can backfire so easily. When the Rider analyzes a problem, he seeks a solution that befits the scale of it. If the Rider spots a hole, he wants to fill it, and if he's got a round hole with a 24-inch diameter, he's gonna go looking for a 24-inch peg. But that mental model is wrong." 5) "Ambiguity is the enemy. Any successful change requires a translation of ambiguous goals into concrete behaviors. In short, to make a switch, you need to script the critical moves." 6) "In creating change, though, we we're interested in goals that are closer at hand—the kinds of things that can be tackled by parents or middle managers or social activists. We want a goal that can be tackled in months or years, not decades. We want what we might call a destination postcard—a vivid picture from the near-term future that shows what could be possible." 7) "The Rider's strengths are substantial, and his flaws can be mitigated. When you appeal to the Rider inside yourself or inside others you are trying to influence, your game plan should be simple...First, follow the bright spots...Next, give direction to the Rider." 8) "Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE. You're presented with evidence that makes you feel something. It might be a disturbing look at the problem, or a hopeful glimpse of the solution, or a sobering reflection of your current habits, but regardless, it's something that hits you at the emotional level. It's something that speaks to the Elephant." 9) " Most of the big problems we encounter in organizations or society are ambiguous and evolving. They don't look like burning platform situations, where we need people to buckle down and execute a hard but well-understood game plan. To solve bigger, more ambiguous problems, we need to encourage open minds, creativity, and hope." 10) " In the identity model of decision making, we essentially ask ourselves three questions when we have a decision to make: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What would someone like me do in this situation? Notice what's missing: any calculation of costs and benefits. The identity model explains the way most people vote, which contradicts our notion of the "self-interested voter."" 11) "That's the paradox of the growth mindset. Although it seems to draw attention to failure, and in fact encourages us to seek out failure, it is unflaggingly optimistic. We will struggle, we will fail we will be knocked down—but throughout, well get better, and we'll succeed in the end." 12) "Change isn't an event; it's a process. There is no moment when a monkey learns to skateboard; there's a process. There is no moment when a. a child learns to walk; there's a process. And there won't be a moment when your community starts to invest more in its school system, or starts recycling more, or starts to beautify its public spaces; there will be a process. To lead a process requires persistence. A long journey requires lots of mango." ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2013 by O. Halabieh
    • Review by J. Colannino
Switch is a book about managing change by the Heath brothers (Chip and Dan). Chip is a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and Dan is a Senior Fellow at Duke University' Social Entrepreneurship center. The two have teamed up before -- in 2007 they released their critically acclaimed Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. This latest effort focuses less on the stickiness of the idea and more on the change process itself. What should a change agent do to implement lasting change in a hard-headed organization that desperately needs it? The book is organized into eleven chapters in three parts: Part 1, Direct the Rider; Part 2, Motivate the Elephant; and Part 3, Shape the Path. The titles come from a vivid metaphor by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt likens a person to a rider on an elephant. The rider is the rational side of a person: the part that tells him to eat better, exercise more, and stop procrastinating, for example. The elephant is the emotional side that doesn't want to work to lose weight or exercise and would rather stay put; let's say willpower vs. won't-power; but why should that be? Whatever is autonomous and ingrained by habit belongs to the elephant. The rider is theoretically in control, but it is exhausting to continually tug on the reins and direct the stubborn elephant. Eventually the rider relents and the elephant goes back to doing what he's always done. Sound familiar? Before going much farther, you should know that two things separate Switch from so many other glib books about change: first, the book has a very solid psychological basis. Despite its accessible style, scores of major psychological findings and studies are reported and undergird the book's practical formulae for change. Second, Switch is not a self-help book. I have no doubt that the book could be used in this way, but it is really a book about how to change things. It is primarily directed toward organizational change, though its principles are much broader. And there are many surprises. The first big surprise occurs in the very first chapter. "We know what you're thinking -- people resist change. But it's not quite that easy. Babies are born every day to parents who, inexplicably, welcome that change. Yet people don't resist this massive change -- they volunteer for it. In our lives we embrace lots of big changes. So there are hard changes and there are easy changes. What distinguishes one from the other?" And the surprises keep coming. Like the two researchers who dramatically and permanently got folks to reduce their saturated fat intake. Or the doctor who saved over 100,000 lives and counting in American hospitals on schedule (18 months) by getting thousands of doctors and organizations to change their practices. Or the American who went to Vietnam and changed the face of malnutrition. Or the student who saved an endangered species in a Caribbean country that didn't give two hoots about it. What do all these stories have in common? For one, none of these change agents had the sufficient budget or authority to succeed; yet, they did. How? Every one of them gave clear rational direction to the rider by finding the bright spots, scripting the critical moves, and clearly pointing to the end goal. All of them motivated the elephant by emotionally connecting with it, and they shrunk the apparent change by carefully communicating progress. They refused to underestimate their people. Instead they provided them with a newfound identity that let them to grow into the challenge. But there was more. As the authors note, many times what looks like resistance is really confusion or even the result of misaligned incentives. That's why the path needs to be shaped by making manageable changes to the environment, building sound habits, rallying the herd, and reinforcing the new habit until it becomes a way of life. Well, maybe that sounds like a lot of work. I think it is. But speaking from firsthand experience, it will be a labor of love. And if your heart is not in the change and you do not think you can derive reward from the process, perhaps you are selling yourself short -- or, maybe you're the wrong person to lead the change and you should stop kidding yourself. And perhaps that is what I like most about this book. It does not promise a panacea. It tells it like it is without the jingoism that has become the substance of many change management essays. If you are leading organizational change, the book will provide a solid prescription for achieving lasting results because Switch uses real research, reports real experiences, and provides real guidance. Here, my recommendation is enthusiastic. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on December 3, 2012 by Joseph Colannino
    • Well written, easy read and practical advice
Right from the start the book is able to drawn you in. With interesting stories the book explains the steps of making impactful change. The way it gives you the ability to try out theory in presented cases at the end of the chapter is a great way to test your understanding. But it also let you just read further without disturbing your flow. I would highly recommend anyone that is going through change or initiating changes to read this book. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2025 by C de Quaasteniet

Can't find a product?

Find it on Amazon first, then paste the link below.