Switch Book Reviewed – Dan and Chip Heath Love Anecdotal Evidence
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Psychology books can be very dry, and dryness isn't something that lends itself to being sold on a mass market scale. So very few of the psychology/marketing books you find available in the business section of today's bookstore just come right out and say what they are trying to get at. Outside of college professors and the students they require to read a book like that, no one would purchase it and read it willingly.
And that's probably why Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, a book we will be reviewing here tonight includes so many of the same little true, possibly true, or fable sounding stories to get their point across.
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Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
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They aren't the first authors to do this, of course. I think I read skimmed at least two other books this week that pretty much had the same layout: tell a story at the beginning of the chapter and then dissect the story to glean what the author wants us to hear or feel from the story.
Switch focuses on ways to help the reader get those around them to change the way they do things, to change their thinking, to motivate them properly in a positive way. Managers need to find ways to get their employees to think out of the box, and Switch shows the reader a way to recognize how their team might be compelled to think and act in a certain way, and then get those same employees to "switch" to another way.
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What way is that you say? Well, it's as simple and as difficult as to find a way to get each person's rational process (or thought process) to position itself in parallel with the emotional process.
The brothers determined that everyone is pretty much a schizophrenic in the way they think. Take for instance the rational person who sets their alarm for an early morning wakeup (for exercise, meditation, whatever) who in contrast will turn into the emotional person at the time the alarm sounds. The emotional person will want to stay in bed, and completely ignore the rational side and its need for exercise.
So, the goal with Switch is to take that example and put the rational and emotional sides of each person in a family, in an organization, in any group, confront those two sides, and then find common ground between the two to get both the rational and emotional moving in the direction that the leader, manager, etc. wants that person, that team to move.
About 125 pages in, I grew weary of all the stories and anecdotal stories included in Switch.. So I began skimming quickly through to get to the point. As I said at the beginning, a lot of books today use anecdotal (ie possibly not true) stories to help get a point across. Heck, my favorite book of all time, The Four Hour Work Week, includes many stories itself (at least in the expanded version). But where those stories seem like genuine people who actually got something from the book and used what they learned to better themselves, these stories are just used to validate the following results.
Still, the psychology and science of Switch appears to be good, and what I learned from reading the book does appear to be ideas that I can take and use in my own workplace. While the stories were many, what was in Switch that was not in story-mode sounded like good psychology and not the fluff of some of the other, unnamed self-help authors.
If you like anecdotal references to be used to help get the point across in your readings, then by all means, Switch is probably the book for you if you need help motivating your team to go in a new direction. By learning to "direct the rider", you won't necessarily be able to achieve the exact results you want from your team or family. But you will find new ways to direct them in the ways that you want them to go, and hopefully to success.
Switch Book Review Photos
Switch Book Details
* ISBN-13: 978-0385528757
* Formats Available: Hardcover, Paperback, eBook (Kindle, B&N), Audio Book
* Number of Pages: 312 (Hardcover)
* Publisher: Crown Business Publishing
* Release Date: February 2010
Reference
Switch by Chip and Dan Heath - a Book Review - YouTube
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