Quotes from Chip Heath

Entrepreneurs don't seem to believe that forecasting is worth the bother: One survey found that 60% of Inc. 500 CEOs had not even written business plans before launching their companies. To

schemas enable profound simplicity

In fact, one study in Philadelphia schools found that a teacher was almost two times more likely to drop out than a student.

Sometimes we think we're gathering information when we're actually fishing for support.

Behavior is contagious.

Commitment devices are commonplace in business as well. Google has pledged to give its engineers 20% of their time to pursue personal projects. With that pledge, the company forecloses its ability to claim that time (at least without a lot of squawking). Small businesses get in on the act too.

process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.

In this chapter, we've seen that what looks like a "character problem" is often correctible when you change the environment.

Why did they quit so easily? The answer may surprise you: They ran out of self-control.

oscillating

If you've got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren't certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language.

A business cliché commands us to "raise the bar." But that's exactly the wrong instinct if you want to motivate a reluctant Elephant. You need to lower the bar. Picture taking a high-jump bar and lowering it so far that it can be stepped over. If you want a reluctant Elephant to get moving, you need to shrink the change.

Marcus Buckingham, who says that

That's why scripting is important—you've got to think about the specific behavior that you'd want to see in a tough moment, whether the tough moment takes place in a Brazilian railroad system or late at night in your own snack-loaded pantry.

Unexpected ideas are more likely to stick because surprise makes us pay attention and think.

instill hope and optimism and excitement

You can't script every move—that would be like trying to foresee the seventeenth move in a chess game. It's the critical moves that count. Recall

and the wrong one for others, depending on their bank account and their movie lust.

These results are shocking. The mere act of calculation reduced people's charity. Once we put on our analytical hat, we react to emotional appeals differently. We hinder our ability to feel.

simple" is finding the core of the idea.

but this experiment made me think about how I'm impacting others.

What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

If you are leading a change effort, you need to remove the ambiguity from your vision of change. Granted

If failure is a necessary part of change, then the way people understand failure is critical.