Quotes from Chip Heath

Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business, because even the most sophisticated people get it wrong. People go out and they're collecting the data, and they don't realize they're cooking the books.

Research has found that interviews are less predictive of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance. Even a simple intelligence test is substantially more predictive than an interview.

Stories are like flight simulators for the brain.

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?

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.

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question "What's working, and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's broken, and how do we fix it?

Big changes can start with very small steps. Small changes tend to snowball. But this is not the same as saying that change is easy.

When a CEO discusses "unlocking shareholder value," there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can't hear.

Checklists provide insurance against overconfidence.

In times of change, you may not know what options are available. And this uncertainty leads to decision paralysis as surely as a table with 24 jams.

It can sometimes be challenging, though, to distinguish why people don't support your change. Is it because they don't understand or because they're not enthused? Do you need an Elephant appeal or a Rider appeal?

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.

Sportsmanship" had been stretched too far. Like "relativity," it had migrated far afield from its original meaning. It used to refer to the kind of behavior that Lance Armstrong showed Jan Ullrich. But over time the term was stretched to include unimpressive, nonchivalrous behavior, like losing without whining too much or making it through an entire game without assaulting a referee.

An old advertising maxim says you've got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don't buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children's pictures.

Some analogies are so useful that they don't merely shed light on a concept, they actually become platforms for novel thinking. For example, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has been central to the insights generated by cognitive psychologists during the past fifty years.

self-evaluation involves interpretation, and that's where the Elephant intrudes.

Until you can ladder your way down from a change idea to a specific behavior, you're not ready to lead a switch. To create movement, you've got to be specific and be concrete. You've got to emulate 1% milk and flee from the Food Pyramid.

The four rules were clear: (1) Unblock revenue. (2) Minimize up-front cash. (3) Faster is better than best. (4) Use what you've got. These rules, taken together, ensured that cash wouldn't be consumed unless it was being used as bait for more cash. Spend a little, make a little more.

To be clear, it's not so much that you're a brilliant predictor; it's that he's a lousy self-evaluator. We're all lousy self-evaluators.

When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions—those that increased revenues, profits, and market share—they found that "process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six." Often a good process led to better analysis—for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic. But the reverse was not true: "Superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing." To

Learn to recognize your own scripts. Play with them, poke at them, disrupt them.

Another variety of close-up involves going to the genba, a Japanese term meaning "the real place" or, more loosely, the place where the action happens. Japanese detectives, for instance, call the crime scene the genba. In a manufacturing firm, the genba would be the factory floor, and for a retailing company it would be the store. Practitioners of Total Quality Management encourage leaders to "go to the genba" to understand problems.

This doesn't make sense. The doctors were acting as though having more medication options somehow made medication a worse bet than surgery. But if 47 percent of doctors thought medication A was preferable to surgery, the mere existence of a second medication shouldn't have tipped them toward surgery.

The higher numbers get, the less sensitive we get to them, a phenomenon psychologists have labeled "psychophysical numbing.