The primary obstacle is a conflict that's built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath. 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.

While human lives are endlessly variable, our most memorable positive moments are dominated by four elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection. If we embrace these elements, we can conjure more moments that matter. What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember twenty years later? What if a manager knew how to create an experience that would delight customers? What if you had a better sense of how to create memories that matter for your children?

This book delves into some fascinating mysteries of experience: Why we tend to remember the best or worst moment of an experience, as well as the last moment, and forget the rest. Why we feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they're not. And why our most cherished memories are clustered into a brief period during our youth.

Readers discover how brief experiences can change lives, such as the experiment in which two strangers meet in a room, and forty-five minutes later, they leave as best friends. (What happens in that time?) Or the tale of the world's youngest female billionaire, who credits her resilience to something her father asked the family at the dinner table. (What was that simple question?)

Many of the defining moments in our lives are the result of accident or luck--but why would we leave our most meaningful, memorable moments to chance when we can create them? The Power of Moments shows us how to be the author of richer experiences.

Anyone interested in influencing others--to buy, to vote, to learn, to diet, to give to charity or to start a revolution--can learn from this book.--The Washington Post

Mark Twain once observed, A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on. His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus news stories circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas--entrepreneurs, teachers, politicians, and journalists--struggle to make them stick.

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds--from the infamous kidney theft ring hoax to a coach's lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony--draw their power from the same six traits.

Made to Stick will transform the way you communicate. It's a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures): the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the Mother Teresa Effect; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice.

Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas--and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.

Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle one of the most critical topics in our work and personal lives: how to make better decisions.
　
Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We're overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn't. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn't fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better?

In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively readable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star's ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO's disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions.

Along the way, we learn the answers to critical questions like these: How can we stop the cycle of agonizing over our decisions? How can we make group decisions without destructive politics? And how can we ensure that we don't overlook precious opportunities to change our course?　

Decisive is the Heath brothers' most powerful--and important--book yet, offering fresh strategies and practical tools enabling us to make better choices. Because the right decision, at the right moment, can make all the difference.

How much bigger is a billion than a million?

Well, a million seconds is twelve days. A billion seconds is...thirty-two years.

Understanding numbers is essential--but humans aren't built to understand them. Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five--anything from six to infinity was known as lots. While the numbers in our world have gotten increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. How can we translate millions and billions and milliseconds and nanometers into things we can comprehend and use?

Author Chip Heath has excelled at teaching others about making ideas stick and here, in Making Numbers Count, he outlines specific principles that reveal how to translate a number into our brain's language. This book is filled with examples of extreme number makeovers, vivid before-and-after examples that take a dry number and present it in a way that people click in and say Wow, now I get it

You will learn principles such as:

-SIMPLE PERSPECTIVE CUES: researchers at Microsoft found that adding one simple comparison sentence doubled how accurately users estimated statistics like population and area of countries.
-VIVIDNESS: get perspective on the size of a nucleus by imagining a bee in a cathedral, or a pea in a racetrack, which are easier to envision than 1/100,000th of the size of an atom.
-CONVERT TO A PROCESS: capitalize on our intuitive sense of time (5 gigabytes of music storage turns into 2 months of commutes, without repeating a song).
-EMOTIONAL MEASURING STICKS: frame the number in a way that people already care about (that medical protocol would save twice as many women as curing breast cancer).

Whether you're interested in global problems like climate change, running a tech firm or a farm, or just explaining how many Cokes you'd have to drink if you burned calories like a hummingbird, this book will help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our world--allowing us to bring more data, more naturally, into decisions in our schools, our workplaces, and our society.

El obstáculo principal es un conflicto intrínseco en el cerebro, nos dicen Chip y Dan Heath, dos reconocidos especialistas en comportamiento organizacional. Los psicólogos han descubierto que la mente está gobernada por dos sistemas diferentes --la mente racional y la mente emocional-- que compiten por el control. La mente racional quiere un cuerpo perfecto; la mente emocional quiere comerse esa galleta. La mente racional quiere cambiar el trabajo; la mente emocional ama la comodidad y la rutina. Esta tensión puede causar que muchos esfuerzos por cambiar fracasen, pero si se superan, el cambio puede llegar rápidamente. En Switch, los hermanos Heath muestran cómo personas comunes y corrientes han unido estas dos mentes, logrando espectaculares resultados:

● La directiva que ayudó a Target a pasar de ser una compañía minorista regional que facturaba tres billones de dólares, a convertirse en un gigante de más de 63 billones de dólares.

● La directora de servicios clínicos que, junto con su equipo de enfermeras, logró reducir drásticamente los errores en la administración de medicamentos en su hospital.

● El director de atención al cliente que transformó su compañía de una que ignoraba totalmente el servicio al cliente a ser una compañía definida por él.

En este convincente relato, los Heath reúnen décadas de investigación en los campos de la psicología, la sociología y los negocios entre muchos otros, para explicar por qué cambiar es tan difícil y dar a conocer nuevas maneras de lograr cambios duraderos. Switch muestra que los cambios exitosos siguen un modelo, un modelo que puedes utilizar para lograr los cambios que tú quieras, tanto si tu interés se centra en cambiar el mundo como en cambiar tu cintura.

ENGLISH 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.

Segundo finalista al Premio Knowsquare al mejor libro de empresa 2014

Decisiones, decisiones, decisiones. Nos enfrentamos a cientos de ellas todos los días, incluso miles. Pero cómo podemos saber si estamos tomando las correctas? En Decídete, Chip y Dan Heath abordan uno de los temas cruciales de nuestras vidas laborales y personales: cómo tomar mejores decisiones. Y es que la decisión correcta, en el momento oportuno, puede cambiarlo todo.

La investigación psicológica ha revelado que nuestras decisiones se distorsionan por sesgos e irracionalidades: tenemos una confianza desmedida en nosotros mismos y buscamos información que nos respalde y restamos importancia a la que no lo hace. Las emociones a corto plazo nos distraen. Cuando elegimos, nuestros cerebros son nuestro peor enemigo. Lamentablemente, limitarse a ser consciente de estos defectos no soluciona el problema, de igual modo que saber que somos miopes no nos ayuda a ver. La verdadera pregunta es: cómo podemos hacerlo mejor? Cómo podemos tomar mejores decisiones y más inteligentes?

En Decídete, los hermanos Heath presentan un proceso de cuatro pasos para contrarrestar estos sesgos. Escrito en un estilo cautivador e irresistiblemente ameno, Decídete lleva al lector a un viaje inolvidable a través de historias y anécdotas reales de personajes populares para ayudarnos a tomar mejores decisiones en nuestra vida tanto personal como profesional.