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The subtitle of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Broadway Business, 320 pages, $26) says it all. The book, by Chip Heath, a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and Dan Heath, a senior fellow at Duke University's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, is about overcoming the immense difficulty of organizational change.

It is not an ordinary book about organizational change, which has been a very popular topic for management advice books over the last couple of decades. It begins by delving deep into the human psyche to examine why we all so resist change so much of the time. The authors argue that if we can learn some fundamentals of how our minds function, we can do better overcoming our opposition to change. We can figure out how to keep our desire to improve things from being overwhelmed by our skepticism, caution and fear.

People usually mean different things by change. Corporate consultants mean organizational change, and they purvey "change management" advice. Self-help authors peddle change for individuals. And activists of every stripe seek change on a bigger scale. They want to change the world.

This book looks at all kinds of change, individual, organizational and societal, in the same light. You may want to help your brother-in-law beat his gambling addiction, help your team at work cut its travel expenditures or get your neighbors to bike to work-the underlying pattern is the same. It always begins with one individual deciding to act differently. Every change, on every level, starts with a person at a time deciding to take the lead. Brother-in-law starts staying away from casinos. One employee and then another starts taking trains instead of planes. People start taking their bikes out of their garages.

The authors of Switch argue that change works best when each individual who begins a change or who leads changes focuses on three big things at once:

1. Motivate the elephant. The elephant is our emotional, instinctive side, which is lazy and skittish and will take any quick payoff over a long-term reward. We all have that. The elephant is usually the first cause of any failure to change, because the change we want usually involves short-term sacrifice in pursuit of long-term benefit. Think of any time you have chosen to oversleep or overeat or think about it tomorrow, and so on. You can't get anywhere with any change effort unless you engage a person's emotional side to get their lazy elephant to turn to the path of change.

2. Direct the rider. The rider, perched atop the elephant, is our rational side. We presume our rational side holds the reins and chooses the way forward. But the rider's control is precarious, because he is tiny compared with the elephant. Whenever a six-ton elephant and a 150-pound rider disagree about where to go, the elephant wins. But often what looks like elephant resistance or rider weakness is really just lack of clarity. You must give the rider clear direction with which it can steer the elephant.

3. Shape the path. Change often fails because the rider can't keep the elephant on the road long enough to reach the destination. The elephant's hunger for instant gratification pulls against the rider's strength, which is the ability to think big picture and plan beyond the moment. The more you can make straight and clear the path ahead, the more you can diminish confusion between elephant and rider and make progress for both of them easier and more likely, no matter what is going on between them.

The book also takes on what its authors consider to be popular myths about change. A big one is that we've constantly got to solve problems. When something is broken, we worry about how to fix it. We commonly bring in outside management experts to implement industry best practices. But people naturally resist solutions brought in from elsewhere, the authors say. They suggest looking for "bright spots" within the organization instead. Native solutions can often be found by asking a simple question: What is working, and how can we do more of it? That question may sound simple, but at most organizations it is never asked, the authors have found.

They sprinkle the volume with case studies from across the world and across realms-from personal experience, corporations, nonprofit organizations and even nations. Their examples include Jerry Sternin of Save the Children, saving the lives of thousands of malnourished children in Vietnam by finding community bright spots of well-nourished children in poor families; Donald Bedwick, M.D., the chief executive of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, launching the 100,000 Lives Campaign and thereby helping prevent an estimated 122,000 avoidable deaths; two health researchers, Steve Butterfield and Bill Reger, spreading health far and wide with a campaign promoting low-fat milk.

Switch is one of the best books on change management I have read. It stands out for its simple and lucid language, its wonderful insight into personal and organizational behavior and its great illustrative case studies. A must-read.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Sangeeth Varghese is a leadership thinker and the founder of LeadCap Ventures, a global market research and consulting firm. E-mail him at sangeethv@leadcap.net. Follow him on Twitter at @leadCap. For more from Sangeeth Varghese, click here.

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How To Change Things When Change Is Hard

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The subtitle of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (Broadway Business, 320 pages, $26) says it all. The book, by Chip Heath, a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and Dan Heath, a senior fellow at Duke University's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, is about overcoming the immense difficulty of organizational change.

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https://www.forbes.com/2010/06/02/change-management-chip-dan-heath-leadership-managing-switch.html