Author
Chip Heath
The Stanford professor who turned 'why do some ideas stick?' into a checklist anyone can run.
2 books on BookYol
The story and the impact
Chip Heath is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he has taught courses on organisational behaviour and on making ideas stick. Before Stanford he taught at the University of Chicago and at Duke.
With his brother Dan he has written a series of books that take one question each through research and reporting: Made to Stick (2007) on why some ideas survive, Switch (2010) on how change happens when it is hard, Decisive (2013) on making better choices, and The Power of Moments (2017) on why certain experiences matter far more than others.
The brothers write together across a distance, trading drafts, and the books carry the same structure: a small number of principles, each with the research behind it and a story that shows it at work.
The signature
Heath's signature is the research-backed checklist: a handful of traits or steps, named so that they can be remembered, with the studies that support each one. He is skeptical of talent as an explanation and interested in what ordinary people can do on purpose.