Chip Heath's Blog, page 5

We've posted a whole slew of free resources related to Switch, including these:

- A podcast series (episodes for social entrepreneurs, managers, marketers, etc.)

- A book-club guide

- A guide for applying the principles of Switch to organizational challenges

To get them, just sign up for our email newsletter. In the past we've offered free Fast Company subscriptions and free advance copies of Switch (via lottery). Hope you find the resources useful.

Switch goes on sale today — I can't wait to see it in a bookstore. If you're looking for immediate gratification, you can find links to all the online retailers here. (And Amazon is selling it for the freakishly low price of $13.)

We've just posted the first chapter of Switch here — check it out. (And if you want a nicely-formatted PDF of the first chapter, sign up for our free resources section.)

Stanford researchers ran a series of experiments, hoping to find evidence that people who multitask have enhanced cognitive abilities that allow them to juggle multiple media effectively. Instead, they came away disappointed: The multitaskers were worse than a control group at everything they tested.

"We kept looking for what they're better at, and we didn't find it," said Ophir, the study's lead author and a researcher in Stanford's Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. …

"Th...

US Airways Customer Service Line: "Your call will be answered in:

One hundred.

Fifty.

Four.

Minutes."

Steven Strogatz, an applied math prof at Cornell, has started a series on the NYT site to re-teach basic math from an adult perspective, with the goal to show "why it's so enthralling."

I love the second installment, which explores the way that using rocks in place of digits (i.e., six rocks rather than the number "6″) can provide unexpected insight on seemingly tough problems:

For example, instead of adding just two odd numbers together, suppose we add all the consecutive odd numbers...

Great story in SI by Don Banks about how the Saints defense was transformed, thanks to the efforts of new defensive coordinator Gregg Williams. Forget football for a second (at least until Sunday)–this is one of the clearest organizational change stories I've heard in a while:

If you want the short answer of how the Saints went from being a 7-9 and 8-8 team in 2007-08, to this year's "turnaround" 15-3 NFC champions, it has everything to do with Williams and his relentless emphasis on creating ...

If you're interested in teaching, this article by Amanda Ripley in The Atlantic is a must-read. For years, people have speculated about what makes a great teacher.

But now there is data. It has been gathered painstakingly by Teach For America for over a decade, and it covers hundreds of thousands of kids. TFA linked the test scores of students to their teachers, so that TFA can spot patterns in the data: Which teachers are causing big boosts in the kids' scores–for instance, advancing them by ...

Stanford professor Brian Knutson describes the way the internet has changed his thinking:

In terms of how I think, I fear that the Internet is less helpful. Although I can find information faster, that information is not always the most relevant, and is often tangential. More often than I'd like to admit, I sit down to do something and then get up bleary-eyed hours later, only to realize my task remains undone (or I can't even remember the starting point). The sensation is not unlike walking i...

More on the mystery of why a card issuer might hit the same person 200 times with a mailer, despite the lack of response: I heard from a former executive of a major bank card issuer, who said that, in her experience, no one cares how many times a customer has ignored a mailer. No one thought about it; it isn't tracked. She framed it as a cost issue — it would be too expensive to scrub the list to eliminate serial non-responders. (She said even trying to remove duplicates within a single list ...