Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard Quotes
"People eat more when you give them a bigger container. Period."
"What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem."
"For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently."
"Babies are born every day to parents who, inexplicably, welcome the change."
"Smokers keep smoking and kids grow fatter and your husband can’t ever seem to get his dirty shirts into a hamper."
"Changes often fail because the Rider simply can’t keep the Elephant on the road long enough to reach the destination."
"Change is hard because people wear themselves out."
"The equation is unyielding: Bigger container = more eating."
"People will drink whatever is around the house."
"Big-picture, hands-off leadership isn’t likely to work in a change situation."
"More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan."
"Change begins at the level of individual decisions and behaviors."
"To learn what the Food Pyramid has to say about food, you must be willing to decipher the Pyramid’s markings."
"Quick, how many teaspoons of oil did you consume today?"
"The language and concepts here are so hopelessly abstracted from people’s actual experience with food."
"What if, instead, the auto industry publicized its version of the disastrous Food Pyramid—say, a Car Rainbow?"
"You need to remove the ambiguity from your vision of change."
"It’s not good enough to ask your team to 'be more creative' or to 'tighten up on the purse strings.'"
"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."
"The parents believed that they’d gotten a 'bad kid,' or a stubborn one, and that violence was the only way they could get their kids to obey."
"Simple scripting has power beyond what any of us could have predicted."
"If Howard residents spent just 10 percent more of their disposable income at home, they would boost the local economy by $7 million."
"The challenges facing Miner County were big and sprawling: the decline of an industrial base, the aging of a population."
"At the beginning of the year, the skill gaps among her students were daunting."
"One of her first efforts was to cultivate a culture of learning in her classroom, calling her students 'scholars.'"
"It’s not so much that you’re a brilliant predictor; it’s that he’s a lousy self-evaluator."
"The Elephant tends to take the rosiest possible interpretation of the facts."
"For most of the twentieth century, oil explorers had trusted their gut, which worked out well, because their gut was pretty smart and oil reserves were largely untapped."
"The accounting department saw itself more as a watchdog than as an internal service provider."
"When change works, it’s because leaders are speaking to the Elephant as well as to the Rider."
"We define up front to the kids what’s an A, B, and C."
"The kids you’d expect to be successful were successful."
"What we mean is that they change their organizational practices."
"We’re here for the ones that can get it, and we’ve got to accept that we’re going to lose some."
"This parrot is ours. Nobody has this but us. We need to cherish it and look after it."
"If you have a stone in your shoe, it hurts and you’ll fix the problem."
"Everything can look like a failure in the middle."
"We went through financial hell and lost everything over a three-year period of time."
"People find it more motivating to be partly finished with a longer journey than to be at the starting gate of a shorter one."
"I’m proud of how hard you worked on that project!"
"Once you realized that exercise could come from little things, maybe you’d be on the lookout for ways to get a smidgen more active."
"To get the Elephant off its duff, you need to reassure it that the task won’t be so bad."
"Despite the health risks, there’s no strong social taboo against sugar-daddy relationships in Tanzania."
"In the United States, 50-year-old lechers who chase college girls are punished for it socially."
"The great majority of Tanzanians—89 percent in one poll—believe that cross-generational relationships are wrong."
"Pamela White and Mike Gehron of USAID called together a diverse team of experts to fight cross-generational sex."
"No one believed that scolding the sugar daddies would be effective in stopping their behavior."
"We need people to be able to laugh at this! We need humor!"
"A villain people would love to hate, like J.R. Ewing, the eternally scheming oilman of the old TV show Dallas."
"Someone suggested that the villain be called 'Fataki,' a Swahili word that translates loosely as 'explosion' or 'fireworks.'"
"Radio spots like that one became part of a unified campaign that was piloted in a rural region called Morogoro."
"By the end of the four-month campaign, 44 percent of people spontaneously replied 'Fataki' to describe a 50-year-old man trying to seduce younger women."
"Be simple. Not simple in terms of 'dumbing down'... What we mean by 'simple' is finding the core of the idea."
"You can’t have five North Stars, you can’t have five 'most important goals,' and you can’t have five Commander’s Intents."
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
"All we offer is peanuts, and she thinks a nice chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?"
"You say, 'Tracy, will adding that chicken Caesar salad make us THE low-fare airline from Houston to Las Vegas?'"
"It’s not supposed to be fun to work for penny-pinchers."
"If you say three things, you don’t say anything."