Best-selling author Dan Heath shares insight at annual Elliott Lecture

Best-selling author Dan Heath shares insight at annual Elliott Lecture

Presidential series lecture featured Duke senior fellow on how to make productive change happen.

Janel Shoun-Smith | 11/15/2024

Change is hard. If it wasn't, Dan Heath wouldn't have had to write six books on the subject.

Heath, a #1 New York Times bestselling author or co-author of five highly acclaimed business books, gave a sneak peek of his sixth book Reset: How to Change What's Not Working on Nov. 7 at Lipscomb's 2024 Don R. Elliott Distinguished Presidential Lecture, hosted by the College of Leadership & Public Service.

More than 400 people from the Lipscomb and Nashville communities attended to hear the Duke University senior fellow's latest thoughts on how to make productive change happen. Reset is set to release in January.

"This is what the texture of change is like, when a group of people decide that we're not going to be confined by what happened in the past," said Heath, using the task of moving a heavy boulder as a metaphor for enacting change at an organization. "We're not going to be stuck in old habits. We're going to find a new way to work. We're going to find a new way to push, and we're going to see that boulder roll."

Heath's books have tackled the nuances of positive change from preventing problems before they happen to personal change in our own lives, from unbiased decision-making to how to make an idea into sustainable reality. Reset looks at how to "escape the gravity of how things have always worked," he said at the event.

The way to do that is to firstly find leverage points to be able to overcome the inertia of that boulder and secondly to "restack" a company's resources so they are all pushing the boulder in the same direction.

Using examples such as the revitalized package receiving area of the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Chick-Fil-A's famously speedy drive-thru line and Strategex Business Consulting's use of the 80/20 rule (80% of a business' revenue comes from 20% of its customers) to refocus customer service efforts, Heath laid out various strategies for finding leverage points and rearranging resources.

In terms of leverage points to overcome inertia, he advised remembering the "goal of the goal," as the true intent of a process often gets lost in implementation; targeting the constraints, or the limiting factors, on bringing about change; and to study the bright spots, his top recommendation, he said.

"Sometimes we can unlock powerful leverage points simply by understanding more deeply the times when we are already succeeding," he said.

His advice on "restacking" resources included to do more and less, meaning to analyze what is working well, and to do more of that and less of what is not working.
"I think we make the mistake in change of thinking of everything as additive," said Heath. "Change is not about 'and,' it's about 'instead of.'"

He also advised to recycle waste, borrowing a definition of waste from Toyota as "any activity that doesn't add value to the customer," and to tap employees' existing motivation instead of trying to infuse motivation where it doesn't exist.

In a special forum held for students earlier in the day, Heath touched on his main points from another of his acclaimed business books, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Heath, known for his engaging storytelling, shared practical strategies to help students communicate ideas that inspire action and resonate with others.

During the interactive forum, Heath explored with students what makes certain ideas "stick" - that is, become understandable, memorable and effective in influencing thought or behavior. He emphasized the importance of simplicity, encouraging students to distill their ideas to their essence or core while excluding unnecessary details.
Heath shared six principles of stickiness, encapsulated in the SUCCESs framework: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotional Resonance and Stories. These principles provide a practical blueprint for crafting ideas that resonate and endure.

"To capture attention, ideas should defy expectations, creating curiosity gaps that are systematically filled," he explained. "Concrete language, rooted in sensory details and human actions, ensures ideas are universally understood. Credibility lends weight to ideas, allowing them to stand on their own, while emotional connections make them relatable and impactful. Finally, storytelling serves as a powerful tool for embedding ideas in the minds of others."

Heath, whose books have been translated into 35 languages and have sold over 4 million copies worldwide, is just the latest speaker in the Don R. Elliott Distinguished Presidential Lecture Series. The series is designed to expose the Lipscomb campus and the surrounding community to persons of influence in one or more issues of contemporary debate or discussion, with a preference for issues related to economics or political science.

The Elliott Lecture was presented for the first time in 2010, and has featured Elaine Kamarck, James P. Pinkerton, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Thomas Friedman, Nina Totenberg; Captain Chelsey "Sully" Sullenberger, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, David Gergen and Daniel Pink.

The lecture series is named in memory of Don R. Elliott, a native of Kerr, Arkansas, who was a professor of economics and political science at Little Rock University, Randolph-Macon College and Vanderbilt University. He founded Don Elliott and Associates, a fundraising consulting firm that directed campaigns for Lipscomb University and a host of other universities, colleges and private schools.

- Photos by Kristi Jones

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