Dan Heath
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
coming up next on passion struck we're looking at the employees who gave a one or two or three out of ten because they're very disengaged they may be in danger of leaving and so we've got a fire we've got to put out the fire it's an emergency and what we don't do a lot of times instinctively is say well hang on a second yes it's important to pay attention to problems but do we understand
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Wow. The temperature is yellow. That stuff that came out of that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
So we can claim co-credit for that national spot. What was it, a stoplight? What was the metaphor, a temperature gauge or a stoplight? Or was it just a color spectrum? I forget.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Man, what a great story. Thanks for sharing that. Boy, you made the most of that moment.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
I think the starting point for Reset, the problem it's trying to solve, is the problem of mindless and undesirable autopilot. You've reached a point in your personal life or at work where you're going through the motions, you're trapped in the gravity of the way things have always worked, and you want something new.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
better and different and maybe you've made gestures in those directions before but nothing's really changed and so this kind of complacency has said in fact that the first story in the book to me has become a kind of symbol for this so it starts in a receiving area in a hospital northwestern memorial hospital
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
and in this receiving area there was a red phone on the wall that rang all the time it was usually like a staffer or a nurse calling to check on the status of some package they'd ordered maybe some medication or some surgical gloves or whatever and so somebody in the receiving area pick up the red phone get the call and then go on a kind of scavenger hunt around the receiving area like it was just chaos it was trying to find something in a hoarder's attic in those days
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And the numbers say it all. It took them an average of three days to get a package delivered within the hospital, which is just nuts, right? You order a medication and maybe FedEx or UPS get it halfway across the country in a day or two. And then to get from the basement of the hospital to the third floor might take another three days.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
So this is a fantastically expensive problem because sometimes medications expire right in the box because they're not put in the fridge in time. Sometimes it leads people to overorder because they're afraid they're not going to get their package in time. Sometimes people are trying to make side deals with the UPS driver to just bypass the receiving area and come straight to their floor.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And what I would say about this situation is that the people working in the receiving area were not incompetent. They were not dumb. They were not lazy. They were stuck. They were working a hard day every day. They came to work. They did their best. They went home.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And when you rack up enough days, and some of them have been working there for decades, so they might have had 20 years in a row with an average track record of three days to deliver a package. You just come to assume, well, that's just the way reality is, right? That's the physics behind.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
of my world is it takes three days and so the departure point for the book is to say when you're in a situation where things aren't the way you want them to be and you aspire for more but you're skeptical you can get to more what do you do to escape that trap and so so those are the first couple of pages in the book and i think a metaphor for what's to come
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Absolutely. In fact, the very heart of the book is a very simple two-part framework. So the idea is to get unstuck, to get to a different and better equilibrium, you've got to do two things. One is to find leverage points, which is just an acknowledgement of the fact that in complicated situations, we can't change everything.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
We can't change most things or even maybe a significant fraction of things, but we can change something. And so leverage points are the something we want to find because that's an intervention or an action where a little bit of investment yields disproportionate returns. So that's part one. That's like, where do we aim our efforts? And then the second part is.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
How do we push in that new direction that we've identified? How do we get the force, the fuel we need to go in a new direction? And it's compounded by the fact that we probably don't just have satchels of free cash on the sidelines or idle employees that we can draft into duty. Like we're probably stuck with what we have today. which means we've got to reorganize, realign.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
In the book, I use the phrase restack resources to push on those leverage points. So that's it. Find leverage points, restack resources. Very simple. But of course, it's really complex to do those things. The first half of the book is about the detective work of where do you find these magical leverage points that let you do a lot with a little? And the second half of the book is about
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
How do you make these trade-offs where you stop doing X and start doing Y or where you find previously untapped resources to employ? Where do you find that fuel that you need to push in a new direction?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
I think we know it in our guts. I think what happens a lot of times is like to go back to the receiving area. I don't think anyone in the receiving area felt like they were at their ideal level of performance. So it's not that they were deceiving themselves. It's more like a kind of learned helplessness or defeatist instinct. Well, it's always been this way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
We've tried things over the years to do something different. They never went anywhere. So it must just be the way things are. So I think part of it is just reawakening our sense of agency. Hey, wait a minute. We don't just have to accept this as nature, as the way things are. We do have influence here. We can do something.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And the second thing is sometimes it's helpful just to look outside to get a new influence. In fact, what eventually triggered, we can come back to Northwestern later, but what eventually triggered the turnaround, because they did turn around completely. But the catalyst was a guy named Paul Suitt who came from outside, took over the department. His background was in lean manufacturing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And so he was used to looking at things from a systems lens and And when he came in, it was just immediately obvious, hey, things can be different here. And if I can convince this team to trust me on this journey, like we can go from being the pariahs of the hospital to the superstars.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Yes. And first, I want to give proper credit to Nelson Repenning, who's an MIT professor, as the source of the phrase, go and see the work. That's the chapter title. So here's the spirit of that. Repenning and his colleagues tell the story of a corrugated box manufacturer. And the boss notices that their paper waste is higher than industry averages. So that's an example.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
We were just talking about looking outside. Well, you compare yourself to outside. Hey, wait a second. We're not performing as well as our competitors. Why is that? And so the boss just goes and sees the work, which means get closer to the ground level. So in a factory situation, it means walking the factory floor, watching the way things are made.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
In a hospital, it might be following a patient journey from check-in to procedure to check out. In a school, it might mean, and one of the stories in the book is about a principal who followed around a ninth grader all day long, including sitting in the classes and sitting in the lunchroom. That's going and seeing the work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
So back to the paper box manufacturer, the boss walks around and notices this corrugating machine, which is one of their signature assets, is shut down during lunch. And he asked why. And the first couple of people he asked don't know. Eventually runs down the answer is years prior, there was some instability from the local utility that provided electricity to the factory.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And it seemed to be concentrated around lunchtime. So they just started kind of preemptively shutting down the machine because it wasn't good for the machine to have variable power and just be abruptly shut down. And so being good systems thinkers, they thought, aha, well, we'll get ahead of this. We'll prevent any damage to the machine by shutting it down.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
But the way organizations work is over time, things just become habitual. And so it just becomes part of your day-to-day checklist. Well, okay, did we shut the machine down for lunchtime? Yes, check. And months go by and months go by. And meanwhile, the utility has fixed the instability, but it doesn't change the fact that they're shutting down the corrugating machine at lunchtime.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Years later, the boss is like, why are we shutting down this machine? Every time we shut down the machine, it creates waste because there's work and product. And then there's a startup cost and there's whatever was in the machine when we shut it down. And so that's one of the major sources of waste and nobody has a good answer.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And they eventually find they've been shutting the machine down for no purpose at all. And so that's an example of where from a boss's perspective, when you're looking at numbers on a spreadsheet, our waste per month is such and such. It might tell you directionally something's not great, but you can't really diagnose it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
You can't really figure out, hey, what could we change to get a better answer until you go and see the work?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
That's a great example of one of the chapters in the book is about waste. And waste is wonderful because if you can find places where you're spending energy, time, money, cash, whatever, to no positive value, you can cut it instantly. Nobody suffers. And then you can use those assets to help assist in your push toward the leverage points.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
why the nines and tens, the employees who are super duper happy at the far other end of the curve, do we understand why they're happy?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Yes, yes, yes. So I think first of all, on the averages point, here's a simple way to think about it. So much of what leaders see is some kind of aggregate or average. They're just looking at big numbers like revenue, profit, net promoter score, employee engagement score. And these are directionally useful. If something's trending the wrong way, it tells you that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
But consider this, let's say you've got a leader going through a 360 where people are giving that person feedback and there are two leaders that both have a seven out of 10 score. Pretty good, not great. You don't really understand anything about the situation until you've gotten closer to the data itself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
For instance, imagine one leader was evenly split between tens and fours that averaged out to seven. So it's very bimodal there. Half the team loves them and half the team is really unhappy. which is a very different situation than a different leader where everybody gave them a seven, like they're just moderately positive. No one is super excited. No one has a problem with them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
You don't really understand the situation until you understand what's beneath the average. So one corollary of that is. If you untangle the averages, you can often find, remember, we're on the hunt for leverage points. You can often find those leverage points by looking at the most positive data points underneath the average. So let me explain what I mean.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Like employee engagement data is something a lot of organizations collect these days. You got your employee pulse studies and somebody's looking at those. Is it going up? Is it going down? But again, if it's like a 69% score or something, these are scored in a lot of different ways, but let's just say it's like the manager. Let's say you're at a seven out of 10 level of happiness.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
You don't really understand anything until you've unpacked that and look at where the clusters of employees are. And specifically, I would argue that In most cases like this, our attention goes immediately to the problem areas. So we're looking at the employees who gave a one or two or three out of 10, because they're very disengaged. They may be in danger of leaving. And so we've got a fire.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
We've got to put out the fire. It's an emergency. And what we don't do a lot of times instinctively is say, well, hang on a second. Yes, it's important to pay attention to problems, but do we understand why the nines and tens, the employees who are super duper happy at the far other end of the curve, do we understand why they're happy?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And that's the intent of studying the bright spots is to try to understand why when we succeed, we are succeeding. And that may sound obvious. Well, how could anybody not know that? But I'll tell you, my experience is people instinctively study the problems And people know when they succeed, but they don't study it. They celebrate it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Or they're relieved that it was a success so they can spend more time on the problems. But we rarely study with the same tenacity what is working as we do what's not working.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Well, and I know a lot of your listeners are thinking about personal growth and just for pure truth and advertising, just this book is probably 75% organizational and 25% personal. So I don't want to sell something improperly, but this bright spots idea translates directly to personal growth. I've used it many times myself because the idea is let's consider a new year's resolution.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And most people set these lofty resolutions. And of course, we all know most people fail and they abandon them. And then we beat ourselves up. But the bright spots philosophy says something very different, which is maybe you started the year swearing that you were going to work out three times a week.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And maybe at the end of January, you've only gone three times total instead of three times a week. So from the way we've been taught, that's a failure. But what Bright Spot says is, no, you've got three bright spots. In the face of all the things you had to do, all the commitments you had, all the stresses you faced, all the unexpected problems, you still managed to triumph three times.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And here's the important part. How? what was different about those three times was it a certain time of day did you go with a friend did you pre-pack your clothes in the car so it was just three percent easier if you can understand what allows you to succeed even if it's in certain circumstances that opens the door to try to reproduce that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Yeah, I'm glad you did.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Yes. Well, in a certain way, I owe this whole book to Chick-fil-A. So I tell the story of during the pandemic, my wife sent me out to fetch a dinner for the family. I've got two young girls and they'll only eat about eight foods. And one of them is Chick-fil-A. So we spent a lot of time at Chick-fil-A and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
I went there and I was crushed because it was probably the longest line I'd ever seen in my life at a drive through. I mean, it must have been at least 50 cars in line. And so, oh, man, I hate lines. And so I just took a deep breath and just patiently started trying to come up with lies.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
I could tell my wife to explain why I came home without the Chick-fil-A, but ultimately decided, OK, I'll put on my big boy pants and get in line. And what happened next completely flipped my emotions because this line was just steadily creeping forward. It was uncanny. It was almost like those automatic car washes you've probably been through where they just pull your car along.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And I was totally fascinated by what they were doing. And I resolved. to figure it out. After I delivered dinner that night, it probably took me 10 or 15 minutes to get through a 50 car line. It blew my mind. So later I go back, I talked to the owner operator, a guy named Tony Fernandez. He tells me that their peak is processing over 400 cars in an hour. That's a car every nine seconds.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
that is just not the way the world i mean you could put your kids through college before arby's would process 400 cars let's be honest so this is just a freakish level of performance and and so i i began talking to tony to try to understand how he'd gotten there And he had just this laser-sharp philosophy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
He said drive-through flow, which is what they're managing to, is all about finding the bottlenecks, managing the bottlenecks. Or the word I use in the book is constraint, but they're synonyms. What's the limiting force in the system? And so, for instance, in a lot of drive-throughs, the bottleneck will be the menu board, the little menu where you order food.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And there are some these days that have two lanes. Most of them still have one lane. And so if you get behind that one person that gets to the board and then they rolled on their window and it's, they're just dazzled by the array of choices in front of them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And they take five minutes to decide, like that means your time in line went up by five minutes and the person behind you went up by five minutes and And so as an example, that's a constraint that Chick-fil-A, at least my local Chick-fil-A, said, well, what do we need a menu board for? I mean, it's nuggets and fries. Like, how hard is it? So they literally don't have a menu board anymore.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
They might have five human beings in the parking lot at once taking orders right at your driver's side window. You've probably seen this before. They'll walk up with an iPad and what can I get you? I mean, imagine that five people dealing with orders at once. There's not a drive-thru on the planet that has five different menu board lanes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
So that gives them this incredible ability to scale up and down. If they're busy, maybe four or five people are taking orders. If they're slow, maybe it's one or two. And here's the important thing. When you're thinking about systems, there's going to be a constraint. There's going to be a number one thing holding you back. So let's say in that case is the menu board.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
So Chick-fil-A figures out a way around that. Well, we can scale this up and down as needed. It's not like you fix the constraint forever. What happens is the constraint just moves somewhere else. So if you've got five people in the parking lot taking orders are streaming into the kitchen. Well, now the kitchen is the constraint. They can't keep up. They can't fry nuggets and fries that fast.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
So you've got to get them more help, better systems. And then once the kitchen can keep up, maybe the bottleneck hops over to what they call meal assembly, where they box and bag your food and get it ready to deliver to you. And so that's how you manage a system is one step at a time. You look what's holding you back, whittle away, move somewhere else, then shift your focus there, whittle away.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And every time you do that, the system is getting better. And then that sounds very operational and it is operations. People talk a lot about bottlenecks and constraints, but I think it's also possible to see the personal implications of that and to start thinking carefully about what are the limiting factors and the constraints in our own lives.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And that analogy actually works perfectly for the idea of a burst because you're right. It's to get the car moving at all takes far more force than what you need to keep it going. And so what does that mean? Well, I love the example. We cite this guy named Greg McLawson, who's an attorney. But for the course of the story, it's more important that he's a husband.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And he was working on a new watering system for his wife's garden. And so they had set up a bunch of hardware to make sure the gardens stayed watered on the right schedule. But Greg McLaughlin said the immutable law of the universe is that you can never get anything you everything you need for a home improvement project with one trip to Home Depot.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Or maybe in tribute to you, we should switch that to Lowe's. You can never get everything you need in one trip. And so he joked that even if you went to get one 60 watt light bulb and you got it, you would discover when you got home, it actually needs to be a 59 watt light bulb. And so this immutable law held true for him.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And he figured out there was this one part he had bought that was defective. It was like a $2 cheap part. And so he said from like the perspective of efficiency, it would make most sense for him to just add that to his next Lowe's trip, which inevitably would be a week or two in the future. And he could just get that and piggyback on whatever else he was doing. But he said-
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
What mattered to his wife was not efficiency. It was finishing the project. She wanted the plants watered. And so he had to go back to get that $2 part. He said he probably wasted $200 in labor costs because he's a lawyer and he's billing by the hour mentally. And $6 in gas just to get that $2 part. And so he said it was a disaster from efficiency's sake.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
But he said it was a huge win from the sake of finishing the project. It was working to completion. And he points out that efficiency is not always synonymous with effectiveness. That what his wife wanted was watered plants. That was the test of success, not how quote unquote efficient it was.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And so we use that as a launching pad for this notion of when you want to change something, it's like that car on the side of the road situation. You need a burst of work up front that is designed not to be efficient, but to be effective, to get momentum going. And that can take a lot of forms.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Like there's a methodology called a sprint used a lot in design and software circles where a team will literally clear their decks for a week. They'll all be in the same room collaborating live for one solid week. Everything else gets shelved and they're working towards something back to work to completion.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
At the end of the week, they're going to have a prototype or they're going to have a shell website or whatever it is they're working on. And that provides the momentum. And think about how much BS that short circuits. If you don't do that stuff in a week, it's like you go from spending 35 focused hours in a week to spending 135 unfocused hours over six months.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
But by compressing it, you get that liftoff velocity that you need to start the change process.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Yes. So this came out of a conversation I had with a guy named David Philippi, who's a consultant at an agency called Strategex. They're zealots for the Pareto principle. I'm sure everybody listening has heard the 80-20 principle. In the business world, you often hear 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the customers. Philip, I told me that's generally been true.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Thanks so much, John. Great to be here.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Although he said for profit, it's far more distorted. It's more like 20% of your customers are 150% of your profits. And what does it mean to have 150% of your profits? Well, what it means is you're serving a bunch of customers who are actually unprofitable. Like you would have a better business if you had a whole segment of customers go somewhere else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
So Phillip, I said they do this thing where they will force rank customers by profitability from most to least profitable. And he said that in almost every case, what they find is that the enterprise's worst customers are over coddled, getting too much time and resources devoted to them, and their best customers are under coddled.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
So one tangible example is he says a lot of times the on-time delivery rates will be better for an organization's worst customers than their best, which just seems befuddling, right? How could you treat your worst customers better than your best? But the worst customers are just buying kind of nickel and dime stuff.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Maybe it's the kind of thing where you can stick one part in a box and mail it out and it's easy. And your best customers are spending tons of money with you and they're doing these complicated things and maybe they're assemblies that, require a lot of collaboration and maybe your shipping department procrastinates those.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And so it's this paradoxical thing where you're treating your best people worse than your worst customers. Now, all that is about profit analysis, but I actually want to take that in a different direction. I wonder if that same analysis could also apply to almost any situation in life, including our personal relationships.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Imagine if you did a ranking of all the relationships in your life from most precious to least precious. And so at the top might be your spouse and your kids and your parents and your relatives. And at the bottom might be those relationships that are consistently stressful, anxiety provoking, maybe even toxic, take a lot of your time, don't give much back.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And isn't it almost certainly the case that we're probably under coddling those people at the bottom at the expense of the people we care most about. So, so that the chapter kind of makes this point that if we're looking at
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
for more resources to push in a new direction back to this idea find leverage points restack resources isn't this almost like an evergreen methodology you can use to steal from the over coddled customers and relationships and projects and time expenditures in your life and reallocate those to the undercoddle the ones at the top that you care most about
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Well, I was going to say two things, but it's actually all in one place. My name is Dan Heath, spelled like the candy bar, danheath.com. And that'll give links to, we talked about the book Reset. And we also talked about my podcast, What It's Like to Be. And both of those have really visible links on that danheath.com site. Thanks for asking that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
thank you the podcast is still in its first legs it's barely over a year old we're about 50 million downloads short of your track record we're doing our best and it has been an absolute pleasure so the conceit for listeners not familiar with it in every episode i talk to somebody from a different profession cattle rancher a secret service agent a forensic accountant a mystery novelist and i just ask them a million nosy questions about what it's like to walk in their shoes what stresses them out
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Thanks so much, John. It's been a treat.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
What are the highs of their work? What's a good day? What's a bad day? And it is just such a treat to hear people talk about their work and really get into the nitty gritty details. And for me, it's just, it's a personal passion. I don't think this is ever going to be something that threatens Joe Rogan, but I really enjoy the process of making it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
I went through exactly the same thought process as you because that interview was published just a couple of weeks before that shooting. And I was, I just remember wincing and she had just said, this was the result of the JFK assassination that they learned. You can never let the bad guys take the high ground. And so to have such a lapse, but I will say, I think this is just me speculating.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
So this is not factual, but my guess is what happened. with that was also something that she mentioned in the episode, which is that the Secret Service plays this kind of unique, weird role in that it often is coordinating with a zoo of different law enforcement agencies.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
So you take a candidate on the trail, they want to go to the local diner, and you've got to get them from the airport to the diner through traffic, shutting things down and back. And so that may mean you're dealing with the airport authority and the sheriff and the local police, and it may transcend different jurisdictions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And my guess is what happened was basically a communication breakdown between this soup of different law enforcement agencies that were on site there. At least that's one man's personal theory of what went wrong.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
I was so excited to talk to Jamie because some of your listeners may know this already, but to be a London cabbie and drive the classic black cabs, they have to pass an exam that has been called the hardest exam in any discipline in the world. No joke. They call it the knowledge, you have to pass the knowledge to be licensed as a cab driver.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And what that means is you have memorized basically every single road, street, alley, hotel, major building, bridge in Greater London, which is just a totally insane feat of mental gymnastics. And people spend years studying for this. I mean, you could probably become a doctor sooner than you could pass the knowledge. And so
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
I just loved hearing him talk about what was involved with that and how do you train for it? And what are some of the crazy questions they get asked on the exams? And it was heartbreaking to hear that in the modern age, So there are two paths to basically get one place from one place to another in London.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
You can either take one of these proud London cabbies that have passed the knowledge, or you can use Uber. And the qualifications to become an Uber driver are effectively nothing, right? You've got spare time in a car. Maybe you pass a background check. There's no exam. There's no special vehicle. And it was just heartbreaking to hear such a proud profession kind of chipped away by the new entrant.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Well, Jamie told me one of the funniest ones is he said, if they thought you hadn't done your homework in a particular area, they would ask you for some just incredibly obscure detail. That government building on the corner of such and such an Elm, what color is the front door? So it's not just, you can't just stay at home and study the map. It's not just that. It's all the contextual knowledge.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
It's what does this look like? And what's the history of such and such? And they might ask you to get from a certain hotel to a restaurant, but they don't tell you the name or address of the restaurant. They just tell you which chef just opened it. And so you have to know all of that kind of secondary knowledge like that. And I was just in awe of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
I mean, it's like a kind of intellectual Everest to me is the way I look at it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
I think that's a multi-dimensional question. And it's fun being the host of this podcast because it's, I get to see how a lot of different people address that. And it is, it's fascinating to see how different their answers can be. Sheldon, the the Christmas tree farmer.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
He has this beautiful moment at the end when he talks about how on a day-to-day basis, he's occupied with the mechanics of the job. It's mowing the weeds in between the rows of Christmas trees. And he is a master of shearing the Christmas tree using a very long blade and kind of hand sculpting their growth. And he does that thousands of times a year.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And so on a day-to-day basis, he's consumed by the particulars. But he says every now and then, He just has a moment where he's able to stand back and maybe from a certain elevated place on the land that he works, he just looks out and sees all these trees that are the result of his careful crafting and cultivation over the years.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
He's hand sculpted every one of them and he just sees this beautiful vista and it's like he thinks, man, I've got it made. And so for him, it's like the achievement of that and then seeing ultimately those trees find a home with a family that are going to make that tree the centerpiece of their Christmas and getting to meet them and see them haul off the tree.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
His farm is one where you cut it down and take it with you. And so he gets to see all these trees he's raised for seven or eight years go into their eventual homes. So that's his way of thinking about mattering. And then you take other people that might have very different careers. A hairstylist I talked to months ago talked about how people sit in the chair. It's almost like a kind of therapy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
We've probably all experienced this. You find yourself just chatting with the stylist or barber to pass the time. And she says over a period of years, you see your clients grow. And it had just never dawned on me to think this way. But she said she had clients where she did their elementary school piano recital and then their prom haircut and their college graduation haircut.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
And then, oh, my gosh, she's on site the day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
getting married and just the trajectory of being able to see and grow up with your clients and see how they blossom and see how they change over time that was her source of meaning and satisfaction so it's been beautiful just to see how many different definitions there can be for what matters oh well thank you so much for sharing that i always love to get people's different definitions because
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dan Heath on How to Reset Your Brain for Success | EP 562
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
When you're told, no, that can't work, we can't try that, no, somebody else tried that, it doesn't work, it's not your business, stay out of it. When you're told that, you know, a hundred times in a row, it's like you just kind of slowly build up these calluses.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
I think it's like a slow realization of powerlessness and which yields a slow accretion of indifference. I think that every human being coming into a new job means well, has ideas, notices things they would do differently.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
but when you're told no that can't work we can't try that no somebody else tried that it doesn't work it's not your business stay out of it when you're told that you know 100 times in a row it's like you just kind of slowly build up these these calluses Um, and, and eventually you shrug your shoulders and you say, you know, well, that's just, this is my degree of freedom.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
It's tiny, but if I want to keep this job, I'll stay within that degree of freedom. And so a lot of times, like in situations like that, you need that, that outside catalyst, you know, and, and so it may be that some of these situations have just not yet found the right catalyst.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
I think that's right. I think that's right. Like the receiving area story where it was taking them three days to deliver within the hospital. I think what happened there is, you know, the muckety mucks in the hospital had gotten enough complaints with people that were frustrated. Hey, we can't get our medicines and our gloves on time. And that they brought in a new person. And that was the spark.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
I don't think it always takes that. I mean, that would be kind of depressing if, you know, a new boss was the answer. But I think there often does need to be a new catalyst.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
well here's something that's interesting about that story which is i think a lot of the things that they had done unwittingly were motivated by by good goals like i'll give you an example they had a lot of batch processes baked into the way they handled things and you know batch processes are great sometimes like we nobody
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
puts one spoon at a time in the dishwasher and then runs it and puts in a fork. I mean, we load it up, right? It's a batch or the same thing with laundry. And so batch processes can work wonders for efficiency. And so that was the thinking behind some of the things they had done. Like, for instance,
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
when FedEx and UPS would pull up, lay some packages down, and then they would kind of wait until there was a pile of packages before they did the first level of processing. Maybe it was zapping the packages into the inventory system or whatever. And then maybe they'd let a second pile build up before they did the next thing. Maybe it's stickering the boxes with their destination and the hospital.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
And so the thinking was, this is making us more efficient because When we get around to stickering the boxes, like we can go slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, and do 20 of them at once. But what the new guy realizes is that no, no, no, this is not a system where you need batch processes.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
Like he completely changes their mental model and says, I want you to imagine letting packages flow like a river. And so our job is to help packages flow from the delivery trucks through our system to their places in the hospital. Our job is to remove friction, to remove delays. And it's like once they put on those lenses, they were able to reimagine the way that they work.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
And they were able to realize not only would it be a lot better for the people in the hospital, it was also a lot better for them. It was actually less work to create the better system. Like here's my favorite example of that.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
They had a red phone in the receiving area that they had to answer all the time with people from within the hospital complaining about their packages and asking for someone to check on them. And so, you know, they pick up the phone, they handle these complaints, they've got to go rushing around looking for the package. And that's all wasted effort.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
Because the people in the hospital didn't want to have to call about their packages to check on them. And then to have to spend 10, 15 minutes fielding each one of these calls. When the packages start flowing and they start getting where they need to go on the right time schedule, those calls disappear. And all of a sudden, you don't have to do that work anymore.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
It's actually easier to stick with the better system.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
The heart of what I'm saying boils down to a two-part framework. If you're trying to get unstuck, number one, find leverage points. So those are those places where a little bit goes a long way, like the batch processes in this receiving area. That was a place where if they cut that out, they could get big gains quick.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
And then the second part is about, okay, now that you've found a place to aim in the leverage points, how can you muster resources to push in that new direction? And resources might be, you know, your time or your energy or your motivation or your systems. The problem that most of us have is we don't have extra of any of those things.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
You can't just walk to the office supply cabinet and pull down a satchel of cash or tap some idle employees to come off the bench. You're stuck with what you have. We have to be smart about how do we reconfigure those resources to push in a new way.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
Yeah, well said. I remember years ago I talked to this kind of genius systems thinker named Steven Spear and I was asking him about some of the changes that he'd seen. And he said that change tends to start with an insufferable frustration. You know, when people just, you know, fed up and they're like, you know, we want this to be different, that's often the motivating factor.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
Now, that said, I think all of us can play a role in helping other people discover that insufferable frustration. You know, imagine if you were in the receiving area And you took one of your colleagues to like another hospital in Chicago and showed them how theirs worked.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
And it was clean and there weren't piles of boxes and they weren't answering frustrated calls and the packages were just zipping along. Like an experience like that has a way of creating an insufferable frustration. Like why do we have, why is ours so much worse? Why do we have to live like this? And so I think we can help unite and rally our colleagues around a new direction.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
One thing that really struck me, what I call considering the goal of the goal. I came across the story of a guy named Ryan Davidson. So he buys a new truck, a Ram truck at a dealership. And then within hours of him driving off the lot, they're immediately pestering him about to fill out a survey about the experience he had.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
And when I say pester, I mean at least five different people from the dealership hit him up in at least three different media, email, texting, calling. I mean, just hounding the guy. And not just for insight, they wanted like positive scores. I mean, they basically said as much. We would really appreciate positive scores on these surveys. And so Davidson kind of reluctantly fills out this survey.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
Probably all of us have been through some form of this. And after he's been pestered and pestered and pestered and pestered for feedback, he fills it out, gives them the feedback, never hears from anyone again, except for his salesperson who texts him to complain about not being given all 10 out of 10s on the survey. And when you think about a charade like that,
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
I think what's going on is at some point people thought, hey, we want to deliver a good experience for people who buy cars and trucks from us. Okay, so far, so good. We need things to measure so that we know if we're getting better or worse. Okay, well, let's try a survey at the end. That makes sense. Okay, so far, so good. But then sometimes these goals just take on a life of their own.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
So rather than using those surveys as a diagnostic of whether the experience is getting better, the survey becomes an end in itself, right? It's like they just want you to literally bubble in 10 out of 10, regardless of what your actual experience was, because if they get a 10 out of 10, they'll get a bonus or something.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
And so that's why I think this prompt, if we can learn to consider what's the goal of the goal, I think that's a useful corrective. So in this situation, the goal of the goal, in other words, why are we collecting the survey data? Surely it's not because we want our team to get better and better at hectoring customers into giving falsely inflated scores, right?
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
That surely can't be the goal of the goal. The goal of the goal is to provide a better experience. And if that's what we care about, this whole charade, of bugging people to give 10 out of 10s is just on the wrong path altogether.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
Why are you asking me for feedback if you fundamentally do not care what the feedback is?
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
Exactly right. There's a law called Goodhart's Law that says when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And I love that because that's what happened in the survey story, right? It's like as soon as you start layering on carrots and sticks to get the 10 out of 10, when the measure becomes a target, it's no longer a good measure of anything.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
There's a story that I love about a receiving area at a hospital, Northwestern Memorial Hospital. And so this is the group whose job it is to take incoming packages and get them delivered to their appropriate places in the hospital. And for a long time, their average delivery time from receipt of package to ultimate delivery was three days, right?
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
So UPS or FedEx would deliver the package across the country in a day or two, and then to get from the receiving area to the third floor of the same hospital might take another three days. And I love situations like that because, let's be clear, the people working in this department, they were not lazy. They were not stupid.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
They were just stuck inside a system that had kind of hardened and become entrenched. And maybe my favorite quote in the book captures this. It comes from a healthcare expert named Paul Batalden, who says that every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
And I think that's the story of situations like that receiving area where every day you come to work, as long as you can remember, it's taken you three days to get packages delivered. And you come eventually to kind of shrug your shoulders and say, well, maybe that's the way things work. And so it's situations like that that I'm hoping to help people get out of.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
That is exactly it. Yes. It's like you come to just almost accept the way things are as well. This is just the way nature operates, right? It's because that's all you've ever seen. I mean, every day you come to work, you work a hard eight hour day, you go home and next day it's the same thing. And so what often happens is, and in this case, this is what happened. An outsider came in.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
Who had a background in lean manufacturing. And so he comes in and he immediately realizes, you know, half dozen things that they could fix to get way better performance. But he's also savvy enough and wise enough to realize it's not enough for him to want to change. He's got to plant the seed with this crew.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
And so he starts by canvassing them to figure out, hey, I'm here to help us all do better work to make your life easier, to make it smoother. If I can do that, will you help me? And the first thing he asked them is what's getting in your way? What are your complaints? What are the stones in your shoes, so to speak?
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
And they start flagging these very mundane things like, you know, they push the packages around on carts and some of the carts have those kind of janky gummed up wheels like you get in the supermarket sometimes. And so this new guy says instantly, okay, new carts, new wheels, whatever it takes, that shouldn't be a source of friction in our work. What's next?
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
And so that becomes a theme as well, is if we're trying to get unstuck, motivation is the fuel for that change. And so this outsider, Paul Seward, that came into the receiving area, he was very, very attentive to motivation as the force that would help him achieve a higher level of performance.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
It is hard. And that's why it doesn't happen naturally. Why these... equilibria, if you will, kind of set in and we adapt to them. So one of the principles that I offer is the notion of finding leverage points, which is to say in situations where we're stuck, there's a lot of variables. There's a lot of factors involved. We can't change them all.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
We've got to find a place to push where a little bit of effort yields a disproportionate return. And so the next logical question is, OK, well, how do you find these magical leverage points? And that's what I devote many different principles to helping people explore. And one of those, just to give you a flavor, is the idea of studying bright spots. So this is a story actually from a therapist.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
There's a branch of therapy called Solutions Focused Therapy that is obsessed with bright spots. And one of my favorite examples has to do with this kid, Bobby, who was a ninth grader, always in trouble at school, always getting sent to the principal for discipline. Comes in, one day there's a new counselor, just started, and he is a practitioner of this branch of therapy.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
Counselor immediately asked Bobby, Bobby, when do you not get in trouble as much at school? I mean, think about the beauty of that question. Like it's so natural to just kind of wallow in the problems and what's not working. The counselor's immediately looking for where are the bright spots? When is Bobby not getting in trouble?
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
And so Bobby says, well, I don't get in trouble as much as Mrs. Smith's class. the counselor starts peppering him. Okay, well, what's different about Mrs. Smith's class? What does she do that's different? How does it feel different? And eventually identifies these three very specific things that Mrs. Smith does, one of which is to green him at the door with a smile.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
Usually Bobby's other teachers tended to kind of You know, slink the other way when they saw the kid coming, not Mrs. Smith. And she always checked to make sure he understood the instructions before assignments and these other very practical things that the counselor then takes to Bobby's other teachers and says, hey, I know you've had some struggles with Bobby. Will you try these things?
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
Will you try this? greeting him at the door where you try making sure he understands the instructions every time. And basically Bobby goes from getting in trouble in about four or five out of six classes a day down to about one or two out of six a day. And to me, that's a kind of magic to take a situation where this kid had a really, really problematic home life in and out of foster care.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
You can't change that. You can't affect that. You can't go back in time and give him a more caring family. But what you can do is look for what's succeeding in spite of that. And that's the notion of bright spots.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
I completely agree. And I think what happens, especially in the world of organizations, is our attention is just captured by the problems. You know, a lot of leaders just kind of careen from one emergency to the next, and they're constantly putting out fires. And so when something good happens, it's not that people are oblivious.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
You know, we all know when things are working and we all know that the happy times and the best customers and so forth. But the trick is we don't study what's working. We just acknowledge it. We celebrate it. We're relieved that something's working because it gives us more time to work on the things that aren't working.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
And I think the twist that I'm adding is, hey, let's take that same discipline that we use to figure out, hey, that broke. Why did it break and how can we keep it from happening again? Let's flip that around and say, why did that work? So we can understand how to do it more.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
I got the best email from a reader who was saying that years ago she had worked in a government office and one of her priorities as a leader was to canvas people on the front line to get their ideas and their inspirations. And she said, you know, this one woman had been working in the printing department for a long time. And she said, well, I've got an easy idea for you.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
We need to start buying paper in bulk.
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
and and for whatever reason you know back to the notion of systems that just kind of set in and get sclerotic they'd just been buying paper on a project basis like when they had something brewing they go buy some paper they do it and then but she said you know we go through a ton of paper and if we just kind of anticipated what we would need and buy it in bulk it would be vastly cheaper and and so the boss immediately runs with this to start buying paper in bulk they save
Something You Should Know
How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down
Tens of thousands of dollars, no joke. And imagine what that does for morale. Number one, to be listened to. Number two, to see that your suggestion was put into practice and to see it pay off. Not only was that a win for the organization, but it was also just a huge psychological win for the people involved.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
It's like no one wants to hear the story of the rich, well-connected guys who meet up at the Marriott conference room to hatch a business plan. There's no romance in that.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Now, that is, at a minimum, an exaggerated tale. In fact, there's a third founder of YouTube who claims the dinner party never happened. And Steve Chin later admitted in Time magazine that the dinner party was embellished to provide a better founding myth.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
And I do want to say that while it feels like a little bit of a letdown to realize that this dinner party story is not the whole truth, I feel like it's a little bit unfair for us to expect more of them than the creation of YouTube. I mean, here's this incredible site, and in some sense, that's not enough for us. We want YouTube to have emerged from some kind of everyday experience.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
It's not enough to have the value of their work. We also want there to be a really compelling story that started it.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Well, Christopher Columbus, as we all know, wanted to prove that he could reach India by sailing west. But no one believed his crazy theory that the earth was round. And in fact, his own sailors en route were terrified that they were about to fall over the edge of the earth. And they almost mutinied.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
So there's a guy named James Lowen, a professor at University of Vermont, who has pointed out that virtually every element of the story is false. That in fact, we still don't really know where Christopher Columbus was going. There's a lot of disagreement among historians and even Columbus's best known biographer isn't totally sure where he was headed.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
And furthermore, there was no element of is the earth round or flat here. Most people at that time already knew that the earth was round. The evidence was there for them to see. They noticed that if another ship is receding into the horizon, their hull disappears first and then the mast later, which implies that there's some kind of curvature in play. And again, you know...
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Here's a guy who crossed an ocean and became one of the first Europeans to set foot on a new continent, and yet we want more from this guy. We want him to be having hand-to-hand combat with his crew en route. We just crave the drama. We crave the obstacles.
This American Life
535: Origin Story
Looks good. By the way, it has Julian Tonig's fingerprints all over it.