Switch - Chip Heath [110]
424 kinds of gloves. Jon Stegner’s story and the quotations are from John P. Kotter and Dan S. Cohen (2002), The Heart of Change, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, pp. 29–30.
1% milk. For the story of the development of this campaign, see Steve Booth-Butterfield and Bill Reger (2004), “The Message Changes Belief and the Rest Is Theory: The ‘1% or Less’ Milk Campaign and Reasoned Action,” Preventive Medicine, 39, 581–588. The actual study is described in Bill, Reger, Margo G. Wootan, Steven Booth-Butterfield, and Holli Smith (1998), “1% or Less: A Community-Based Nutrition Campaign,” Public Health Reports, 113, 410–419.
In 2004, Donald Berwick. Berwick’s 100,000 lives campaign is the subject of a case study prepared by Chip’s colleagues at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. See Hayagreeva Rao and David Hoyt (2008), “Institute for Healthcare Improvement: The Campaign to Save 100,000 Lives,” Stanford Graduate School of Business Case Study L-13. For additional insight into this case, check out an article by Rao and Robert Sutton (September 2008), “The Ergonomics of Innovation,” The McKinsey Quarterly, http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_ergonom-ics_of_innovation_2197 (accessed May 17, 2009).
Chapter Two
In 1990, Jerry Sternin. The Vietnam story is compiled from various sources. An article by David Dorsey (December 2000), “Positive Deviant,” Fast Company, p. 42, first introduced popular audiences to Jerry and Monique Sternin’s work on positive deviance. Other details are from Jerry Sternin’s presentation at the Boston College Center for Corporate Social Responsibility in April 2008 and from interviews of Jerry Sternin by Chip Heath in March and April 2008 and of Monique Sternin in May 2009.
“We were like orphans.” Most of the direct quotations in this section are from Dorsey, “Positive Deviant.”
Bright spots. Sternin’s term for these outliers is positive deviants, which is based on a statistical analogy. Picture a statistical bell curve on which most people have outcomes around average. Sternin was looking for people on the positive tail of the bell curve.
Although the positive deviance methodology pioneered by Sternin is very useful, we found that the “deviance” terminology tends to be confusing or off-putting to people who aren’t familiar with statistics, so we use the “bright-spots” terminology. Later in this chapter, we carry the term bright spots over to other situations that involve exceptional positive performance.
Jerry Sternin died in November 2008. His work lives on through the work of Monique Sternin and the Positive Deviance Initiative at Tufts University. For an overview of the large number of domains in which positive deviance methods have produced substantial change, see the bibliography of work at http://www.positivedeviance.org/materials/bib_subj.html. Positive deviance was one of the “Ideas of the Year” highlighted by New York Times Magazine in 2008.
Emory University’s School of Public Health. See U. Agnes Trinh Mackintosh, David R. Marsh, and Dirk G. Schroeder (2002), “Sustained Positive Deviant Child Care Practices and Their Effects on Child Growth in Viet Nam,” Food and Nutrition Bulletin, 23, 16–25.
“School stinks,” said Bobby. Bobby