Switch - Chip Heath [16]
6.
Focusing on bright spots can be counterintuitive for businesses. Richard Pascale, one of Jerry Sternin’s collaborators, discovered this in 2003 when he accepted a consulting assignment with Genentech. The company had recently launched a drug called Xolair, which had been regarded as a “miracle drug” for asthma. It had proved effective in preventing asthma attacks for many patients. Yet six months after launch, sales of Xolair remained well below expectations.
Pascale and his team were asked to help figure out why Xolair was underperforming. They immediately started looking for bright spots and soon found one: Two saleswomen who worked the Dallas–Fort Worth area were selling twenty times more Xolair than their peers. Further investigation revealed that the women were using a fundamentally different kind of sales pitch. Rather than selling the health benefits of the drug—which doctors largely understood—they were helping doctors understand how to administer the drug. Xolair was not a pill or an inhaler; it required infusion via an intravenous drip. This technique was unfamiliar (and therefore Elephant-spooking) to the allergists and pediatricians who would be prescribing the drug.
Here was a classic bright-spot situation. Like the Vietnamese mothers who mixed sweet-potato greens into their kids’ rice, these saleswomen were achieving radically different results with the same set of resources everyone else had. Having discovered the bright spot, Genentech’s managers could help spread the innovation across their entire sales force.
But that didn’t happen. And here is where a cautionary tale intrudes on our success story. What actually happened was this: The superior results of the Dallas–Fort Worth reps were viewed with suspicion! Managers speculated that the saleswomen had an unfair advantage, and their initial assumption was that the pair’s sales territories or quotas needed to be revisited. (Later investigation established that the two women had the same type of client base as the other reps.)
To be fair to the Genentech managers, let’s acknowledge that there was indeed a chance that those two reps were simply an anomaly. But the managers’ first reaction to the good news was that it must be bad news! That reaction is a good reminder that the Rider’s capacity for analysis is endless. Even successes can look like problems to an overactive Rider.
7.
Let’s circle back to Bobby, the troubled student, because now we can start to understand his rather abrupt transformation. Here’s a brief exchange from one of Bobby’s counseling sessions. Notice how Murphy, the school counselor, starts by popping the Exception Question:
MURPHY: Tell me about the times at school when you don’t get in trouble as much.
BOBBY: I never get in trouble, well, not a lot, in Ms. Smith’s class.
MURPHY: What’s different about Ms. Smith’s class?
BOBBY: I don’t know, she’s nicer. We get along great.
MURPHY: What exactly does she do that’s nicer?
Murphy wasn’t content with Bobby’s vague conclusion that Ms. Smith is “nicer.” He kept probing until Bobby identified several things about Ms. Smith and her class that seemed to help him behave well. For instance, Ms. Smith always greeted him as soon as he walked into class. (Other teachers, understandably, avoided him.) She gave him easier work, which she knew he could complete (Bobby has a learning disability). And whenever the class started working on an assignment, she checked with Bobby to make sure he understood the instructions.
Ms. Smith’s class was a bright spot, and as we’ve seen, anytime you have a bright spot, your mission is to clone it. Using Ms. Smith’s class as a model, Murphy gave Bobby’s other teachers very practical tips about how to deal with him: Greet Bobby at the door. Make sure he’s assigned work he can do. Check to make sure he understands the instructions.
What Murphy had avoided, of course, was archaeology. He didn’t dig into Bobby’s