Chip Heath & Dan Heath

Chip Heath and Dan Heath are American brothers and authors whose books — Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, and The Power of Moments — apply behavioral science to organizational and personal challenges with unusual practical clarity.

Chip Heath (a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business) and his brother Dan Heath (a senior fellow at Duke University’s CASE center) published Made to Stick in 2007, applying research on how ideas spread and endure to the practical question of how to communicate more effectively. The SUCCESs acronym — Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story — gave organizations a framework for making ideas memorable. The book sold millions of copies and established the Heath brothers as reliable interpreters of academic research for professional audiences.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (2010) drew on Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor of the rational rider and emotional elephant to explain why behavioral change is difficult and how to engineer it. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (2013) addressed decision-making specifically, with a four-step process (WRAP: Widen your options, Reality-test your assumptions, Attain distance before deciding, Prepare to be wrong) for improving the quality of important decisions.

The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact (2017) is perhaps their most emotionally resonant book — about why some experiences are disproportionately memorable and how to deliberately create them. The Heath brothers’ books share a consistent approach: a simple, memorable framework backed by academic research and illustrated with compelling case studies. They are ideal for business readers who want to engage with behavioral science without reading the primary academic literature.