The uncles of one of my students wrote a book called Switch. It seems pretty cool. You can find an excerpt of it here at a magazine called Fast Company.
The premise is that we are good at finding problems but sometimes that paralyzes us. What we really need to do is look for bright spots and copy that.
Dozens of experts had analyzed the situation in Vietnam, agonizing over the problems — the water supply, the sanitation, the poverty, the ignorance. They’d written position papers and research documents and development plans. But they hadn’t changed a thing.
Six months after Sternin’s visit to the Vietnamese village, 65% of the kids were better nourished — and they stayed that way. Later, when researchers from Emory University’s School of Public Health came to Vietnam to gather independent data, they found that even children who hadn’t been born when Sternin left the village were as healthy as the kids Sternin had reached directly. That provided proof that the changes had stuck.
