The Three Keys to Change

That's all the "theory" you need to get started. Part One, or "Change 101," will look further at our three cases and build up the theory of change, showing that profound change can happen even in the most difficult situations. Part Two, or "Change 102," will look at how you can change your own life, and how, picking up on recent research in neuroscience, you can improve your knack for change and turn it into an ongoing skill and practice. Then I'll apply the three keys to change to a number of seemingly daunting situations: changing a loved one, changing a company or an organization or a societal institution, and changing an industry or profession. These true stories will take us from the executive offices of companies such as IBM, Yahoo, Amazon.com, and Microsoft to the hallways of charter schools in inner- city neighborhoods and to the desk of a parole officer in Dubuque, Iowa. Through it all we'll see again and again that the same underlying principles of psychology can unlock profound change--and these insights can be grasped easily by anyone.

Unfortunately, no one has been teaching us what we really need to know. People spend billions of dollars every year buying self- help and motivational tapes, videos, and books (such as this one), joining health clubs and diet programs, seeing doctors and therapists, and hiring life coaches and business consultants--and yet so often they fail to realize their goals. The reason isn't that they don't want to change or can't change but rather they don't understand change or have the right tools to effect it.

I was one of those people who repeatedly struggled and failed to change my personal life for many years--even though in my professional life I was expected to know a lot about the subject. When I attended that IBM conference and heard the renowned dean say that very few people can change, it made me wonder for a while about the validity of what I did for a living: I was a staff writer at the monthly business magazine Fast Company, which focused on topics of change and innovation. Every month I would write about yet another person who had managed to create profound change within a company or particular business. The stories were supposed to be sources of practical ideas and inspiration for the magazine's hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I would interview iconoclastic entrepreneurs such as Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com; Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways and the Virgin Megastore chain; and Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google. The reason I had gone to the IBM conference in the first place was that I was in the middle of researching an article about the efforts of IBM's leaders to change the entrenched corporate culture of their 330,000- person organization.

When I heard the experts claim that nine out of ten people can't change, it made me wonder: Can that really be true? If so, the whole point of my work was basically futile. Was I writing every month about people who belonged to that one out of ten for readers who would probably be stuck for the rest of their lives among the other nine out of ten? Were people like Bezos, Branson, and Brin born with some special talent for change that others couldn't emulate no matter what they tried or how hard?

After a few troubled days, it occurred to me that I belonged to that one out of ten. Actually, I have earned a place in an even more selective cohort: I am part of the 3 percent of Americans who have lost weight (in my case, forty pounds) and kept it off for at least five years (the figures come from the National Institutes for Health). Three percent calculates to roughly one out of thirty- three. Although I don't really believe in astrology, I was the classic Taurus--exceptionally stubborn and gluttonous--and I thought: If I can change, then surely anyone can change. Maybe they just needed the inspiration of a terrific teacher and role model like the personal trainer I finally hired after a decade of failed struggles against obesity.

Then I tried to think of case studies that contradicted what the Johns Hopkins dean was saying. I was familiar with Dean Ornish's ideas because I lived just down the street from the University of California at San Francisco's medical school, and a number of my friends were doctors or students there. I also knew about Delancey Street because I had hired its ex-convicts as movers and had eaten at their restaurant and bought several Christmas trees from them. When I researched the figures about the success rates of those two programs, the odds for change totally flipped--assuming you knew what Dean Ornish and Mimi Silbert knew. The great need for spreading that knowledge much more widely through the populace inspired the research for this book.