Chip Heath

Chip Heath is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, teaching courses on business strategy and organizations. He is the co-author (along with his brother, Dan) of four books. Their latest book (an instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller) The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact was published in the fall of 2017. Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work was published in spring of 2013 and debuted at #1 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and #2 on the New York Times.

Their 2010 book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, hit #1 on both bestseller lists. Their first book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, spent two years on the Business Week bestseller list and was an Amazon Top 10 Business Book for both editors and readers.

Their books have been translated into over 30 languages including Thai, Arabic, and Lithuanian. Chip has consulted with clients ranging from Google and Gap to The Nature Conservancy and the American Heart Association. His parents are just happy that their sons are playing well together.

INTERVIEW WITH CHIP HEATH

Author and Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business

BY MAXIMUS INTERNATIONAL

Maximus recently worked with Chip Heath on a program to discover and embed memorable moments in the culture of a leading automobile manufacturer in Australia. Maximus took the opportunity to discuss with Heath how leaders with an appreciation of moments that matter can positively transform the impression made by their brands, products and services.

Maximus: Can you explain moments of power in a nutshell?

Chip Heath: What researchers have found is that people don’t remember most things that happen in their lives. The idea of moments of power is that there are certain moments that do matter to us. When we go on vacation, we don’t remember everything, we remember two or three great events. In our university careers, we don’t remember everything, again we remember peak events.

So, the question is, how do we think about creating moments that are both meaningful and memorable. Why don’t we design for those in the first place? Why don’t we design the vacation so it has those moments? Design a college career so that it has those moments?

M: As an organisational behaviourist, what led you to explore the power of individual moments?

CH: We started by looking at experiences, patient experiences, hospital experiences, experiences for businesses and employee experiences. And we noticed some underlying consistencies. When we asked people about peak moments in their workplace, peak moments as a customer, the same principles keep coming up again and again. We distilled that into a four-part model that describes a lot of peak experiences and therefore suggests how to make experiences better.

M: Can you talk a little more about any of the four elements that lie within your model?

CH: A lot of profound moments in life are about connection, connection with our family with our friends. When you think about a birthday party with a birthday cupcake — that compact distillation of fat sugar and flame — it’s an elevated sensory moment. And the question is, can you create this sensory moment for other people, say, in the customer situation?

Imagine walking onto a car lot and instead of the salesperson just handing you the keys to your new car, there’s actually some celebration: there’s confetti, there’s music. That would make it more of a sensory experience. It would start having the characteristics that we associate with definitive moments. They are fun to talk about.

There’s a hotel in LA called the Magic Castle Hotel. The aspect of it most commented about on Trip Advisor is the red phone by the pool. A sign on the phone says, “Popsicle hotline”. So, you walk over to the phone, you pick it up and a few minutes later somebody shows up wearing white gloves, carrying a silver tray, passing around popsicles. There’s no better combination than a cold popsicle on a warm LA afternoon. The hotel has created a peak moment from thin air. It’s an intense sensory experience and that 15-cent popsicle gets Magic Castle an extra half a point on Trip Advisor ratings because they thought about creating a moment that would be special to people.