Reset How to change what's not working

In this enthusiastic guide, What It's Like to Be podcaster Heath (Upstream) explains how corporate and organizational leaders can utilize small interventions to produce big changes. When looking for areas to improve, Heath recommends taking a close look at daily operations and recounts how an Illinois high school principal concluded that teachers should provide more interactive instruction after she grew bored in class while shadowing a ninth grader for a day. Urging readers to consider how to deploy resources more efficiently, Heath describes how T-Mobile streamlined their call centers by encouraging representatives to prioritize solving customers' problems over fielding as many calls as possible, which reduced the number of incoming calls because customers no longer had to reach out multiple times about the same issue. Elsewhere, Heath suggests creating detailed rundowns of workflows to determine how teams might collaborate more productively. For example, he discusses how an Iowa hospital increased the number of CT scans it could provide after a study of employee responsibilities revealed receptionists could take over a frequent but minor task from nurses, freeing the latter to spend more time on other duties. Exhortations to seek feedback from stakeholders and remove workflow obstructions don't break new ground, but the detailed case studies provide helpful guidance on how to implement the suggestions. This is worth a look. Photos. Agent: Christy Fletcher, UTA. (Jan.)

Heath's (Upstream) book focuses on discovering points of intervention that enable organizations to turn processes and systems that aren't working into changes that yield big, lasting returns. The book's first five chapters are dedicated to a method for locating leverage points in which intervention can produce valuable change. The second half of the book looks at how organizations can reorganize resources to fuel those leverage points. Heath uses examples from hospitals, the fast-food industry, customer service, and high school career offices as success stories. If this sounds like a work about project management principles, it is; Heath shows readers how agile project management can be utilized without entering into a never-ending cycle of customer-facing improvement. Each chapter concludes with a summary and a list of resources. VERDICT Heath's clear writing will appeal to business readers, but there's enough research to give the book some academic heft as well. Its focus on making business changes that can have a lasting impact on employees separates the book from other titles about organizational change.--John Rodzvilla