Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success by Matthew Syed

In Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success, author and table tennis Olympian Matthew Syed explores the role of innate ability (talent) vs. practice, and strongly promotes a practice-based approach to mastery. Although largely based on his experience in athletics, as well as research in athletics, art and music, the core principles of a "growth mindset" have many applications outside of these fields.

The key idea of Bounce is that effort and directed, challenging practice matter far more than natural ability in most pursuits, and that behind the story of many of child prodigies is a reality of hard work and dedication to practice far greater than others of a similar age. Mastery in a subject is usually not achieved without roughly 10,000 hours of directed practice (the 10,000 hour "rule"). This is often around 10 years of effort, given that it is difficult to consistently do more than 20 hours of really focused practice per week, 1000 per year. Many young stars in various fields, from Mozart to Picasso and the Williams sisters, also took approximately 10 years of training to begin to reach their peak performance despite being significantly ahead of their peers at a young age. Of particular note is that merely doing something for 10,000 hours doesn't result in mastery (for example, driving for 10,000 hours doesn't make you an expert driver), but instead mastery comes from targeted practice that stretches your limits. Top performers find techniques that continuously push them beyond their comfort zone, challenging themselves more relative to their own abilities than their less successful competitors. For example, top figure skaters don't only try harder jumps, but consistently try jumps that are farther beyond their current capabilities, and as a direct result, they also fall more during practice. MMA legend Fedor Emelianenko expressed this idea well after a significant loss: "The one who doesn't fall, doesn't stand up"

Starting with his own story as a child table tennis prodigy, Syed explains how his success could be seen as a natural result of his innate ability revealed at a young age and leading to his rise to the pinnacle of British table tennis. However, he then points out the multiple environmental factors that truly contributed, including having a full-sized table as a child, an older brother who was a motivated training partner which resulted in hours of practice against a strong opponent, which led in turn to early successes against his peergroup, and then to better coaching, including early work with a star coach in the local school district, and how these opportunities built in a reinforcing cycle. He then notes that a hugely disproportionate number of England's table tennis stars came from one single street, his street.

Effort-based praise and rewards (instead of talent-based recognition) lead to a culture of achievement, and increased resilience to setbacks: They teach that success shouldn't come easily because of your talent, but rather is obtained through consistent effort and a willingness to try, learn, refine, practice and improve. Organizational cultures that reward talent can even be destructive: Because innate ability can't be earned or improved, there is a much greater temptation to cheat when talent is the measure of success. Syed points to Enron as an extremely talent-oriented culture (talent was valued far more than knowledge), and points to the need to appear smart as one of the key reasons why people felt compelled to hide their failures at ever-greater scales. Embracing failure, taking on difficult challenges and insisting on hard work are key ingredients to a "growth" culture.

I found two of the studies cited in Bounce to be particularly worthwhile. The first is somewhat common in the "growth mindset" literature, about children who were praised on for their effort on a test versus children who were praised for their intelligence (talent). The children praised for effort were more willing to take additional, harder tests, and in fact did better, while the "talent praise" children attempted to retain their intelligent label by avoiding more difficult opportunities. In the other study, it was demonstrated that there is a transference effect to success. Students who read an article about a successful mathematician immediately before taking a test did better when the article was modified so that the mathematician was born on the same day as the test-taker. This placebo effect is discussed in several other examples, but I found it quite surprising.

Bounce also describes the experiences of László Polgár, the father of three chess superstars who set out on a publicized, real-world experiment to demonstrate that he could raise children to become chess champions despite having no chess aptitude himself, and literally recruited a wife to help him. His quest to prove  that "geniuses are made, not born" is fascinating. Although the success of his experiment was astonishing (Judit Polgar is considered to be the best female chess player ever, another is a grand master, and the third is an international master), the very fact that all three sisters were so good has given his critics an opportunity to point to a genetic basis for their success.

Syed also writes about the importance of making some part of what you are doing consistent enough so that you have an adequate mechanism for identifying problems and isolating changes. This is a  common idea for trouble-shooting:  isolate one factor and see how changes to that factor impact the rest of the system, but I had not given it too much thought in the context of a tennis swing. In his example, his coach changed his swing so that it was uniform for all types of strokes. Although this was a difficult adjustment, once completed he could easily diagnose problems and make changes and improvements, leading to much more rapid progress.

One of the most unique concepts in the book is the idea of "doublethink". Doublethink (as coined by George Orwell) is keeping two incompatible ideas in mind at once. Top performers need to be able to make realistic assessments to choose a course of action, accurately predicting  the risk of failure from available options, but, once the decision as been made, to execute the action with the confidence that failure is impossible. Similarly, after a loss, top competitors typically go through a cycle of selective focus or even denial during which they deal with the failure by seeing only the good parts. Later, however, during practice, they need to fully analyze and understand the root problems in order to correct them. Finally, at the next competition, they need to once again banish all thoughts of failure and perform with confidence.

Related to this idea of performance doublethink was an exploration of the athletic "choke" phenomenon, when all training breaks down and the performer completely falls apart. Syed explains that through extended practice, many parts of an activity become unconscious-- muscle memory that allows the athlete to focus on a completely different set of problems. For example, a tennis player can think about what his opponent is doing rather than how he needs to move his feet and swing his arm to connect with the ball. However, when "choking", his concentration becomes so disrupted that the athlete begins to focus on the unconscious actions and attempts to perform them consciously. Unfortunately this is literally like attempting to re-learn the techniques in the middle of the match, analyzing and breaking a complicated motion into the hundreds of small pieces that make up the whole. Pressure and loss of confidence can bring on the choke, and a partial remedy is to try to focus on other things and re-establish the unconscious rhythm. Top athletes need to play "the most important game of their life as if it didn't matter".

Bounce also mentions situational blindness: We focus only on a tiny fraction of the available information that our senses present. This topic is discussed in much greater detail in The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us,  a great book which he also mentions.  The famous invisible-gorilla experiment demonstrates how we can ignore something obvious right in front of us while focused on something else. In a much more chilling account of an airplane crash, repeated, cockpit recordings demonstrated that clearly audible altitude warnings were ignored while the pilot and crew focused on troubleshooting a warning light until it was too late to avert the crash.

Near the end of the book, Bounce challenges one of the most prevalent athletic stereotypes: black sprinters and distance runners are better than white ones. Only black sprinters have run sub-10 second 100 meters, the vast majority of recent Olympic 100m finalists are black, and Kenyans have done spectacularly well in the distance events. However, digging deeper, he points out that, for sprinters, American and Jamaican sprinters are disproportionately represented, and that the majority of top Kenyan runners come from a tiny region, roughly within a 60 mile radius in Kenya. So rather than being general racial characteristics, the successes are highly specific to a tiny subset of the population. A brief exploration of genetic diversity ensues, the highlight of which is that all ethnicities contain a very large percentage of the total genetic variation, far more within a group than across groups. For more information on this topic, see the wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation#Distribution_of_variation

In summary, Bounce is an inspiring look at the benefits of the growth mindset versus the talent mindset, with a good mix of personal anecdotes and scientific research. I recommend it with 4 stars, and enjoyed the unabridged audiobook version from Audible.com.

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? By Seth Godin

In Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?, author Seth Godin assembles a surprisingly large collection of ideas, tips, strategies and anecdotes about becoming a linchpin, the person that an organization can't do without. Although many of his examples are targeted at the business environment, Linchpin is also about life strategies that can be applied to nearly any undertaking. The book is filled with so many thought-provoking ideas, many almost at the level of one-liners, that it would not be surprising to have separate readers come away with significantly different impressions. I will be highlighting the points that I found most interesting, rather than giving a thorough summary.

My principle takeaway from Linchpin is that creative, non-linear results delivered consistently and with humanity is the secret to becoming indispensable. Godin calls linchpins "artists", and points to three critical characteristics:

1. They give a gift. Some exceptional part of what they do is above and beyond what they expect in return.

2. They produce results that cause change in the world around them.

3. They ship. They prepare their work, but then share/publish/give it so that other people can use/appreciate/consume/benefit from it.

Godin explains that your work as an artist is to simply ship things that make change. Everything else is unimportant.

 

Linchpin begins with a relatively pessimistic assessment of the state of the business environment. Godin argues that many of our business practices originate in the assembly-line management style that emerged from the industrial revolution, when one of the primary goals was to break down production into a series of simple, largely repeatable tasks that could be performed by mostly interchangeable workers with specific but limited training. An employee's value to the business was confined to the income they generated minus the wage they were paid. By mechanizing the steps, businesses could achieve economy of scale and the emphasis was on decreasing the cost of labor by simplifying the requirements for any particular task. Today, even though there are still companies that are succeeding with this type of business model, there are a very limited number of them in each industry, and they are very price and cost-sensitive. The business ecosystem supports a variety of other approaches, however, and many other businesses succeed by providing better service, more flexibility, creativity and competing on other factors other than price. As he points out, retail businesses don't try to compete with Walmart on price, that battle is largely over. Instead, businesses that depend on any of those other non-price factors need employees who show superior initiative, creativity and/or people skills. Unfortunately, he argues, our education system is still oriented to producing factory workers who are able to follow instructions, master a body of existing knowledge, work hard at clearly defined tasks, and expect that over time, their diligence, hard work and obedience will be rewarded. The harsh reality is that because of a variety of factors from globalization to the continued factory mindset, these types of system-educated workers are more likely to become low-cost, outsourceable cogs than someone highly in demand. For example, castingwords.com is a transcription service that uses Amazon's mechanical turk to break audio recordings into small chunks that are transcribed by a fleet of low-cost typists distributed all over the world, thereby providing quality transcriptions at a fraction of the cost (and employee wages) of a traditional service. However, after painting a pretty grim picture of the existing environment, Godin begins to point to a number of opportunities to adapt and thrive within this difficult ecosystem. One of the points is that knowledge work has transformed the balance of power from the factory owner to the factory worker. Previously, the factory required a huge capital investment, and it was far easier for a factory owner to replace a worker than it was for the worker to create a new factory where his skills could be applied. However, with knowledge work, the "factory" is often the mind, or the mind + a computer, and so it is now easy for the worker to "build their own factory". 

The concept of shipping is critical to the linchpin mentality. Part of the discipline (and the point) of creativity is sharing. As you force yourself to ship, to finish something and share it with others, you enable the artistic process (both giving and receiving) to happen. Develop the discipline of getting things to a shippable state, and then pull the trigger. Sometimes this can simply involve shipping whatever you have at a fixed cutoff, and making that commitment to yourself and others. For example, Saturday Night Live must ship. That's the point, and it's built into the show. Over time, you will become better at producing higher quality results when you ship. A common fear barrier ("the resistance") is that we don't have a good enough idea, or enough good ideas. Godin argues that it's far more effective to attempt to generate lots of bad ideas, and *ship* them than to obsess about finding the one good idea. With practice, good ideas will emerge from the discipline of preparing bad ideas for release, and bad ideas that ship have an infinitely better chance of creating positive change than good ideas that never get implemented. As an additional strategy, Godin suggests putting aside ideas that don't quickly take shape, where you aren't able to make rapid, concrete progress and complete them. This technique requires some finesse, however, because it's important not to avoid everything that is difficult, while at the same time avoiding the trap of not shipping because it's too hard to get things "ready".

Linchpin takes the bias towards action to a whole new level with the idea that there is only minimal difference between knowing and not knowing when you begin something. Progress has three states: inaction, action, and completion. While this is another idea that requires considerable finesse to be practical, the takeaway is that progress is made by doing, not by waiting until we have everything just right so that we can start with a clear plan.

Godin also devotes considerable attention to describing the importance of the "gift" exchange. As mentioned above, giving is a critical part of being a linchpin. Because of the power of internet communications, there is a new class of people who are not friends but "friendlies". If you spend too much time attempting to market and sell to people you don't know, you are likely to cause strains and your art will suffer. However, if you spend time attempting to give "gifts" to your friends AND friendlies, you will likely see that your circle expands and opens new opportunities. It may turn out that there is no clear economic benefit to giving your gift, but often being true to what you want to do is rewarding itself. 

One of the more surprising ideas in Linchpin is that asking for permission to do something new and risky is largely a cop-out. "I want to do something, but my boss won't let me. Of course she won't, because it means that if it fails, she gets the blame, but if it succeeds, you get the credit." If you believe in something, take the risk to make it happen, accept failure on your own shoulders and be very quick to share the credit if you succeed.

Learn to depersonalize: people tend to have a much easier time not blaming others when events are random or the result of forces we can't really change, like the weather. However, we have little actual ability to change the people around us, and should learn to treat events caused by others just as impersonally.  Switching to "wow, I wonder why that happened" instead of "How dare he!" is the first critical step to being solution oriented. As an example, Richard Branson, when faced with a canceled flight out of the Caribbean, didn't spend time fretting about the problem, but instead went immediately to inquire about a charter flight, and then put up on a board, "flights home, X dollars" and was able to fill the charter and get home on time.

Another technique is "if only". Learn to say to yourself, I could do this "if only". Then address the specific issues. Don't treat this an an excuse, but rather as an empowerment technique that can isolate limiting factors in a specific and actionable way, moving from a blockage to the idea that you could succeed given a few tweaks. Naturally, it helps to identify things that you can control or influence as part of the "if only" condition.

One of the ideas that was most controversial to me was about avoiding thrashing. Per Godin, as a project progresses, it becomes important to limit the number of people who can change the final result. The cycle of see, change. debate, consider, build, see, change is important to have early on, but once the direction has been established, if that sort of change happens closer towards the end, it can delay or sink the entire project. So attempt to have a single person with go/no-go authority, and present them the choice of shipping on time, or accepting/handling lots of late-stage feedback. I tend to agree that it's very easy for lots of late stage changes to create thrashing, but building iteratively with shorter release cycles seems to be a better approach. Perhaps, though, shorter release cycles are really just another way of decreasing the amount of required/available late-stage input.

Another key concept in Linchpin is the idea of "the resistance". The resistance is a general term for the forces of fear, uncertainty, doubt, inertia and overt hostility that conspire to block change. Many times these forces are internal, while another times they are actually external. Godin points to anxiety as an extremely useless part of the resistance. Fear is productive, it warns you away from danger, while anxiety is imagining what could go wrong. He uses the example of a driver who, when spotting flashing lights in the rear view mirror, begins to imagine a traffic stop, misunderstandings, resisting arrest, being jailed and eating prison food. Learn to recognize the signs of the downward spiral of anxiety, and abort it at an early stage. As a personal example, I have found that my tendency to replay arguments in my head, and in particular to imagine the actual dialogue for the "rematch", is a particularly useless cycle. It allows my anger to escalate nearly unchecked against the mental strawman, while the actual conversation with a real person always diverges radically from the first word of the imagined script. I can break the cycle by recognizing the pattern and focusing on the key points of how I feel and what needs to change, not the intricacies of scoring points in an imagined contest of verbal swords. 

I would definitely recommend reading Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?. There are a  multitude of ideas, and you are sure to find a few that will inspire, challenge and provoke you. I listened to the Overdrive unabridged audiobook version from the San Jose Public Library. 

Rating: 4 stars

Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices by Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria

In Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, Harvard Business School professors Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria present a unified theory of human motivation. They identify the following four primary drives, each unique and separate from each other in significant ways such that they cannot be reduced further, and which together form the basis for other drives. They are:

D1. The drive to acquire. This drive includes the desire for objects of value and unique experiences, status and influence. Sexual conquest would fall under this desire, while sexual intimacy would be D2.

D2. The drive to bond and form long-term relationships.

D3. The drive to learn, to increase our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

D4. The drive to defend our self, our loved ones, our possessions, our community and our beliefs.

The authors begin by attempting to explain their background, and how the narrowed focus of the vertical scientific disciplines have been unable to arrive at a unified theory of why we do what we do. By tracing back to earliest humanity, when the great leap in human intelligence and/or society occurred, they point to a biological basis for the drives that was reinforced by successful evolution.

Each of the four drives has a positive and negative side. In moderation, each drive aids survival, and can help the species to thrive and to be happy. However, when carried to extremes, each drive can be destructive.

In the final part of the book, the authors point out how knowledge of their four drives can be used to build environments where people can prosper and thrive, meeting each of their four primary drives, and they point out two case businesses as case studies. They discuss HP as a model of a company that embraced all four of the drives to create a successful culture. The “HP Way” was based on the principles of individual ownership and responsibility, collaboration within groups, knowledge sharing, and a sense of community.

Unfortunately, Driven teeters awkwardly between a scholarly work and a book aimed at the mass market. On one hand, they try to build a solid case for why their four drives are necessary and sufficient based on studies in various fields. On the other hand, they then make a series of unsupported off-the-cuff remarks that greatly undermine their credibility. The writing itself is quite dry, and they spend far too much time talking about their credentials and editorializing.

Key ideas: Humans have four primary drives, the drive to acquire, bond, learn and defend that are all critical for our survival and success. Although the relative intensity of each drive will vary from person to person, we require all four to be met, and a successful business or social environment will address all four needs. Defending our beliefs is a core drive. In the same way that we rise to the defense of our community, we defend the ideas that we have adopted when they are threatened.

It is interesting to compare Driven with Drive by Daniel Pink. Pink talks about the need for autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and also addresses the need for payment as well. However, his goal is to identify the situations in which intrinsic motivation can flourish, assuming that the basic need for compensation has been addressed. Pink perhaps pays too little attention to the need to acquire/gain status, but his thesis is that those are primarily extrinsic motivations that science has shown to have a negative or at best neutral impact of creative thinking.

I listened to the unabridged audiobook version from Audible.

Review: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink

In his 2011 book Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us, Daniel Pink offers a compelling and intriguing case for what he terms Management 3.0, the principles that will guide management in the 21st century.  Motivating knowledge workers, people who must exercise creative thinking to solve novel problems in new and unique ways where the correct answer is not even clear from the start, is significantly different than for the more manual and/or repetitive task-oriented workers that have been common for the last 150 years. In particular, creative thinking is significantly enhanced by intrinsic motivation, and impaired by extrinsic motivation, so the goal of management will be increasingly to set up situations that foster intrinsic motivation. Surprisingly, the effects of traditional extrinsic carrot (bonus/equity/perks if/then thinking) and stick (firing/humiliation/pressure) can actually impair creativity. Pink points to the following three principles for fostering intrinsic motivation:

1. Autonomy. Control over the four 4 Ts.

• Time (when work is done. Flex time)
• Tasks (what gets done. Allow people to pursue their own solutions to problems)
• Technique (Allow them to implement the solutions as they see best)
• Team (Allow freedom to collaborate with people of their choosing)

2. Mastery. People naturally want to become better at the things that they do. Enable people to continually improve by pursing "goldilocks" tasks: things that are not too easy, but not too hard. Strive to create "flow", the optimal state where focus, ability and desire converge. Encourage a climate of perpetual improvement, limited only by a person's desire to discover, learn and practice new ideas and techniques.

3. Purpose. People have a need to take part in something bigger than themselves that has greater meaning. Clarify what that larger purpose is, and

Citing a number of scientific studies, he points out that behavioral scientists have known about these ideas for decades, but that traditional management has been very slow to adapt to the changing science. For example, managers and companies should seek to remove compensation from the discussion, rather than motivate workers through bonuses. Multiple studies confirm that rewards-based compensation is actually counter-productive for tasks requiring creative thinking and problem-solving (although it IS effective for tasks with requiring little or no creativity). Pay employees a fair/good salary (relative to their peers, and to the industry), and allow them to focus on the intrinsic motivation of the job. Use pay to attract and retain talent. See also "Good to Great" for a detailed discussion of this idea.

In addition to management, Pink points out that the same ideas can be applied to education and child-rearing. As nearly all the tasks that are routine or well-suited to automation are leaving the US, the skills our children will require have shifted, and we need to shift our educational styles too. He includes a number of resources in the book, including a detailed summary of the contents.

Key idea: Fostering intrinsic motivation is key to tasks that require creative thinking. Autonomy, mastery and purpose are the building blocks of intrinsic motivation.

Other interesting ideas:

• Management is a technology, not an innate human condition. Be aware and treat it as such.
• Companies like Google use 20% time to give greater autonomy and drive innovation. End result: successful new products
• Results-only work environments (ROWE) are pioneering even greater  workplace autonomy

This is one of the most important books I read in 2011. Backed up by research, and presented in an entertaining and though-provoking way with concrete examples, the books makes a solid case for change. Pink goes out of his way to make the ideas easy to absorb, providing a number of resources like a detailed summary that can serve as a refresher, and a number of conversation starters.

There are many parallels to the ideas discussed in Good To Great. In particular, while GTG talks about the importance of hiring self-motivated people, and then not demotivating them, Drive fills in the gaps to explain how specifically to encourage self-motivation.

One area for further exploration would be the crossover between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I don't believe that the lines are as clearly drawn as Pink posits. For example, the successful person who states that they were driven (intrinsically motivated) by the burning desire to "not be poor", to provide security and safety for their families, or to be remembered, all of which would be fall in Pinks classification as extrinsically motivated, but which also share some elements of a greater purpose.

See Also:

• Good to Great: Why some ccompanies make the leap... and others don't
• Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History Of Innovation
• Daniel Pink's TED Talk on the surprising science of motivation 

Review: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

I recently completed the audiobook version of  Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. In this excellent book, they break down change factors into three components: the logical mind, the emotional mind, and the environment. Borrowing a metaphor from another excellent book, The Happiness Hypothesis, they characterize human decision making as a rider perched atop an elephant. Although the rider (the logical mind) has the power of foresight, thinking and planning for the future, he can only exercise limited control over the greater strength of the emotional mind, the elephant. When emotions take over and runs wild, the tiny rider has only limited control and must hang on for the ride. The rider thinks about tomorrow, skipping the cake today for a healthier body next summer. However, without the elephant, the rider has difficulty making decisions and taking action. They summarize their recipe for change as follows:

1. Direct the rider. Often what appears to be inaction or resistance is simply confusion. Script the critical change steps into simple, crystal-clear actions that can be easily followed. Look for early, or previous successes (bright spots), and identify the key components to change. Often large, complex problems seem to demand complex solutions, but by looking for common elements in the bright spots, we can make progress through simple steps. For example, a weightloss campaign that targets whole milk as the largest single source of fat simply suggested buying skim/1% milk and was effective. Solutions-based therapy is another example of the "bright spot" technique. When in your relationship/career/life were you happy.

2. Motivate the elephant. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. People have a limited amount of self control, and expending this control fighting their elephant decreases their capacity for other efforts. Make an emotional appeal that is directed at making people feel something. Aligning logic and emotion is critical. Knowledge does not bring about change, only emotion and desire change behavior. Powerpoint displays rarely get peoples' blood boiling, so find more visceral ways to get your point across. In one example, as part of a campaign to reform corporate purchasing, a glove shrine with more than 400 gloves, many identical except for their prices, was piled on a fancy executive's table to demonstrate the insanity of each business unit independently negotiating  and purchasing its own supplies. Always think, "what is the feeling here".

3. Shape the path. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. A good leader doesn't ask "what's wrong with these people, they just aren't getting it". Rather, consider what factors in the environment can be changed to influence the outcome. As an example, they described an experiment in which people at a movie theater were given large or extra large buckets of badly tasting popcorn. Repeated experiments confirmed that people given the extra large buckets ate more. Changing the bucket size changed behavior.

Other ideas:

Rally the herd: Use peer pressure to drive conformity. If the majority of people are already doing the desired behavior, publicize it and encourage people to do the right thing. For example, publicize that 70% of employees get their expense in on time, or 90% of reviewers complete their review within X amount of time. As a corollary, don't publicize statistics that reinforce undesired behavior, e.g. only 30% of employees submit their expense reports on time.

Make use of action triggers. Encourage behavior by tying it to a specific time and place or event. For example, ask employees returning from a conference to "write up some notes for the team when the fasten seatbelts sign goes off on the flight home". Students asked to write a paper over break did better when they specified when and where they would write it.

Use checklists. The "lowly checklist" is extremely effective at making sure that procedures are followed, or ideas are primed. For example, the "cisco pre-acquisition checklist" was a useful tool for ensuring that basic questions were asked prior to acquisition.

I highly recommend Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard for anyone attempting to create change at the personal, organizational or even societal level.