Dan Heath, MBA

Dan Heath co-wrote four of the most-loved business books of the past decade: Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, and The Power of Moments, which explores why certain brief experiences can jolt, elevate and change us—and how we can learn to create these extraordinary moments in our life and work. All four quickly became New York Times best sellers. Dan recently released Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen (March 2020), which explores a vital question: Why are we so often trapped in a cycle of reaction—putting out fires, responding to emergencies—when the problems we’re reacting to could have been prevented? Upstream studies leaders who have escaped this cycle and triumphed in preventing major problems: Customer churn. Homelessness. Chronic disease. Dropouts. The book reveals the approaches used by these leaders to overcome problems that were thought intractable. Dan is a senior fellow at Duke University’s CASE center, which supports entrepreneurs who fight for social good. He is also an entrepreneur himself, having founded Thinkwell, an innovative education company that will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2017. A former case writer for Harvard Business School, Dan was named in 2013 to the Thinkers 50, a ranking of the world’s 50 most influential management thinkers, and also to Fast Company magazine’s list of the Most Creative People in Business. He has delivered keynotes or workshops for teachers, police chiefs, U.S. senators, interior designers, Navy admirals, health care leaders, marketers, ministers, and countless executive teams, across 26 countries on 6 continents. (He’s still waiting for that invitation from Antarctica.)