Just over two years ago, Fast Company senior writer Alan Deutschman (right) went to a conference on innovation where a panel of doctors delivered a devastating message: faced with the choice between changing one’s personal behavior or improving the quality of life—in many cases, even ensuring there’d be a life with any sort of quality, period—most people won’t change. When we met a few weeks ago to chat about his latest book, Change or Die, which expands upon the article he wrote after that conference, he remembered how he was left reeling after the initial presentation. After all, he was telling Fast Company readers every month about changes they could make to improve their business; was he really reaching only one out of every ten people, if that? “If this was true,” he recalled, “the whole purpose of my career was wrong.” That set him off on a quest to uncover the principles behind the successful efforts of those who actually do make changes, drawing upon examples from the medical and scientific communities as well as the business world.
I asked Deutschman if he’d ever faced a “change or die” dilemma, and he opened up about the decade he spent struggling with obesity issues which, while never life-threatening, proved hard to resolve. In fact, when he joined the staff of GQ early in his career, the first assignment they gave him was to report on how they’d hired the top personal trainer at Equinox to completely “jumpstart” his body…but the exercise and diet program failed. “Because while I was doing all that,” he recalled, “I was going to long lunches at the Four Seasons with Art Cooper, then going to his office at five o’clock for drinks…” Eventually, he found a program that worked, and one of the factors to which he attributes the success is learning more about the reasons behind the recommended lifestyle changes. “People don’t want to just be told what to do,” he says. “They want to be treated as the intelligent, accomplished, and successful individuals they see themselves as.” Among his favorite success stories from the book: a community of convicted criminals in San Francisco that run several businesses as part of their rehabilitation program, including a moving company that Deutschman himself has used, considering its employees more reliable than those of other established movers. “If they can make it,” he smiles, “what excuses do any other companies have?”
One other interesting aspect of Deutschman’s book: It’s one of the final titles published by ReganBooks before HarperCollins shut the imprint down earlier this month. Which means you might want to grab a copy of it (and other similarly fated Regan titles, like the Sammy Davis, Jr. photo collection) now and hang onto them as eBay-able collector’s items; when Change or Die goes back for future printings, I confirmed, it’ll bear an “HC Books” logo on the spine.