A trail of links led me to a FastCompany article entitled, “Change or Die”.  Intrigued by the name, I went through the entire piece, and discovered that it offered a fascinating perspective on Life and Work :

What if you were given that choice? For real. Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We’re talking actual life or death now. Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn’t, your time would end soon — a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?

… at IBM’s “Global Innovation Outlook” conference, the company’s top executives had invited the most farsighted thinkers they knew from around the world to come together in New York and propose solutions to some really big problems. They started with the crisis in health care, an industry that consumes an astonishing $1.8 trillion a year in the United States alone, or 15% of gross domestic product.

Dr. Raphael “Ray” Levey, founder of the Global Medical Forum, an annual summit meeting of leaders from every constituency in the health system, told the audience, “A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health-care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral.” That is, they’re sick because of how they choose to live their lives”…

Then the knockout blow was delivered by Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University. He turned the discussion to patients whose heart disease is so severe that they undergo bypass surgery, a traumatic and expensive procedure that can cost more than $100,000 if complications arise… But many patients could avoid the return of pain and the need to repeat the surgery — not to mention arrest the course of their disease before it kills them — by switching to healthier lifestyles. Yet very few do. “If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle,” Miller said. “And that’s been studied over and over and over again.

The research has important implications for businesses and work, too :

Changing the behavior of people isn’t just the biggest challenge in health care. It’s the most important challenge for businesses trying to compete in a turbulent world, says John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied dozens of organizations in the midst of upheaval: “The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people.”… The conventional wisdom says that crisis is a powerful motivator for change. But severe heart disease is among the most serious of personal crises, and it doesn’t motivate — at least not nearly enough.

What works? Why, in general, is change so incredibly difficult for people? What is it about how our brains are wired that resists change so tenaciously? Is there a solution?

Read the entire article, to find out the answers to these questions and more.  It’s a fascinating read!

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory!”
— W. Deming