Decisive: A book review by Bob Morris

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Crown Business (2013)

How to make better decisions and help others to make better decisions in all domains of life

Those who have read one or more of Chip and Dan Heath’s previously published books already know that they are master raconteurs as well as keen observers of human nature in general and of the business world in particular. I also view them as anthropologists whose scope and depth of knowledge enable them to create a multi-dimensional context for the information, insights, and counsel they provide. In this instance, as their latest book’s subtitle correctly indicates, they share what they have learned about “how to make better choices in life and work.”

All of those who read this book make several dozen (sometimes several hundred) decisions each week, most of which are based on past experience, custom, habit, etc. However, there are some decisions that are very challenging, perhaps even daunting. What to do? The heaths recommend and explain what they characterize as the WRAP process: Widen Your Opinions, Reality-Test Your Assumptions, Attain Distance Before Deciding, and Prepare to Be Wrong. “We want to make you a bit better at making good decisions, and we want to help you make good decisions a bit more decisively (with appropriate confidence, as opposed to overconfidence). We also want to make you a better adviser to your colleagues and loved ones who are making decisions, because it’s usually easier to see other people’s biases than your own.” The Heaths succeed brilliantly in achieving those objectives.

They ensure that the insights they share are especially sticky by making skillful use of several reader-friendly devices that include a “Chapter X in One Page” section in Chapters 1-12. Also, three Clinics on decision making (“Should a Small Company Sue a Bigger Competitor?” “Should a young Professional Move to the City?” and “Should We Discount Our Software?”, Pages 257-266), each a mini-case study based on real-world circumstances in which the material is provided within this format: Situation, Options, Process, Verification/Authentication, and Reflection/Evaluation. Readers will also appreciate the “Overcoming Obstacles” section following the Clinics in which the Heaths provide eleven Q&As (Pages 267-272) about the common roadblocks to using the WRAP process effectively as well as extensively annotated Endnotes (Pages 273-299) and

These are among the dozens of passages that caught my eye, also listed to indicate the scope of coverage in the material. All of them explain one or more dimensions of the aforementioned process by which to “make better choices in life and work.”

o How to collaborate to generate and consider options simultaneously (Pages 50-67)
o How to find someone who has solved the given problem (68-89)
o How to consider alternative, even opposite options (92-96)
o Roger Martin and the Copper Range negotiations salvaged by evidence-driven decision making (97-101)
o When and how to “construct small experiments to test one’s hypothesis” (135-153)
o How to overcome short-term emotions (156-174)
o How to honor one’s priorities (175-192)
o How to identify and prepare for probable outcomes of a decision that range from success to adversity (194-217)
o How to determine when to increase allocation of resources or cut losses? (218-238)
o How to earn and then sustain trust for a decision making process (239-253)
o How to overcome obstacles and resistance to a decision (267-272)

Recall Chip and Dan Heath’s expressed hope that the material they provide in this book will help their reader to achieve two objectives: to make better decisions, and, to help others to make better decisions. The key is to master each of the four steps of the WRAP process.

I presume to add two points of my own. First, although you’ll never have too much of the best information, there are times when you have to make a decision based on what you do know. No process such as WRAP is infallible because no one who uses it is infallible. Expect to make mistakes and learn from them. Also, more often than not, if at all possible, when in doubt, DON’T. Making no decision is itself a decision. To repeat, if at all possible, continue the WRAP process: consider other options, test your assumptions more rigorously, create a wider/deeper context for the given decision, and finally, embrace each mistake as a precious learning opportunity.

Blogging on Business Update from Bob Morris (Week of 1/14/13)

I hope that at least a few of these recent posts will be of interest to you:

BOOK REVIEWS

A Technique for Producing Ideas: The Simple, Five-Step Formula Anyone Can Use to Be More Creative in Business and in Life!
James Webb Young

HBR Guide to Better Business Writing
Bryan A. Garner

Know What You Don’t Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen
Michael Roberto

Winning with Transglobal Leadership: How to Find and Develop Top Global Talent to Build World-Class Organizations
Linda Sharkey, Nazneen Razi, Robert Cooke, and Peter Barge

101 Design Methods: A Structured Approach for Driving Innovation in Your Organization
Vijay Kumar

Train Your Brain For Success: Read Smarter, Remember More, and Break Your Own Records
Roger Seip

The Catalyst: How You Can Become an Extraordinary Growth Leader
Jeanne Liedtka, Robert Rosen, and Robert Wiltback

INTERVIEWS

Kon Leong
Adam Bryant
The New York Times

Rich Horwath
Bob Morris

Mark W. Schaefer
Bob Morris

COMMENTARIES

“The 10 Rules of Change”
Stan Goldberg
Psychology Today

“Don’t Sacrifice Long-Term Growth Just to Hit Your Forecast”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR

“Five Keys to Enhancing Your Emotional Intelligence”
Preston Ni
Psychology Today

“If Peter Thiel and Garry Kasparov Are Right About the Innovation Crisis, Then We’re In Trouble”
Peter Rogoff
BusinessInsider

“Three Secrets to Make a Message Go Viral”
Chip and Dan Heath
Fast Company

“Quotations of Timeless Relevance”
BOB

“The Disadvantages of an Elite Education”
William Deresiewicz
The American Scholar

“Leadership lessons to be learned from a brilliant symphony conductor”
BOB

“How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes: Lessons in Mindfulness and Creativity from the Great Detective”
Maria Popova
Brain Pickings

“Delegate, Delegate, Delegate”
Management Tip of the Day
HBR

* * *

To check out these resources and other content, please click here.

To subscribe via RSS Reader, please click here.

How to craft a message that sticks: An interview with Chip Heath

Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of Chip Heath co-conducted by Lenny T. Mendonca and Matt Miller. It was featured in The McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. To read the complete interview, check out a wealth of free online resources, and learn more about the firm, please click here.

*     *     *

The key to effective communication: make it simple, make it concrete, and make it surprising.

The ability to craft and deliver messages that influence employees, markets, and other stakeholders may seem like a mysterious talent that some people have and some don’t. Jack Welch, for example, created ideas that inspired hundreds of thousands of GE employees. But many other leaders are frustrated to find that key messages sent one day are forgotten the next—or that stakeholders don’t know how to interpret them.

Why do some ideas succeed while others fail? Chip Heath, professor of organizational behavior in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, has spent the past decade seeking answers to that question. His research has ranged from the problem of what makes beliefs—urban legends, for instance—survive in the social marketplace of competing ideas to experiments that show how winning ideas emerge in populations, businesses, and other organizations. Earlier this year Heath published his findings in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, written with his brother, Dan, who founded a business that specializes in this very subject.

In July 2007 Chip Heath spoke with Lenny Mendonca, a director in McKinsey’s San Francisco office; Matt Miller, an adviser to McKinsey; and Parth Tewari, who was then a Sloan fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, about the key principles for making an idea “stick” and how executives can use them to communicate more successfully. The conversation took place at Stanford.

The Quarterly: Let’s start by defining success. What is a sticky idea?

Chip Heath: A sticky idea is one that people understand when they hear it, that they remember later on, and that changes something about the way they think or act. That is a high standard. Think back to the last presentation you saw. How much do you  remember? How did it change the decisions you make day to day?

Leaders will spend weeks or months coming up with the right idea but then spend only a few hours thinking about how to convey that message to everybody else. That’s a tragedy. It’s worth spending time making sure that the lightbulb that has gone on inside your head also goes on inside the heads of your employees or customers

The Quarterly: Give us an example of a sticky idea.

Chip Heath: John F. Kennedy, in 1961, proposed to put an American on the moon in a decade. That idea stuck. It motivated thousands of people across dozens of organizations, public and private. It was an unexpected idea: it got people’s attention because it was so surprising—the moon is a long way up. It appealed to our emotions: we were in the Cold War and the Russians had launched the Sputnik space satellite four years earlier. It was concrete: everybody could picture what success would look like in the same way. How many goals in your organization are pictured in exactly the same way by everyone involved?

My father worked for IBM during that period. He did some of the programming on the original Gemini space missions. And he didn’t think of himself as working for IBM—he thought of himself as helping to put an American on the moon. An accountant who lived down the street from us, who worked for a defense contractor, also thought of himself as helping to put an American on the moon. When you inspire the accountants you know you’re onto something.

*     *     *

To read the complete interview, please click here.

Chip Heath is a Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His research examines why certain ideas – ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths – survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas. His research has appeared in a variety of academic journals, and popular accounts of his research have appeared in Scientific American, the Financial Times, the Washington Post,BusinessWeek, Psychology Today, and Vanity Fair. He lives in Los Gatos, California. He has co-authored two books with his brother Dan: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.

Lenny Mendonca is a director in McKinsey’s San Francisco office, and Matt Miller is an adviser to McKinsey. The co-authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Parth Tewari, who helped initiate and shape this interview. Tewari recently left Stanford to become the India director of TechnoServe (a nonprofit organization that helps create business solutions to fight poverty), where he is using these ideas to shape his communications.

Amazon’s Secret – Make it Easy; Make it Fast; Make it Insanely Convenient

I am a convert.  As I have written before, I now buy most of my books (all that are available digitally) on Amazon’s Kindle App for my iPad.  I get my protein bars though Amazon.  I get my ink for my printer from Amazon.  And a whole lot more.  And my experience on Amazon has made me a more energetic, frequent on-line shopper from other outlets (stores).  And, with my Amazon Prime purchase, I get practically everything in two days.

And it is about to get faster.

I have written before about our growing desire/demand for no hassles! (quoting Frank Luntz):  We Really Don’t Like Hassles — So, our Agenda: Create “Hassle Free”.  And after I presented Switch:  How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, a participant at our First Friday Book Synopsis said to me:  “Here’s what that book said.  You’ve got to make the change convenient – you’ve got to make everything convenient.”

Well, Amazon is about to really up the bar on the convenience competition for customers.

We first learned this from Netflix.  Their business became more convenient (more convenient than the many, many minutes it took to drive to the local Blockbuster, and browse the shelves).  Netflix took off when it became highly likely that you could get your DVD in the mail the day after you ordered it.   Convenience! – the day after!  (Blockbuster is now bankrupt, by the way).  And now, of course, on Netflix you can watch your movie or TV show immediately, streamed onto your computer or your iPad or your iPhone or your Apple TV.

Amazon Fulfillment Center

Well, today, Slate.com reminds us that Amazon has matched the Netflix convenience model on practically everything.  They are on the verge of providing same-day delivery for most of the country.  SAME-DAY DELIVERY FOR THE WIN!  This truly is the win in the Super Bowl of the convenience league.  As usual, it is the Slate writer Farhad Manjoo who makes this so understandable in his article I Want It Today:  How Amazon’s ambitious new push for same-day delivery will destroy local retail.

Mr. Manjoo describes how Amazon has quietly been making many of its deliveries, promised to Amazon Prime customers in two days, in just one day.  A convenience surprise!  Now, it is about to raise the bar even higher.  Partly prompted by the loss of their “no sales tax” advantage (we started paying Amazon our sales taxes in Texas this month), Amazon is getting ready to do provide “fulfillment” even faster.

From the article:

If Amazon can send me stuff overnight for free without a distribution center nearby, it’s not hard to guess what it can do once it has lots of warehouses within driving distance of my house. Instead of surprising me by getting something to me the next day, I suspect that, over the next few years, next-day service will become its default shipping method on most of its items. Meanwhile it will offer same-day service as a cheap upgrade. For $5 extra, you can have that laptop waiting for you when you get home from work. Wouldn’t you take that deal?
I bet you would. Physical retailers have long argued that once Amazon plays fairly on taxes, the company wouldn’t look like such a great deal to most consumers. If prices were equal, you’d always go with the “instant gratification” of shopping in the real world. The trouble with that argument is that shopping offline isn’t really “instant”—it takes time to get in the car, go to the store, find what you want, stand in line, and drive back home. Getting something shipped to your house offers gratification that’s even more instant: Order something in the morning and get it later in the day, without doing anything else. Why would you ever shop anywhere else?

So, here is the lesson for your business.  Make it easy.  Make it fast.  Make it insanely convenient.  This is the level of customer service that we will all come to expect.

Amazon will force us all to make it easier, make it faster, make it even more insanely convenient.  And if we fall too far behind, well…  we will be left behind.

Getting the Basics Right (Like Communication, and Team Building) – It is Still, and Always, Hard To Do

Getting the steps right is proving brutally hard, even if you know them.
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto

—————-

This week, I am presenting synopses of Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath and Tribal Leadership:  Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization, both to law enforcement professionals.  (And my colleague Karl Krayer is presenting another book on communication at the same gathering).

Why?

Because, these professionals, like so many others in practically every arena, deal with these two problems:

#1 – how to build, and maintain, effective teams.

#2 – how to communicate, clearly and effectively, to everyone on the team (and to those outside the team).

The more I speak, the more I listen, the more I “consult,” the more I realize this challenge.  It is not a new challenge, it is not a modern challenge.  It is an old challenge.

We don’t get the basics right.

Team building, communication – these are basics.  And after countless books and training seminars on both, we still have unclear communication and ineffective, dysfunctional teams.

My counsel to you – keep working on both of these.  Pay attention to your team members.  Pay careful attention to your spoken and written communications.  Do you listen, and encourage, and include, and support each one of your team members?  Are your e-mails clear – do you put your sentences together effectively?  Do you speak clearly?

Build Teams.  Communicate clearly and effectively.  These are two of the basics we just have to get right.

The Ebook, The Myth of the Garage, by the Heath Brothers – For Free!

by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

News Flash:  You can get a free copy of The Myth of the Garage by Chip Heath and Dan Heath from the Kindle Store at Amazon.

————

This is really interesting.

And I like it.  And not just because it is free.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I like reading on the Kindle App on my iPad.  The features – a search button, a click which takes you to the Table of Contents, the highlighting feature, the fact that you can view all of your highlights (and with a little work, can copy and paste them into a Word document) — are all just wonderful, and genuinely useful to a serious book reader.  The Kindle app is a great tool.

And reading on the iPad, in a “book format,” is so much easier that clicking through to essay after essay on the web.  For example, wouldn’t it be great to have all of Malcolm Gladwell’s essays (most of which are archived at his web site, Gladwell.com), in one ebook?  Yes, it would.

Now the future has just arrived in the first such volume (that I know about — there could be others).

Chip and Dan Heath are terrific authors.  The brothers Heath wrote Made to Stick, and Switch, both of which I have presented at the First Friday Book Synopsis.  They also have written a number of essays for the magazine Fast Company.  I have not read most of these.

But I’ve read a bunch of them now.  Because they are compiled, all together, in a free ebook available through the Kindle store.

And, yes, some of these essays are terrific.

The Heath brothers, with terrific essays, all on one place, in an easy-to-read-and-highlight ebook.  Is this heaven?

(By the way, this one was free, but there is a real market for these.  I would gladly pay a Kindle price for all of the Gladwell essays, or the Gawande essays, or so many others, to have them in one volume).

Order it now for your Kindle, or your Kindle app.  “Buy” it (for free) here.

————

Here’s a quick take on The Myth of the Garage, that I found here.

From Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, comes The Myth of the Garage: And Other Minor Surprises, a collection of the authors’ best columns for Fast Company magazine – 16 pieces in all, plus a previously unpublished piece entitled “The Future Fails Again.”

In Myth, the Heath brothers tackle some of the most (and least) important issues in the modern business world:

• Why you should never buy another mutual fund (“The Horror of Mutual Funds”)
• Why your gut may be more ethical than your brain (“In Defense of Feelings”)
• How to communicate with numbers in a way that changes decisions (“The Gripping Statistic”)
• Why the “Next Big Thing” often isn’t (“The Future Fails Again”)
• Why you may someday pay $300 for a pair of socks (“The Inevitability of $300 Socks”)
• And 12 others . . .

Punchy, entertaining, and full of unexpected insights, the collection is the perfect companion for a short flight.

Second Life, Google+ and the Very Rough Road to Successful New (or Sort-Of-New) Endeavors

On Slate.com today, there is a post mortem on Second Life, and a pre-mortem on the “doomed” Google+.  The authors are the Heath Brothers (the Second Life piece: Why Second Life Failed), and Farhad Manjoo (the Google+ take down: Google+ Is Dead).  So, what do we learn?  (By the way, I am a big fan of both the Heath brothers and Farhad Manjoo).

Regarding Second Life, the Heath Brothers say that it is simply a product with no actual job to do.  And for a product to succeed, you need an actual job to do.

What job is it (Second Life) designed to do? Most successful innovations perform a clear duty. When we craved on-the-go access to our music collections, we hired the iPod. When we needed quick and effective searches, we hired Google. And looking ahead, it’s easy to see the job that Square will perform: giving people an easy, inexpensive way to collect money in the offline world.
But what “job” did Second Life perform? It was like a job candidate with a fascinating résumé—fluent in Finnish, with stints in spelunking and trapeze—but no actual labor skills.  

Regarding Google+, Manjoo says that it simply was not, and still is not, “cool” enough (my word).

by failing to offer people a reason to keep coming back to the site every day, Google+ made a bad first impression. And in the social-networking business, a bad first impression spells death.
…a social network needs a critical mass of people to be successful—the more people it attracts, the more people it attracts.
…Google+, by contrast, never managed to translate its initial surge into lasting enthusiasm. And for that reason, it’s surely doomed.

I don’t know a lot about the people behind Second Life, but, regarding Google+, it is safe to say that Google is a true behemoth.  But even Google can not guarantee success against another behemoth, one that people are happy with already (Facebook).

So, what are the lessons?  Here are a few:  a “cool” idea must still serve a purpose by doing a job that people want/need to be able to do.  And, it’s good to remember that to succeed with a new idea is always a tough assignment.  And, if you are truly one-of-a-kind, a less-than-stellar first impression might be survivable, but when you are competing against an established giant, a bad first impression is probably insurmountable.

These two examples fit in the overall history of innovation and “new, new things.”  Netscape gave us our first browser, but did not endure.  MySpace gave us our first “Facebook,” but has disappeared in the rear-view mirror.  Palm Pilot was a wonder, but my iPhone does everything my Palm Pilot did, only better, and without a stylus.  (No stylus! – Steve Jobs insisted).

{By the way, I still have my Palm Pilot.  Do you know what I do with it?  When I am utterly exhausted, too tired to read, but not quite ready to fall asleep, I pull it out and play Solitaire.   I connect with my iPhone, I play Solitaire on my Palm Pilot.  That pretty much says it all…}

The world would be worse off if the Google+ and the Second Life efforts had not been attempted.  We need a lot of new ideas, a lot of new products, a lot of “copycats,” to help us choose the best and lasting products that fill our lives.  Remember, when the automobile was ramping up, there were a lot of car company hopefuls.  Only the best survived.

But, once you “make it,” you’d better keep tweaking and making it even better.  Because, in a garage somewhere, someone is hard at work to put you out of business.

Overload! A book review by Bob Morris

Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization
Jonathan B. Spira
John Wiley & Sons (2011)

How and why more information usually means less information has impact

Chip and Dan Heath are the co-authors of two brilliant books, Made to Stick and Switch. In the first, they explain (as its subtitle suggests) “why some ideas survive and others die.” In his book, Overload!, Jonathan B. Spira addresses a much larger issue: Why too much information is “hazardous” to an organization’s health and also to the health of many among its workforce. As he explains, “Information Overload is killing us. It is death by a thousand paper cuts in the form of e-mail messages, documents, and interruptions…While there is relatively little we can do about Information Overload, we don’t have to grin and bear it. What does help reduce Information Overload and lessen its impact is 1.) raising awareness and 2.) presenting context and history as to why the problem is occurring.”

He goes on to observe, “Raising awareness helps because most people are simply unaware of the root causes of Information Overload, such as poor search techniques, unnecessarily copying dozens if not hundreds of colleagues on an e-mail, or calling someone two minutes after sending an e-mail simply to tell the recipient of its presence. Providing context and history puts things into perspective.” Spira organizes his material within two Parts: “How We got Here” and then “”Where We Are and What We Can Do.”

My own rather extensive experience supports Spira’s assertion that Information Overload is both the result of several serious problems that are its root causes, and, is itself the root cause of countless other serious problems. For example, in an organization in which senior management has determined that collaboration must be increased and improved, people will be under severe pressure be become much more involved in communication and cooperation between and among associates. This will create an Information Overload that, in turn, consumes time and energy that should have been allocated elsewhere.

I presume to offer four suggestions to those who read this brief commentary. First, decide whether or not you and/or your organization now suffers from Information Overload. If so, pin down precisely what the most serious problem is (e.g. too many non-essential emails to send and/or read, too many non-essential reports to complete or read). Next, carefully check Spira’s coverage of that specific problem in the book. Finally, read Part I and then only the material relevant to the most serious in Part II. All or even most of the problems cannot be solved simultaneously.

I have no quarrel with any of his advice but do think he calls prey to the perils of Information Overload his book was intended to reduce. The more information, insights, and recommendations he provides throughout the 21 (count `em, 21) chapters within 237 pages, the less impact his most important ideas have. I think a much different format that includes reader-friendly devices such as checklists, self-diagnostic exercises, and end-of-chapter summaries of key points would have better served his purposes. One man’s opinions.

That said, I commend Jonathan Spira on the quality of content and the scope and depth of his analysis of serious problems that cause or result from Information Overload. I now urge him to consider an Overload! Fieldbook (with a workbook format), one that correlates with this book’s sequence of subjects but also enables people to interact with the material by completing exercises that accomplish two important objectives: They help the respondent to define the nature and extent of a given problem — in its context — within her or his own situation and/or organization; also, they emphasize the most important points, thus facilitating, indeed expediting frequent review of both those points and responses later.

As I said, one man’s opinions.

The most powerful strategies when beginning a presentation

Over the recent years, I have read dozens of excellent books in which their authors offer advice on how to make effective presentations in one form of another (e.g. in-person, teleconferencing, electronically recorded). None offers more and better advice that does As We Speak: How to Make Your Point and Have It Stick, co-authored by Peter Meyers and Shann Nix, published by Atria Books/A Division of Simon & Schuster (2011).

After explaining in the first chapter how to ensure that a speech is outcome-focused, relevant, and on point, Meyers and Nix note that when taking the next step, “you can’t just start slapping bricks together. First, you need to know where they go. You need a design. So now it’s time to put together the architecture of ideas.”

The architecture consists of  three parts: Ramp (the beginning),  Discovery (the middle), and Dessert (the end).

Meyers and Nix suggest three “Master Tips”:

• Get the I/You ratio right: Use ten “You’s” for every “I.”
• You have only seven seconds at the beginning in which the audience decides whether or niot they’re going to pay attention.
• Don’t bury the lead. If you don’t hook them right up front, you’ve lost them forever. There are no second chances.

Here are the opening strategies they recommend:

1. Open with the word “You”
2. Use a powerful statistic (i.e. a “sexy number”)
3. Ask an intriguing question.
4. Shock them.
5. Make a confession.
6. Use the word “imagine.”
7. Tell an historical anecdote that is relevant to your key point.
8. Tell a story: setting, characters, conflicts, tension, key developments, resolution

I highly recommend  As We Speak as well as these:

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Chip Heath and and Dan Heath

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Robert B. Cialdini

Elements of Influence: The Art of Getting Others to Follow Your Lead
Terry R. Bacon

We Eat What We’ve Always Eaten – Subtle Change vs. Massive Innovation; Maybe it Depends on the Industry

We are what we eat, so they say.  And, here’s the really interesting/surprising/not-so-surprising news.  We eat what we have been eating, over the very long haul.  Here are a number of excerpts regarding the 25^th anniversary of the study of what we eat, from Sylvia Rector (Detroit Free Press): Trendy though we think we are, pop, burgers and fries still No. 1.

As founder and director of the NPD Group’s annual Eating Patterns in America study, Harry Balzer probably knows more about what we eat than anyone else in the country.
So when Chicago-based NPD announced that this was the study’s 25th anniversary, I called Balzer to find out what he considered the biggest changes in our eating habits in the past quarter century.
“In the long run,” he says, “the top three foods we ordered in 1978, when I first started — were (in order) carbonated soft drinks, french fries and hamburgers.
“And yesterday, the top three foods we ordered at restaurants were carbonated soft drinks, hamburgers and french fries. … We’ve changed so much!” he joked.

What we eat: Pop, Burgers, and Fries

So, where is the change?  Primarily, it is found not in the “what,” but in the “where.”  We get our “staples” from different places. Again, from the article:

We still order all those burgers and fries, but new players keep arriving to sell them. The fastest-growing restaurant chain in America, Balzer says, is Five Guys Burgers and Fries, which didn’t open its first store until 1986.
As he puts it, “It’s not whether you’ll eat pizza or not eat pizza, but about what brand of pizza you’ll eat.”
We’re so predictable, he adds, “I already know that in 2020, the things we’ll order most in restaurants will be soft drinks, hamburgers and fries,” even though he can’t say now where we’ll buy them.

The column concludes with this, which is reminiscent of findings in Switch:  How To Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath:

The force of habit is indeed strong — something to remember if you, like me, are planning to change the way you eat in the new year.