Dan Heath – Author Biography
Early Life
Dan Heath is an American author and researcher. He earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and began his career in business and technology before turning to writing and research on organizational behavior and decision-making.
Career
Heath writes bestselling business books in partnership with his brother, Chip Heath, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Together they have produced some of the most influential management books of the 2000s and 2010s: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2007), on what makes ideas memorable; Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (2010), on leading change; Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work (2013), on overcoming decision biases; and The Power of Moments (2017), on creating defining experiences. Dan Heath is a senior fellow at Duke University’s CASE center and a popular speaker on change and innovation.
Major Works
Made to Stick (2007), Switch (2010), Decisive (2013), The Power of Moments (2017) — all co-written with Chip Heath; Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen (2020), his solo book.
Writing Style and Themes
The Heath brothers write crisp, story-driven business books built around memorable frameworks: SUCCESs (Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories) for sticky ideas; the Rider, the Elephant, and the Path for change; the WRAP process for decisions. Their style is anecdote-first — every principle arrives wrapped in a vivid case study. Recurring themes include fighting cognitive bias, shaping environments rather than relying on willpower, and making change feel easy.
Legacy
The Heaths are among the most widely read business writers of their generation; Made to Stick and Switch are staples of MBA curricula and corporate training worldwide. Their frameworks gave managers a shared, practical language for ideas, change, and decisions.
