In 2008, Barack Obama was swept into the White House on a wave of goodwill and hope for change. This most unlikely of presidents succeeded where so many other progressive politicians had failed by harnessing the emotional energy of the electorate and articulating a compelling path to a shared future.

Scarcely a year later, this same transformational figure and his administration's signature legislative proposal, healthcare reform, appeared on the verge of defeat — until, that is, the House of Representatives passed, by a razor-thin margin of seven votes, a reconciliation version of the bill, clearing the way (depending on the outcome of various court challenges) for the most sweeping change in the nation's healthcare system since Medicare and Medicaid were signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965.

That probable outcome notwithstanding, the president's near-failure-turned-victory is, as brothers Chip and Dan Heath explain in Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, a powerful example of a change process almost gone awry. While it seemed obvious to a majority of Americans that the healthcare system was broken (exploding premiums, more than 45 million Americans uninsured, healthcare costs projected to consume an ever-larger portion of GDP), the path to fixing those problems was anything but clear. In part, say the Heath brothers, that's because we humans are wonderfully intelligent and rational creatures who happen to be dragging around a primitive ball of emotions and gut feelings — a combination that might be comical were it not so counter-productive. Indeed, if the Heaths — whose previous book, Made to Stick, had a long run on the best-seller lists — are to be believed, lasting transformation in our personal lives, on the job, or even in our national DNA cannot truly occur without each of us learning how to win over the emotional side of our nature. And that's not as easy as it sounds; keeping intellect and emotion in balance and knowing just how and when to tap one or the other, or both, is the art of a kind of leadership that the Heaths' book is meant to illuminate.

In Switch, the Heaths — Chip is a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Dan a consultant with Duke Corporate Education — combine the latest thinking in behavioral psychology and business administration with their own insights into a highly readable field manual for change. In so doing, the brothers are quick to acknowledge their debt to the work of Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. In that book, Haidt identifies the core principle that underlies much of the Heaths' analysis in Switch: people, groups, companies, and even nations all are prone to behaving like an elephant bounding along a path heedless of obstacles. At the same time, each of us is like a rider on that elephant who has a good view of the terrain and a clear idea of where to go. We understand that, to eat in safety, the elephant must cross the valley and join the herd; unfortunately, our elephant is hungry and wants to eat — now. Alas, the more insistent that hunger, the more challenging it becomes for us to control our elephant's actions and the less likely any of our well-thought-out commands will have an effect. Nevertheless, it's our job to figure out how best to appeal to the elephant and steer it safely to the desired destination.

The Heaths, of course, are focused on driving change, and they provide plenty of insights into the ways in which companies (of various sizes), industries, and even cultures have achieved transformational change by being sensitive to both elephant and rider. The elephant needs motivation — or, as the Heaths put it, a clear, emphatic, emotion-based goal. And in Switch, they celebrate leaders who possess the kind of knowledge and insight that allow them to tap into that need and provide easily understood options. In short, these are the folks who, by their example, can help us change our organizations, ourselves, and even the world.

In the book, the Heaths give us vignettes of men (and they are mostly men) in the business and nonprofit worlds who have learned how to tap into the enormous energy of the elephant. We are introduced, for example, to Donald Berwick of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, who knew it was not enough to tell a room full of hospital administrators to improve their outcomes through a "comprehensive adherence to quality assurance standards." Bureaucracy, elephantine inertia, and dispersed authority all work to ensure that change within hospitals rarely happens. Instead, Berwick challenged his audience to join with him to save 100,000 lives — a goal they exceeded by 22,000 — by adopting a new system of his own devising.

The Heaths also laud the efforts of Graham Weston, the head of Rackspace, a leader in the enterprise-level managed hosting business, who successfully changed the client-indifferent culture at his company to a client-focused one by asking his employees to become "fanatical about customer service." Not only did Weston provide his employees with a meaningful war cry, write the Heaths, he also identified many of the obstacles in the way of that goal. To get employees to talk to clients, for example, he unplugged the customer service line and patched the calls directly into the office; the phone rang until someone picked up. For the Heaths, this is an example of one of the central pivots of the elephant-and-rider metaphor. Because the rider, at best, can only nudge the elephant, it is the rider's job to really see the path the elephant is on and to clear obstacles as needed in order to drive change.

Alas, such "ah-ha" moments are rare, and to leave you with the impression that driving change is as easy as coining a good slogan would be doing a disservice to the Heath brothers and their book. Hindsight is 20-20, after all, and while the Heaths celebrate those who have managed to pull rabbits out of a hat, we might have learned just as much by sitting in on the autopsy of a few management disasters. We might also be forgiven for wondering what the Heaths would say of the recent healthcare reform effort. Do they see the president as an effective leader able to clear obstacles in the path of his healthcare agenda while gently but insistently guiding the country toward a larger goal? Or would they see the Democrats' bitterly contested legislative victory as tentative and subject to rollback?

In the end, it doesn't really matter. Americans and American business can point with pride to any number of landmark transformations, from the FDR-led push for Social Security in the depths of the Depression, to LBJ's masterful shepherding of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, to the Lee Iacocca-led revival of Chrysler in the 1980s. What the Heaths, and history, tell us is that lasting change is not about a single win on a single day; rather, it is an ongoing process that continually engages both heart and head in pursuit of common goals. With the publication of Switch, we have a new, easy-to-use manual to help us think differently about that process.