Dan Heath is an American business author and speaker, co-author with his brother Chip Heath of four bestselling business books, and Senior Fellow at Duke University's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at the Fuqua School of Business. He holds a BA from the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He lives in Durham, North Carolina.
With his brother, he co-authored Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2007), Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (2010), Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work (2013), and The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact (2017). All four were New York Times bestsellers, all have been translated into more than thirty languages, and their combined sales total over four million copies worldwide. From 2007 to 2011 the brothers wrote a regular column for Fast Company magazine.
His first solo book, Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen (Avid Reader Press, 2020), drew on interviews with hundreds of leaders to argue that organizations spend too much time reacting to problems and not enough preventing them. The book reached the Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestseller lists and is widely used in public health, social entrepreneurship, and policy circles. His second solo book, Reset: How to Change What's Not Working, came out in January 2025 and tackles change management at the team and organizational level.
Heath hosts the podcast What It's Like to Be, which ranks in the top five Apple Careers podcasts and interviews working professionals from a wide range of fields. In 2018 he hosted the first season of Choiceology, the Charles Schwab behavioral economics podcast. The Duke center where he serves as Senior Fellow supports entrepreneurs working on social good. He is a frequent keynote speaker on change leadership, decision-making, and the design of meaningful experiences.
