Presidential Transition in Higher Education: Managing Leadership Change Book

This is a cleverly written but superficial long essay based on the premise that no one ever changes health behaviors, and so it's amazing that the author has found a few examples of successful behavior change programs. The main fallacy here is that people never change and no one knows how to get them to change. What about cigarette smoking, car crashes, etc. ? We have seen enormous progress in these areas; millions of lives have been saved. How did that happen? With population-level, not individual-level interventions. Excluding this factual context seems dangerous to me.
And, of course, there are different successful approaches to individual-level behavior change, and he leaves out some of those. What is valid in the book is that just shocking people with scary facts is often ineffective for behavior change. So if someone has been stuck using just that approach, then the book could be very valuable.

Something that struck me as fishy was that as a reporter for Fortune magazine, the author should know about the articles in Fortune showing that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation specifically avoided spending money on the types of things that he suggests they would spend money on like bed nets for mosquito control to prevent malaria and that their donations in the field of education for example were spectacular failures not amazing successes.