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The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale Hardcover – February 1, 2022

by John A. List (Author)

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A leading economist answers one of today’s trickiest questions: Why do some great ideas make it big while others fail to take off?

“Brilliant, practical, and grounded in the very latest research, this is by far the best book I’ve ever read on the how and why of scaling.”—Angela Duckworth, CEO of Character Lab and New York Times bestselling author of Grit

LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD

“Scale” has become a favored buzzword in the startup world. But scale isn't just about accumulating more users or capturing more market share. It's about whether an idea that takes hold in a small group can do the same in a much larger one—whether you’re growing a small business, rolling out a diversity and inclusion program, or delivering billions of doses of a vaccine.

Translating an idea into widespread impact, says University of Chicago economist John A. List, depends on one thing only: whether it can achieve “high voltage”—the ability to be replicated at scale.

In The Voltage Effect, List explains that scalable ideas share a common set of attributes, while any number of attributes can doom an unscalable idea. Drawing on his original research, as well as fascinating examples from the realms of business, policymaking, education, and public health, he identifies five measurable vital signs that a scalable idea must possess, and offers proven strategies for avoiding voltage drops and engineering voltage gains. You’ll learn:

• How celebrity chef Jamie Oliver expanded his restaurant empire by focusing on scalable “ingredients” (until it collapsed because talent doesn’t scale)
• Why the failure to detect false positives early on caused the Reagan-era drug-prevention program to backfire at scale
• How governments could deliver more services to more citizens if they focused on the last dollar spent
• How one education center leveraged positive spillovers to narrow the achievement gap across the entire community
• Why the right set of incentives, applied at scale, can boost voter turnout, increase clean energy use, encourage patients to consistently take their prescribed medication, and more.

By understanding the science of scaling, we can drive change in our schools, workplaces, communities, and society at large. Because a better world can only be built at scale.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown Currency
Publication date

February 1, 2022
Dimensions

6.36 x 1.03 x 9.55 inches
ISBN-10

0593239482
ISBN-13

978-0593239483
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Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

When it comes to ingredients, you must know your negotiables and non-negotiables, then figure out whether your non-negotiable ingredients—the ones your enterprise can’t survive without—are in fact scalable.
Highlighted by 272 Kindle readers
Defined more broadly, “to scale” means to achieve a desired outcome when you take an idea from a small group—of customers, students, or citizens, for example—to a much larger one.
Highlighted by 254 Kindle readers
Human incompetence, laziness, and wastefulness should not be underestimated—especially at scale!
Highlighted by 218 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

Duckworth says it’s brilliant, practical and grounded

Editorial Reviews

Review

“List is far too thoughtful to write something gimmicky or simple. . . . An entertaining and clear writer. His book is chock-full of compelling stories of businesses that failed and others that went big.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Skillfully done . . . Careful, comprehensive, and fun, The Voltage Effect excels in turning a seemingly boring niche topic into a fascinating book that’s relevant to all, from CEOs and policymakers to naturally curious people with a taste for learning how economics shapes our lives in the real world.”—ZME Science

“If you’ve ever wondered why so many promising solutions fail to achieve their desired impact, look no further. . . . A master class in how the quirks of human irrationality can make or break our ideas in the real world.”—Steven D. Levitt, professor of economics, University of Chicago, and co-author of Freakonomics

“Brilliant, practical, and grounded in the very latest research, this is by far the best book I’ve ever read on the how and why of scaling. If you care about changing the world, or just want to make better decisions in your own life, The Voltage Effect is for you.”—Angela Duckworth, CEO of Character Lab and New York Times bestselling author of Grit

“How many books are funny and wise, practical and profound? John List is a scientist, but he’s also a magician, and he’s changing the world. The Voltage Effect shows how. This is one of the best economics books I have ever read—and an instant classic in behavioral economics.”—Cass R. Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University, and New York Times bestselling co-author of Nudge

“The Voltage Effect is the tool kit for the ambitious. Packed with proven principles and pro tips made real through behind-the-scenes stories in settings ranging from Silicon Valley to African NGOs, it fills the gap between startup books and management books to show how any idea can achieve its full potential.”—Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit

“A must-read . . . Ideas from the ivory tower or Davos fail often—and fail badly—because they do not recognize the deeply political and historical nature of the problems they are meant to deal with or the social realities in which these problems are embedded. This thought-provoking and engaging book proposes an original framework for thinking about how good policy proposals can be applied at a scale large enough to do social good, and for avoiding predictable mistakes that prevent such scaling.”—Daron Acemoglu, professor at MIT and co-author of Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor

“John List’s work in field experiments is revolutionary.”—Gary Becker, professor of economics and sociology, University of Chicago, Nobel Prize for Economics

About the Author

John A. List is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. He has served on the Council of Economic Advisers and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Kenneth Galbraith Award. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, NPR, Slate, NBC, Bloomberg, and The Washington Post. List has authored over 250 peer-reviewed journal articles, several academic books, and, with Uri Gneezy, the international bestseller The Why Axis.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part One

CAN YOUR IDEA SCALE?

1

Dupers and False Positives

On September 14, 1986, First Lady Nancy Reagan appeared on national television to address the nation from the West Sitting Hall of the White House. She sat on a sofa next to her husband, President Ronald Reagan, and gazed into the camera. “Today there’s a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country and no one is safe from it,” she said. “Not you, not me, and certainly not our children.”

This broadcast was the culmination of all the traveling the First Lady had done over the preceding five years to raise awareness among American youth about the dangers of drug use. She had become the public face of the preventative side of President Reagan’s War on Drugs, and her message hinged on a catchphrase that millions of people still remember, which she employed once again that evening on television. “Not long ago, in Oakland, California,” Nancy Reagan told viewers, “I was asked by a group of children what to do if they were offered drugs. And I answered, ‘Just say no.’ ”

Although there are different accounts of where this infamous slogan originated—with an academic study, an advertising agency, or the First Lady herself—its “stickiness,” to use the parlance of marketing, was undeniable. The phrase appeared on billboards, in pop songs, and on television shows; school clubs took it as a name. And in the popular imagination it became inseparable from what government and law enforcement officials saw as the crown jewel of the Reagan-era drug prevention campaign: Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E.

In 1983, Los Angeles chief of police Daryl Gates announced a shift in his department’s approach to the War on Drugs: instead of busting kids in possession of illegal substances, the new focus would be on preventing those drugs from getting into their hands in the first place. This was how D.A.R.E., with its iconic logo of red letters set against a black background, was born.

D.A.R.E. was an educational program built on a theory from psychology called social inoculation, which took from epidemiology the concept of vaccination—administering a small dose of an infectious agent to induce immunity—and applied it to human behavior. The approach of the program was to bring uniformed officers into schools, where they would use role-playing and other educational techniques to inoculate kids against the temptations of drugs. It certainly sounded like a great idea, and the early research on D.A.R.E. was encouraging. As a result, the government opened its taxpayer-funded faucet, and soon the program was scaled up in middle schools and high schools across the country. Over the next twenty-four years, 43 million children from over forty countries would graduate from D.A.R.E.

There was only one problem: D.A.R.E. didn’t actually work.

In the decades since Nancy Reagan urged the nation’s youth to “just say no” to drugs, numerous studies have demonstrated that D.A.R.E. did not in fact persuade kids to just say no. It provided children with a great deal of information about drugs such as marijuana and alcohol, but it failed to produce statistically significant reductions in drug use when these same kids were presented with opportunities to use them. One study even found that the program spurred participants’ curiosity about drugs and increased the likelihood of experimentation.

It is hard to overstate the cost of D.A.R.E.’s voltage drop at scale. For years, the program consumed the time and effort of thousands of teachers and law enforcement officers who were deeply invested in the well-being of our greatest natural resource: future generations. Yet all of this hard work and time, never mind taxpayer dollars, was wasted on scaling D.A.R.E. because of a fundamentally erroneous premise. Worse, it diverted support and resources away from other initiatives that might have yielded real results. Why D.A.R.E. became the disaster that it did is a textbook example of the first pitfall everyone hoping to scale an idea or enterprise must avoid: a false positive.

The Truth About False Positives

A first truth about false positives is that they can be considered as “lies,” or “false alarms.” At the most basic level, a false positive occurs when you interpret some piece of evidence or data as proof that something is true when in fact it isn’t. For example, when I visited a high-tech plant in China that produced headsets, if a headset working properly got marked as defective due to human error, that was a false positive. When I was called for jury duty, a false positive would have occurred had we determined that an innocent suspect was guilty. False positives also show up in medicine, a phenomenon that gained attention during the pandemic, when some test results for the virus turned out to be unreliable, showing people had contracted the virus when in reality they had not. Unfortunately, false positives are ubiquitous across contexts; consider a 2005 study that found that between 94 and 99 percent of burglar-alarm calls turn out to be false alarms, and that false alarms make up between 10 and 20 percent of all calls to police.

In the case of D.A.R.E., the National Institute of Justice’s 1985 assessment involving 1,777 children in Honolulu, Hawaii, found evidence “favoring the program’s preventative potential,” and a subsequent study conducted soon after in Los Angeles among nearly as many students also concluded that D.A.R.E. led to a reduction in drug experimentation. These purportedly strong results drove schools, police departments, and the federal government to just say yes to expanding D.A.R.E. nationwide. Yet numerous scientific analyses over the following decade examining all of the known studies and data on the program yielded incontrovertible proof that D.A.R.E. didn’t actually have a meaningful impact. So what happened?

The simple answer is this: it is not uncommon for data to “lie.” In the Honolulu study, for example, the researchers had calculated that there was a 2 percent chance their data would yield a false positive. Unfortunately, subsequent research shows that either they underestimated that probability or they just, unfortunately, fell within that 2 percent. There was never any voltage in D.A.R.E.

How can something like this happen in the hallowed halls of science? First, I should clarify that when I say the data are “lying,” what I’m actually referring to is “statistical error.” For example, when you draw a sample of children from a certain population (i.e., children living in a single city in Hawaii), random differences among them might produce an “outlier group” that leads you to make a false conclusion. Had the researchers gone back to the original population of children in Honolulu and tested D.A.R.E. again with a new group of students, they would have likely found the program didn’t work. (A related kind of inference problem is when the results from one group don’t generalize to another; we take up this issue in Chapter 2.) Unfortunately, statistical failures of this sort happen all the time.

As we saw with D.A.R.E., false positives can be very costly because they lead to misinformed decisions with downstream consequences—time and money that would have been better invested elsewhere. This is especially true when the “lie” or error is missed early on, causing enterprises that were never actually successful to begin with to suffer an inevitable voltage drop at scale. In other words, eventually the truth will come out, as it did for D.A.R.E. when its critics produced overwhelming empirical evidence that the program didn’t work. I have witnessed this firsthand in my own work in the business world.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown Currency (February 1, 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593239482
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593239483
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.36 x 1.03 x 9.55 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #117,973 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #79 in Social Sciences Research
- #242 in Medical Social Psychology & Interactions
- #370 in Popular Social Psychology & Interactions

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Professor John A. List is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on combining field experiments with economic theory to deepen our understanding of the economic science. In the early 1990s, List pioneered field experiments as a methodology for testing behavioral theories and learning about behavioral principles that are shared across different domains. He co-authored the international best seller, The Why Axis, in 2013. List was elected a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2015. List received the 2010 Kenneth Galbraith Award, the 2008 Arrow Prize for Senior Economists for his research in behavioral economics in the field, and was the 2012 Yrjo Jahnsson Lecture Prize recipient. He is a current Editor of the Journal of Political Economy.

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Matthew T. Holt

Amp your voltage

Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2022

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I finally finished #thevoltageeffect by John List. This is an excellent book, and a great companion piece to ”Influence is Your Super Power” by Zoe Chance. John is a world-class behavioral economist with broad experience in higher education, government, and industry. In this book, John draws on his research to tell us why some ideas scale and why some fail.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part examines five fundamental reasons why an idea/product/project will fail to scale. And part two examines four secrets to scaling. Both parts are equally important. And both underscore the power of economics and behavioral approach to contemplating scale. But of the two, I like part two the most. A behavioral focus on culture, why it’s important, and how to build a good one, is unique and eyeopening. You will also learn why EOE state,ents may discourage diverse candidates from applying. Why quitting early and often may be the smartest move of all. And why any business, government agency, and nonprofit should allocate resources by carefully examining marginal costs and benefits. Throughout, John argues for constant experimentation.

This is not a typical book by a typical economist. It is immediately readable and broadly applicable. I highly recommend “The Voltage Effect.” And when you finish that, pick up “Influence is Your Superpower.”

4 people found this helpful

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David Hume Lindsay

Solid Business/Public Management Ready

Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2022

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Good quick read that gets to the point quickly (a positive trait for these type of reads). Explains, encourages, and educates on the how's and why's of where and when best laid plans and ideas fall short of expectation on the operations side of things. One of the better business books I read this year.

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Raechelle T. Sherman

An Insightful, Actionable, Important Read

Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2022

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I found John List's new book, The Voltage Effect an insightful and thoroughly enjoyable read for three reasons:

1. John is a refreshingly rare and different breed of academic economist, far more dedicated to applying economic theory to solve complex, real business and societal problems, than to devising mathematically and theoretically elegant but impractical solutions, decoupled from real-world application

2. His numerous examples help make the key concepts literally jump off the page. Case in point, the saga of KMart's Blue Light Special program delivered a bitingly funny indictment of corporate HQ overreach everywhere.

3. Bottom line, List's advice on the do’s and don’ts of scaling businesses and government policy initiatives provides valuable and eminently actionable guidelines for corporate execs and government policymakers.

And the icing on the cake is John's breezy and unpretentious writing style, which turns a book grounded in economic theory into a page-turner for general audiences.

One person found this helpful

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James E. Schrager

A unique look inside how top executives make crucial decisions

Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2022

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A Must Read!
How many times do you get to accompany a top-of-the world expert as they work with the CEOs of companies such as Uber and Lyft? In most cases, these economists and consultants are bound by non-disclosure agreements preventing them from revealing what goes on behind closed doors.

But in this book, economist John List takes you inside the real world of figuring out which ideas will scale and become the next big thing--and which won’t. This isn’t another book by an academic theoretician or consultant showing us how the world of business should be, based on hazy generalizations, or by a CEO who regales us with stories of what they did when they were up at bat.

In this book you ride side-saddle with an expert as he investigates ideas to see which will work, and which will fail—but more importantly, why each idea sounded good and how the decisions were made of which ideas could scale. And this isn’t just which ideas made the sales line grow, but instead, Prof List uses his deep knowledge of the financial statements to dig into the true cost of each idea and whether it will add to the bottom line. Too many entrepreneurs—and authors-- are focused only on top line growth.

From this book you will walk away with ideas about how ideas are tested in the most rigorous fashion. At center point are a set of ways you can deceive yourself when looking at and interpreting data. As an added bonus, he includes examples from his work in schools and for the federal government as he develops simple, usable tests of how to judge your ideas.

The book is a unique combination of Prof List’s wide experience and laser focus on predicting what will fly and what won't. The take-aways make for enjoyable reading and a roadmap to some of the most important decisions all of us make about which ideas to push forward.

4 people found this helpful

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Richard Startz

Very fun read...and incredibly informative.

Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2022

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First off, the is just a fun read. It's so well-written and makes its points by telling stories. And while you can pick up some economics here, that's just a side effect. There ain't no "widgets," everything is illustrated with real-world experiences (and then sometimes List tells us that there happens to be an economics term for what we've just learned.)

Useful for anyone who wants to run a business or make policy or raise money for the local neighborhood kids baseball team!!!

5 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Alain

Excellent produit

Reviewed in Canada on February 12, 2023

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EXCELLENT INSPIRING

Ana

one of the best researched books

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 19, 2023

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The type of book i'd go back to over and over again to learn and apply how to develop scalable programs and products. The stories and examples are so relevant

Adhiraj Dwivedi

Outstanding Book - Book of the Year!

Reviewed in India on August 7, 2022

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Every year you read a book, which makes you feel that your horizons have been expanded. This book qualifies for that.

Would strongly recommend to everyone in the field of Economics or with a general interest in the life around you and wanting to make a change.

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Book sent in good condition as advertised by merchant

Reviewed in Japan on April 1, 2022

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Amazon Customer

Recommend

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 25, 2022

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Great book with lots of practical insights for professionals, policy makers, executives, charities, ... looking to deliver impact at scale

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