Page 243 - The Power to Change Anything

232 INFLUENCER

in the world each year? Suicide or homicide? Fire or drown-
ing? Most people select homicides and fires because these are
the catastrophes they see more often in the news.
Suicides are generally kept quiet for reasons of privacy, so
we don’t learn of them as often; and fires make for dramatic
live coverage. The evening news team can hardly wait to show
a reporter standing in front of a fiery blaze. And since we see
homicides and fires on the news more often than we see sui-
cides and drownings, we assume that this sample represents the
underlying whole, when in fact it grossly distorts it. Death by
flood and suicide are more common, but we apply a simple
mental heuristic, fall victim to an inaccurate data stream, and
rarely do we know that it’s happening.
Influence geniuses understand the importance of an accu-
rate data stream and do their best to ensure that their strategies
focus on vital behaviors by serving up visible, timely, and accu-
rate information that supports their goals. Instead of falling vic-
tim to data, they manage data religiously. For example, imagine
what Dr. Donald Hopkins was up against when he kicked off
the global campaign to eradicate Guinea worm disease. To get
the campaign started, his biggest challenge was to move the
parasite to the top of the agenda of developing-world leaders
who typically worried a heck of a lot more about bloody coups,
economic disasters, and corrupt politicians than they worried
about parasites.
If competing priorities weren’t enough to keep the worm
problem out of the spotlight, the fact that most leaders had
grown up in urban areas and were completely unaware of
the pervasive effects of the Guinea worm in their own country
didn’t help. For example, Jimmy Carter, former U.S. president
and founder of The Carter Center, told us that the first chal-
lenge leaders faced when attacking the Guinea worm disease
in Pakistan was that the president of Pakistan had never even
heard of the parasite. In addition to the worm’s invisibility, even
leaders who knew the plague was widespread paid little atten-