The Power of Habit – Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

The small wins that started with O’Neill’s focus on safety created a climate in which all kinds of new ideas bubbled up.

“It turns out this guy had been suggesting this painting idea for a decade, but hadn’t told anyone in management,” an Alcoa executive told me. “Then he figures, since we keep on asking for safety recommendations, why not tell them about this other idea? It was like he gave us the winning lottery numbers.”

III.

When a young Paul O’Neill was working for the government and creating a framework for analyzing federal spending on health care, one of the foremost issues concerning officials was infant mortality. The United States, at the time, was one of the wealthiest countries on earth. Yet it had a higher infant mortality rate than most of Europe and some parts of South America. Rural areas, in particular, saw a staggering number of babies die before their first birthdays. [121]

O’Neill was tasked with figuring out why. He asked other federal agencies to start analyzing infant mortality data, and each time someone came back with an answer, he’d ask another question, trying to get deeper, to understand the problem’s root causes. Whenever someone came into O’Neill’s office with some discovery, O’Neill would start interrogating them with new inquiries. He drove people crazy with his never-ending push to learn more, to understand what was really going on. (“I love Paul O’Neill, but you could not pay me enough to work for him again,” one official told me. “The man has never encountered an answer he can’t turn into another twenty hours of work.”)

Some research, for instance, suggested that the biggest cause of infant deaths was premature births. And the reason babies were born too early was that mothers suffered from malnourishment during pregnancy. So to lower infant mortality, improve mothers’ diets. Simple, right? But to stop malnourishment, women had to improve their diets before they became pregnant. Which meant the government had to start educating women about nutrition before they became sexually active. Which meant officials had to create nutrition curriculums inside high schools.

However, when O’Neill began asking about how to create those curriculums, he discovered that many high school teachers in rural areas didn’t know enough basic biology to teach nutrition. So the government had to remake how teachers were getting educated in college, and give them a stronger grounding in biology so they could eventually teach nutrition to teenage girls, so those teenagers would eat better before they started having sex, and, eventually, be sufficiently nourished when they had children.

Poor teacher training, the officials working with O’Neill finally figured out, was a root cause of high infant mortality. If you asked doctors or public health officials for a plan to fight infant deaths, none of them would have suggested changing how teachers are trained. They wouldn’t have known there was a link. However, by teaching college students about biology, you made it possible for them to eventually pass on that knowledge to teenagers, who started eating healthier, and years later give birth to stronger babies. Today, the U.S. [122] infant mortality rate is 68 percent lower than when O’Neill started the job.

O’Neill’s experiences with infant mortality illustrate the second way that keystone habits encourage change: by creating structures that help other habits to flourish. In the case of premature deaths, changing collegiate curriculums for teachers started a chain reaction that eventually trickled down to how girls were educated in rural areas, and whether they were sufficiently nourished when they became pregnant. And O’Neill’s habit of constantly pushing other bureaucrats to continue researching until they found a problem’s root causes overhauled how the government thought about problems like infant mortality.

The same thing can happen in people’s lives. For example, until about twenty years ago, conventional wisdom held that the best way for people to lose weight was to radically alter their lives. Doctors would give obese patients strict diets and tell them to join a gym, attend regular counseling sessions-sometimes as often as every day-and shift their daily routines by walking up stairs, for instance, instead of taking the elevator. Only by completely shaking up someone’s life, the thinking went, could their bad habits be reformed.

But when researchers studied the effectiveness of these methods over prolonged periods, they discovered they were failures. Patients would use the stairs for a few weeks, but by the end of the month, it was too much hassle. They began diets and joined gyms, but after the initial burst of enthusiasm wore off, they slid back into their old eating and TV-watching habits. [123] Piling on so much change at once made it impossible for any of it to stick.

Then, in 2009 a group of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health published a study of a different approach to weight loss. [124] They had assembled a group of sixteen hundred obese people and asked them to concentrate on writing down everything they ate at least one day per week.

It was hard at first. The subjects forgot to carry their food journals, or would snack and not note it. Slowly, however, people started recording their meals once a week-and sometimes, more often. Many participants started keeping a daily food log. Eventually, it became a habit. Then, something unexpected happened. The participants started looking at their entries and finding patterns they didn’t know existed. Some noticed they always seemed to snack at about 10 A.M., so they began keeping an apple or banana on their desks for midmorning munchies. Others started using their journals to plan future menus, and when dinner rolled around, they ate the healthy meal they had written down, rather than junk food from the fridge.

The researchers hadn’t suggested any of these behaviors. They had simply asked everyone to write down what they ate once a week. But this keystone habit-food journaling-created a structure that helped other habits to flourish. Six months into the study, people who kept daily food records had lost twice as much weight as everyone else.

“After a while, the journal got inside my head,” one person told me. [125] “I started thinking about meals differently. It gave me a system for thinking about food without becoming depressed.”

Something similar happened at Alcoa after O’Neill took over. Just as food journals provided a structure for other habits to flourish, O’Neill’s safety habits created an atmosphere in which other behaviors emerged. Early on, O’Neill took the unusual step of ordering Alcoa’s offices around the world to link up in an electronic network. This was in the early 1980s, when large, international networks weren’t usually connected to people’s desktop computers. O’Neill justified his order by arguing that it was essential to create a real-time safety data system that managers could use to share suggestions. As a result, Alcoa developed one of the first genuinely worldwide corporate email systems.

O’Neill logged on every morning and sent messages to make sure everyone else was logged on as well. At first, people used the network primarily to discuss safety issues. Then, as email habits became more ingrained and comfortable, they started posting information on all kinds of other topics, such as local market conditions, sales quotas, and business problems. High-ranking executives were required to send in a report every Friday, which anyone in the company could read. A manager in Brazil used the network to send a colleague in New York data on changes in the price of steel. The New Yorker took that information and turned a quick profit for the company on Wall Street. Pretty soon, everyone was using the system to communicate about everything. “I would send in my accident report, and I knew everyone else read it, so I figured, why not send pricing information, or intelligence on other companies?” one manager told me. “It was like we had discovered a secret weapon. The competition couldn’t figure out how we were doing it.”

When the Web blossomed, Alcoa was perfectly positioned to take advantage. O’Neill’s keystone habit-worker safety-had created a platform that encouraged another practice-email-years ahead of competitors.

By 1996, Paul O’Neill had been at Alcoa for almost a decade. His leadership had been studied by the Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government. He was regularly mentioned as a potential commerce secretary or secretary of defense. His employees and the unions gave him high marks. Under his watch, Alcoa’s stock price had risen more than 200 percent. He was, at last, a universally acknowledged success.