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

by Charles Duhigg

These organizational habits—or “routines,” as Nelson and Winter called them—are enormously important, because without them, most companies would never get any work done. Routines provide the hundreds of unwritten rules that companies need to operate.

But among the most important benefits of routines is that they create truces between potentially warring groups or individuals within an organization.

What makes the difference between success or failure are a designer’s routines—whether they have a system for getting Italian broadcloth before wholesalers’ stocks sell out, a process for finding the best zipper and button seamstresses, a routine for shipping a dress to a store in ten days, rather than three weeks.

The ones who have formed the right truces and found the right alliances.

If a truce is unbalanced—if the peace isn’t real—then the routines often fail when they are needed most.

The critical issue at Rhode Island Hospital was that the nurses were the only ones giving up power to strike a truce.

Crises are so valuable, in fact, that sometimes it’s worth stirring up a sense of looming catastrophe rather than letting it die down.

Like Rhode Island Hospital, these institutions have found that reform is usually possible only once a sense of crisis takes hold.

In fact, crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose.

The secret to changing the American diet, the Committee on Food Habits concluded, was familiarity.

None tried to camouflage their recommendations in existing habits, and as a result, all of the campaigns failed.

you must understand how to make the novel seem familiar.