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

by Charles Duhigg

PROLOGUE

Hi, Charles Duhigg here - the author of The Power of Habit. First off, let me say thanks for reading this book (and these notes.) Along with Goodreads, we’re trying something kind of crazy: I’m going to annotate this book with some background stories, random thoughts and updates that have occurred since POH was published in 2012. I have no idea if this will be interesting to anyone besides me - however, I’m kind of excited to try. If these comments don’t answer all your questions (or if they inspire new ones!), please feel free to drop me a line at charles@charlesduhigg.com. I answer every reader email I receive. (It’s a habit.) I hope you enjoy the book, Charles

She was the scientists’ favorite participant.

True story: Lisa is one of the first people I encountered when I first started researching the science of habits for the book proposal that became The Power of Habit. There’s a general rule in journalism: the first interviewee you meet is ALWAYS the wrong person - you basically have to plan on throwing that interview away. Except, Lisa was so fantastic that she stuck in my mind, and I couldn’t shake her loose. So three years later - after I had sold the book, and had finished writing it, and only had the prologue left to write - I decided to use her as the intro. Boom: Rule overturned.

cigarette smoke and lavish meals.prl.1

These links to footnotes in the text kind of drive me crazy. I find them distracting. So, for my next book, Smarter Faster Better, we removed them.

I first became interested in the science of habits eight years ago, as a newspaper reporter in Baghdad.

When I was almost done with this book, I had to figure out how to write the prologue. (A weird thing about most books is that the first thing in the book is the last thing that gets written.) I was really struggling with the prologue. This was my first book, and the prologue seemed really important - I kept picturing someone standing in a book store, picking up this book, and deciding whether to buy it or not based on the prologue. I had Lisa’s story, but that didn’t seem like enough. I needed another narrative to show that this book was about more than just personal transformation stories. I wanted to show that the influence of habits ranged from companies to armies to schools to social movements. I needed another story. Trying to figure out which story to use was really stressing me out. And so, one morning, I decided to go for a run without my iPod, so I could think about the prologue. I was kind of desperate at this point. As I was jogging through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, I began trying to figure out why I got interested in this topic in the first place - and then I thought, ‘well, it really all started in Iraq.’ And that’s when I knew what story I should use as the second narrative in the prologue.

About a year earlier, Eugene Pauly, or “E.P.” as he would come to be known in medical literature, had been at home in Playa del Rey, preparing for dinner, when his wife mentioned that their son, Michael, was coming over.

I was insanely lucky that E.P.’s family was willing to talk to me. They are amazing people.

In rare cases, however, the virus can make its way into the brain, inflicting catastrophic damage as it chews through the delicate folds of tissue where our thoughts, dreams—and according to some, souls—reside.

Learning about this story has basically caused me to freak out about every cold sore I have gotten since I wrote this book. It’s going to eat my brain! (Well, hopeful it won’t. But you never know!)

From the day of his surgery until his death in 2008, every person H.M. met, every song he heard, every room he entered, was a completely fresh experience. His brain was frozen in time. Each day, he was befuddled by the fact that someone could change the television channel by pointing a black rectangle of plastic at the screen. He introduced himself to his doctors and nurses over and over, dozens of times each day.1.10

If you’re interested in learning more about H.M., let me recommend a great book that has come out since POH was published: Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets by Luke Dittrich (who is the grandson of the doctor who removed sections of H.M.’s brain.)

As Eugene sat at the table, he looked at Squire’s laptop. “That’s amazing,” he said, gesturing at the computer. “You know, when I was in electronics, there would have been a couple of six-foot racks holding that thing.”

It’s interesting to note that the same findings that propelled Squire’s work have influenced our understanding of why some Alzheimer’s patients can live relatively autonomously - and can go about daily activities without help, but not remember anything about what happened that day, or any new details from recent years.

In the early 1990s, the MIT researchers began wondering if the basal ganglia might be integral to habits as well. They noticed that animals with injured basal ganglia suddenly developed problems with tasks such as learning how to run through mazes or remembering how to open food containers.1.15 They decided to experiment by employing new micro-technologies that allowed them to observe, in minute detail, what was occurring within the heads of rats as they performed dozens of routines. In surgery, each rat had what looked like a small joystick and dozens of tiny wires inserted into its skull.

Pictures of the rats who have gone through this surgery FREAK ME OUT. But, apparently, the don’t even notice anything has changed.

Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.

A lot of people have highlighted this sentence, which I think is really cool, because it reflects a basic insight that has become fundamental to cognitive sciences: Many of our brain’s quirks occur because, at root, we want to conserve energy. Brains (and neurological structures) that can operate without requiring huge effort have a huge evolutionary advantage. Much of what we’re leaning from behavioral economics - such as why people tend to react in (seemingly) irrational ways - are reflections of this basic principle: The best brains are efficient. They try to automate basic decision making, so we can save cognitive energy for other, more important tasks. And that causes some glitches sometimes. (For instance, we stamp on the brakes when we see a cop car out of the corner of our eyes, or unthinkingly take the exit to go home when we’re intended to drive to the movies.) But those glitches are small prices to pay for having brains that can continuously - and nearly automatically - get more and more efficient at doing hard things.

Those decisions are habitual, effortless. As long as your basal ganglia is intact and the cues remain constant, the behaviors will occur unthinkingly. (Though when you go on vacation, you may get dressed in different ways or brush your teeth at a different point in your morning routine without noticing it.)

Wanna know a great time to start a new diet/quit smoking/start an exercise routine/re-work those bad spousal communication patterns that drive you crazy? During a vacation! Crazy, I know. But studies show it works. All your usual cues are out of whack, and so it’s a bit easier to start something new. Try it! It works! (I am typing this in Costa Rica, where I have started a new weird exercise habit involving rolling my back out every morning. I tried to do this back home, but I kept forgetting. Here, I do it every morning.)

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

This is, in many ways, the most important idea in this book: That we can influence any habit we want, but, if we don’t take an active role in choosing our habits, then they’ll proliferate without our permission. But we can control them, if we want. We just need to know how.

One day in the early 1900s, a prominent American executive named Claude C. Hopkins was approached by an old friend with a new business idea. The friend had discovered an amazing product, he explained, that he was convinced would be a hit. It was a toothpaste, a minty, frothy concoction he called “Pepsodent.”

True story: I wasn’t sure if I was going to include the story of Claude Hopkins in this book, but whenever I tried to describe what I was working on to other people, I kept mentioning tooth brushing as an example of habits that have successfully proliferated. And then, when I heard other people describing the book, they kept mentioning tooth brushing, too. And after a while, it finally got through my head: I should probably include the tooth brushing story that I found in the book itself.

He had made Puffed Wheat famous by saying that it was “shot from guns” until the grains puffed “to eight times normal size.”

How does someone shoot grains of rice from guns? I have no idea.

Before Pepsodent appeared, only 7 percent of Americans had a tube of toothpaste in their medicine chests. A decade after Hopkins’s ad campaign went nationwide, that number had jumped to 65 percent.2.12 By the end of World War II, the military downgraded concerns about recruits’ teeth because so many soldiers were brushing every day.

Another strange reporting detail: It’s actually incredibly hard to find research about the history of toothbrushing in the United States. To report this chapter, I tracked down a couple of historians who had studied the public health of dental hygiene - but there’s almost nothing definitive on the subject.

First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards.

It is interesting how frequently people - including marketers - fail to define the rewards they are offering someone in exchange for building a new habit. Think, for instance, about how your health insurance company tries to influence your behavior. They probably offer you a discount on premiums if you exercise, or promise to give up smoking, or something like that. But can you tell me how much that discount is? Or how that discount will impact your life in a positive way? Do they offer you counseling with clear weekly goals and rewards to help you improve? Probably not. Now, apply that by millions of people, and you start to see the challenges that programs like Medicare and the Affordable Healthcare Act confront.

Studies of people who have successfully started new exercise routines, for instance, show they are more likely to stick with a workout plan if they choose a specific cue, such as running as soon as they get home from work, and a clear reward, such as a beer or an evening of guilt-free television.

One of the best cues for exercise is agreeing to meet a friend at the gym on a particular evening, or planning a run with a colleague for some morning. As future chapters explain, cues that are embedded in social networks are particularly powerful.

Stimson was tall and handsome, with a strong chin, a gentle voice, and a taste for high-end meals. (“I’d rather my kids smoked weed than ate in McDonald’s,” he once told a colleague.)

I hope Drake’s kids never read this.

This explains why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings. Most of the time, these cravings emerge so gradually that we’re not really aware they exist, so we’re often blind to their influence.

The area of research showing how our brains anticipate rewards is pretty important, because it explains a bunch of other things as well: Why do we get tired of rewards over time? Because as we start expecting them, they are less and less rewarding. Why is it so hard to ignore temptations once we’ve imagined a treat? Because our brain starts experiencing that reward even before we get it, and if it fails to materialize, we feel something akin to depression. And, even more important: is there a kind of reward that seems to bypass this discounting process, that remains consistently rewarding, regardless of how much we expect it, or how many times it arrives? Yes: Emotional rewards seem more immune to discounting, perhaps because the trigger neurological activity in older parts of our brains.

“We were looking at it all wrong. No one craves scentlessness. On the other hand, lots of people crave a nice smell after they’ve spent thirty minutes cleaning.”

This basic insight - that people don’t crave ‘empty’ rewards, like scentlessness, which are hard to see or touch or smell - might seem obvious, but think about how many times we try to motivate ourselves with such rewards. People say they want to diet because they want to lose weight - but losing pounds is hard to see or touch. We’re much better off with a tangible reward - like saying I want to diet in order to fit into a particular dress.

there’s no craving that has made sunscreen into a daily habit. Some companies are trying to fix that by giving sunscreens a tingling sensation or something that lets people know they’ve applied it to their skin. They’re hoping it will cue an expectation the same way the craving for a tingling mouth reminds us to brush our teeth.

This sunscreen problem remains an issue today: No company has figured out how to make applying sunscreen every day into a widespread habit. Making skin tingle doesn’t work, because there are too many people with sensitive skin who experience that tingling as pain. Giving sunscreen a pleasant smell also hasn’t proven successful (in part because the chemicals that provide that smell often cause eye irritation.) If someone can figure out how to make sunscreen into a daily habit, they’ll save millions of lives.

The game clock at the far end of the field says there are eight minutes and nineteen seconds left when Tony Dungy, the new head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers—one of the worst teams in the National Football League, not to mention the history of professional football—starts to feel a tiny glimmer of hope.

One challenge that I encountered in writing this chapter: I know almost nothing about football. Thank goodness for experts who are willing to read early drafts.

“Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” Dungy would explain. “They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”

For some reason, this quote has been really popular on twitter. It’s funny, because if you asked me which parts of this book would resonate with people, I don’t know that I would have chosen this quote. Shows what I know.

As the ball spins through the air, Lynch reads his cues—the direction of the quarterback’s face mask and hands, the spacing of the receivers—and starts moving before it’s clear where the ball will land. Roche, the San Diego receiver, springs forward, but Lynch cuts around him and intercepts the pass. Before Roche can react, Lynch takes off down the field toward the Chargers’ end zone. The other Buccaneers are perfectly positioned to clear his route. Lynch runs 10, then 15, then 20, then almost 25 yards before he is finally pushed out of bounds. The entire play has taken less than ten seconds.

I must have watched the game tape of this play 200 times in order to write those paragraphs. At one point I had a dream about this series of movements on the field.

AA meetings don’t have a prescribed schedule or curriculum. Rather, they usually begin with a member telling his or her story, after which other people can chime in.

If you have never been to an AA meeting, I highly recommend it - even if you don’t have a drinking problem. (It is not unusual for people without drinking issues to attend AA meetings. As long as it is an open meeting, all are welcome, even if you are attending simply because you are curious about how it works.) There are few gatherings more inspiring, powerful and surprising than an AA meeting. It’s well worth your time. And, it goes without saying, if you are struggling with a behavior that you feel you can’t control - like consuming alcohol, or overeating, or porn - groups like AA, or Overeaters Anonymous, or Sex Addicts Anonymous can help a lot. (It’s also worth noting, however, that if those programs don’t work for you, don’t despair. This kind of treatment is right for some people, but not for everyone. For others, counseling with a professional, or a religious figure, or even just a close friend can help a lot. If you’re not sure where to start in finding help, try the Internet, and then experiment with a couple of different kinds of treatments. Just because one thing doesn’t make the difference doesn’t mean you’ll never change - it just means you need another approach.)

Just as frequently, however, there was no tragedy that preceded people’s transformations. Rather, they changed because they were embedded in social groups that made change easier.

This taps into an interesting line of research (and social biases.) We tend to think that radical change is only possible after someone experiences a radical problem: We’ve all heard, for instance, of the brush with cancer that prompts someone to start exercising and dieting, or the near-death accident that causes someone to start working less and spending more time with her kids. But it turns out that most people who radically change their life don’t have a radical problem that precedes the change. Most people don’t wait until they have cancer or an accident. Rather, they start believing that change is possible, and they work at the change - and fail repeatedly - until they learn enough to make the change become real. And I find that really inspiring, because it means two things: First, you don’t have to wait for the cancer or the accident to become the person you want to be. And, second, failing at change is part of the process of changing. Just because you start a diet, and then fall off the wagon, that doesn’t mean you’ll never lose weight. It just means that you’ve figured out one of the weaknesses of your dieting plan - and now you’re ready to start again, with a plan in place for the next time that weakness appears.

O’Neill believed that some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization. Some habits, in other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are “keystone habits,” and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.

The phrase ‘keystone habit’ draws from a concept in biology known as a ‘keystone species’ which, similarly, is “a species on which other species in an ecosystem largely depend, such that if it were removed the ecosystem would change drastically.”

Keystone habits explain how Michael Phelps became an Olympic champion and why some college students outperform their peers. They describe why some people, after years of trying, suddenly lose forty pounds while becoming more productive at work and still getting home in time for dinner with their kids. And keystone habits explain how Alcoa became one of the best performing stocks in the Dow Jones index, while also becoming one of the safest places on earth.

This is one of my favorite chapters in this book. I don’t know why. I just think that, structurally, it works. It’s easy to read, it moves quickly. Most of the time, when I write, I don’t feel particularly proud or smart when a chapter or a passage comes together. I more feel relieved - and happy, because I enjoy reading it. This chapter does that for me.

At the top of O’Neill’s list he wrote down “SAFETY” and set an audacious goal: zero injuries. Not zero factory injuries. Zero injuries, period. That would be his commitment no matter how much it cost. O’Neill decided to take the job.

Think, for a moment, about the audaciousness of this hiring: Paul O’Neill decided to take this job not because he thought he could make better aluminum, and not because he thought he could make the company more profitable, but because he thought he could make it safer. Who takes a job for a reason like that? And what kind of a board hires a guy who doesn’t know anything about aluminum to run an aluminum company? It’s mind boggling. (And thank goodness everyone acted so irrationally.)

The key to protecting Alcoa employees, O’Neill believed, was understanding why injuries happened in the first place. And to understand why injuries happened, you had to study how the manufacturing process was going wrong. To understand how things were going wrong, you had to bring in people who could educate workers about quality control and the most efficient work processes, so that it would be easier to do everything right, since correct work is also safer work.

I think one of the important points on this story is this: “O’Neill’s plan for getting to zero injuries entailed the most radical realignment in Alcoa’s history.” If O’Neill had come into Alcoa telling everyone he wanted to realign everything, all the employees would have fought him on it. But because he got them invested in a fairly benign goal at first (improving worker safety) instead of emphasizing how much things were going to change, people were more willing to play along. We tend to think of strong leaders as people who arrive promising to change everything. But in my experience, it’s the opposite: Strong leaders show up emphasizing the things everyone agrees upon - and then the changes occur without anyone completely realizing how thoroughly everything is shifting.

It’s not completely clear why. But for many people, exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change. “Exercise spills over,” said James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. “There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.”

People have asked why exercise is a keystone habit for some people, but not others. The answer appears to have something to do with how exercise changes someone’s self image. If you were a serious high school athlete, for instance, and you stopped working out for a period, and then start exercising again, it’s unlikely that an exercise habit will be a keystone habit for you - it’s unlikely, in other words, that starting to exercise will trigger other changes in your life. But if you were someone who, like me, never played sports, and doesn’t have a history of exercising, then starting an exercise habit is a big deal. It’s hard to know how to start. You don’t know what to wear, you worry that you’ll look dumb jogging. There’s a small, irrational fear to starting an exercise habit. And so, when you finally overcome that small fear, and start exercising habitually, it causes a shift in self-image: you start thinking of yourself, almost sub-consciously, as the kind of person who exercises. And that kind of person tends to procrastinate less, and avoid frivolous spending. Put differently, a new pattern can act as a keystone habit when it causes us to start seeing ourselves differently, when it influences how we think of ourselves. If a change seems irrationally scary - if convincing your department to be more productive, for instance, seems frightening; or if giving up drinking causes you a mild anxiety - then that’s a good sign, because it means that if you can make that small shift, you’ll likely set off a chain reaction that will change other habits, as well. Keystone habits gain their strength by causing us to reimagine who we are, and what’s possible.

During practices, when Bowman ordered Phelps to swim at race speed, he would shout, “Put in the videotape!” and Phelps would push himself, as hard as he could. It almost felt anticlimactic as he cut through the water. He had done this so many times in his head that, by now, it felt rote. But it worked. He got faster and faster. Eventually, all Bowman had to do before a race was whisper, “Get the videotape ready,” and Phelps would settle down and crush the competition.

This practice of visualization is really powerful in almost any context. Numerous studies have shown that visualizing something with precision - imagining how you hope a meeting will play out, for instance, or visualizing a specific conversation, or pushing yourself to daydream about a task you hope to accomplish - increases the odds that things will turn out pretty well. This is, in part, because telling ourselves stories about ourselves is how we build mental models, which help focus our attention on what matters, and helps us ignore details we can safely put aside. (I cover mental models and visualization in my book Smarter Faster Better.) The science behind visualization, however, has been largely overlooked by mainstream media, in part, I think, because it smacks of the kind of nonsense that you can find in new age books that say if you visualize something, it will find its way to you. That’s not right. Simply imagining winning the lottery doesn’t make it more likely I’ll win the lottery. But that also doesn’t mean that visualization is bad. It’s really useful - if you know what to use it for.

There was one famous experiment, conducted in the 1960s, in which scientists at Stanford had tested the willpower of a group of four-year-olds. The kids were brought into a room and presented with a selection of treats, including marshmallows.

This is the famous ‘marshmallow experiment’, which has been repeated dozens of times. If you want to see some great video of repetitions of this experiment, search the internet for “Marshmallow test.” The footage is wonderful.

Years later, they tracked down many of the study’s participants. By now, they were in high school.

One of the reasons it was easy to track down many of these participants is because the researcher’s daughter was one of the participants, and her classmates populated the rest of the volunteers. That researcher - Walter Mischel - wrote a book called “The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.”

They learned that teaching them simple tricks—such as distracting themselves by drawing a picture, or imagining a frame around the marshmallow, so it seemed more like a photo and less like a real temptation—helped them learn self-control.

One of my favorite summaries of this experiment is found in a blog post at the New Yorker titled “THE STRUGGLES OF A PSYCHOLOGIST STUDYING SELF-CONTROL”. Here’s a great excerpt: In all this work, Mischel has consistently found that the crucial factor in delaying gratification is the ability to change your perception of the object or action you want to resist. Trying to avoid the tasty treat in front of your nose? Put a frame around it in your mind, as if it were a picture or photograph, to make the temptation less immediate. One boy in Mischel’s test was initially unable to wait, but, with careful instruction, eventually learned to hold out. When Mischel asked him what had changed, the boy replied, “You can’t eat a picture.” Mischel used a different kind of picturing when he quit smoking—he replaced his pleasurable associations with cigarettes with the image of the man in the hospital. The key, it turns out, is learning to mentally “cool” what Mischel calls the “hot” aspects of your environment: the things that pull you away from your goal. Cooling can be accomplished by putting the object at an imaginary distance (a photograph isn’t a treat), or by re-framing it (picturing marshmallows as clouds not candy). Focussing on a completely unrelated experience can also work, as can any technique that successfully switches your attention.

But the patients who didn’t write out any plans were at a significant disadvantage, because they never thought ahead about how to deal with painful inflection points. They never deliberately designed willpower habits. Even if they intended to walk around the block, their resolve abandoned them when they confronted the agony of the first few steps.

It’s worth noting that this method of planning - also known as ‘implementation intentions’ - have also been shown to be really effective in combatting procrastination. The thinking goes as such: rather than trying to extinguish the cues that cause procrastination (boredom, needing a break, etc.), come up with some kind of plan regarding how to respond to them ahead of time (“I’ll set an alarm for 5 minutes, and allow myself to visit Facebook until the alarm goes off.”) We tend to fail when we try to extinguish a negative impulse, rather than plan for it. For more on procrastination, there’s a nice paper here: http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/2010_Wieber_Gollwitzer_Procrastination.pdf

Simply giving employees a sense of agency—a feeling that they are in control, that they have genuine decision-making authority—can radically increase how much energy and focus they bring to their jobs.

Giving employees a sense of control can also trigger motivation. In my new book, Smarter Faster Better, I spend a lot of time talking about how important a sense of control (what psychologists call an ‘internal locus of control’) is in fostering motivation and innovation. I did a quick video on this topic for the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/video/business/100000004810041/we-trust-you.html

Travis’s father died that night. On the anniversary of his death, every year, Travis wakes up early, takes an extra-long shower, plans out his day in careful detail, and then drives to work. He always arrives on time.

I love this story. I became a journalist, in many ways, because I wanted to write things that help people. And for a long time, as a reporter at the New York Times, that meant I focused on big problems. I wrote about companies that take financial advantage of senior citizens, and American and Chinese firms that exploit workers. And I’m proud of those stories - they help get laws passed, and improve people’s lives. But, with this book, I tried to do something different: Find small lessons and insights that help individuals. Not being able to control your emotions, or get to work on time, or struggling with daily habits isn’t a huge problem akin to financial loss or worker exploitation. But it’s still a problem - and for someone suffering from that problem, it feels incredibly hard and real and sad. And tiny victories - like learning how to show up for work on time - can be life changing. Travis’s life was changed by learning how to control himself. I hope other people find some meaning in hearing his story.

The patient was already unconscious when he was wheeled into the operating room at Rhode Island Hospital. His jaw was slack, his eyes closed, and the top of an intubation tube peeked above his lips. As a nurse hooked him up to a machine that would force air into his lungs during surgery, one of his arms slipped off the gurney, the skin mottled with liver spots.

No one ever asks me any questions about this chapter, but I really like it. It was the easiest chapter in the book to write, because I just followed the stories. I think its really exciting to read. But no one ever asks me about it. I have no idea why.

One nurse told me they developed a system of color codes to warn one another. “We put doctors’ names in different colors on the whiteboards,” she said. “Blue meant ‘nice,’ red meant ‘jerk,’ and black meant, ‘whatever you do, don’t contradict them or they’ll take your head off.’

One way to identify the organizational routines inside your own company is to look for the ‘work arounds’ or codes that people use to communicate with each other, such as writing doctor’s names in different colors in order to signal which ones are pleasant to work with, and which are troublesome. Every company - and, in fact, every unit or team - has little codes like this. Sometimes they are formal, like using different colors to signal information. Sometimes they are almost completely undefined, like the gossip that people whisper to each other which serve a similar function: to warn, or to pass information. Those small communication systems are signals for what people feel like they can’t openly say - and the behaviors that emerge to accommodate the need to communicate, even when that communication is hard, are the organizational habits that define the culture.

Destructive organizational habits can be found within hundreds of industries and at thousands of firms. And almost always, they are the products of thoughtlessness, of leaders who avoid thinking about the culture and so let it develop without guidance. There are no organizations without institutional habits.

If you are interested in learning more about organizational habits, and the different ways the can manifest, let me recommend a fantastic summary of the academic literature located here: http://link.sdu.dk/downloads/SOD/Becker2004.pdf

Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war.

Some people might feel like this is an ungenerous assessment. And that’s true: most of the time, companies work together really well. Teams feel like real partners. Co-workers don’t seek out opportunities to undermine each other. But, in many ways, cooperation is the exception to the rule of how companies are supposed to work. Capitalism, after all, is predicated upon to premise that competition reveals efficiencies. As just one example of how competition can emerge within a company (not just accidentally, but as the result of well thought out policies), consider these two examples cited in an academic paper titled “Hiring, Firing and Infighting: A Tale of Two Companies”: In 1997, Levi Strauss & Co. was forced to lay off about a third of its workforce, when a plan to implement a team-based approach failed. The Wall Street Journal (May 20, 1998) states that this approach of the company “led to a quagmire in which skilled workers . . . found themselves pitted against slower colleagues, damaging morale and triggering corrosive infighting.” 2. Former Microsoft executive Dick Brass wrote, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times (February 4, 2010), “At Microsoft, [internal competition] has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.”

And which new designers are most likely to have the right habits? The ones who have formed the right truces and found the right alliances.6.26 Truces are so important that new fashion labels usually succeed only if they are headed by people who left other fashion companies on good terms.

The fashion industry is a fascinating example of how organizational routines manifest. Think about a fashion show, and how strangely everyone acts. All the models walk as if they are aliens. There are people air kissing each other all over the place. Even most of the clothes themselves are bizarre - the kinds of garments no normal person would ever wear. So why do these strange (and incredibly expensive to stage) fashion shows happen multiple times a year? In part, because its a way for the industry to demonstrate a series of social routines that send an enormous amount of information to everyone else within the industry. Who is in the front row of the fashion show? Who is thanked at the end? Who gets three air kisses, instead of just two? These are all bits of habits that allow executives to communicate with each other, without having to say anything rude.

In fact, the hospital had been given an opportunity that few organizations ever received. “I saw this as an opening,” Dr. Cooper told me. “There’s a long history of hospitals trying to attack these problems and failing. Sometimes people need a jolt, and all the bad publicity was a serious jolt. It gave us a chance to reexamine everything.”

Crises give us an opportunity to make big changes - but frequently, we become so focused on the crisis itself that we don’t see the opportunity. For a fun overview about how to identify the opportunities that a crisis might offer, let me recommend: Strategic decision making: from crisis to opportunity by Papadakis, Vassilis M., Yiannis Kaloghirou, and Maria Iatrelli.

Congress also passed Obama’s health care reform law, reworked consumer protection laws, and approved dozens of other statutes, from expanding children’s health insurance to giving women new opportunities to sue over wage discrimination. It was one of the biggest policy overhauls since the Great Society and the New Deal, and it happened because, in the aftermath of a financial catastrophe, lawmakers saw opportunity.

Good leaders, as I mentioned, look for opportunities to create a sense of crisis sometimes, so as to help people change. Consider, for instance, how Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, talks about his company to his employees. Cook consistently emphasizes that Apple is doing well - but that a nimble competitor could kill the firm in just a few years, if Apple isn’t savvy in staying ahead. The largest, most profitable company on earth believes it is always on the brink of destruction because of the warnings of the CEO - and because believing you are always in mild-crisis makes it easier for Apple itself to stay nimble, to reconsider and change its habits when it needs to.

Andrew Pole had just started working as a data expert for Target when a few colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk one day and asked the kind of question Pole had been born to answer: “Can your computers figure out which customers are pregnant, even if they don’t want us to know?” Pole was a statistician. His entire life revolved around using data to understand people.

I ended up doing a bit more reporting about Target when an excerpt from this chapter appeared in the New York Times Magazine. If you want to read more about my interactions with the company, you can find the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

Caitlin Pike, a thirty-nine-year-old in San Francisco who purchased a $250 stroller, but nothing else? She’s probably buying for a friend’s baby shower. Besides, her demographic data shows she got divorced two years ago.

Caitlin Pike is a woman who I went to college with, and one of my best friends (and is married to one of my other best friends.) She’s not divorced. She was a little surprised when she discovered that I had summarily divorced her in a book. Sorry, Caitlin!

At the time, organ meat wasn’t popular in America. A middle-class woman in 1940 would sooner starve than despoil her table with tongue or tripe. So when the scientists recruited into the Committee on Food Habits met for the first time in 1941, they set themselves a goal of systematically identifying the cultural barriers that discouraged Americans from eating organ meat. In all, more than two hundred studies were eventually published, and at their core, they all contained a similar finding: To change people’s diets, the exotic must be made familiar. And to do that, you must camouflage it in everyday garb.

The study that this section draws upon was written by Brian Wansink, an academic who is famous for doing experiments that show things like dish size influence how much we eat. In one of his most famous experiments, he create a soup bowl that - unbeknownst to diners - would secret refill itself as people ate, via a tube connected to the bottom of the bowl. People would eat and eat and eat as long as the bowl appeared to be full. Eating from a large plate, by the same token, causes people to consumer more food than using a small plate. Wansink’s research is really fascinating.

“Managing a playlist is all about risk mitigation,”

I love situations like this, where DJs start talking like investment bankers. As a general rule, I’ve found, when a professional starts using language that you’ve only heard in very different contexts, it means you’re on the right track.

Whether selling a new song, a new food, or a new crib, the lesson is the same: If you dress a new something in old habits, it’s easier for the public to accept it.

I eventually went back to Target and Andrew Pole (who eventually stopped speaking to me) to try and find out more. Here’s what I wrote for the NYT Magazine: A few weeks before this article went to press, I flew to Minneapolis to try and speak to Andrew Pole one last time. I hadn’t talked to him in more than a year. Back when we were still friendly, I mentioned that my wife was seven months pregnant. We shop at Target, I told him, and had given the company our address so we could start receiving coupons in the mail. As my wife’s pregnancy progressed, I noticed a subtle upswing in the number of advertisements for diapers and baby clothes arriving at our house. Pole didn’t answer my e-mails or phone calls when I visited Minneapolis. I drove to his large home in a nice suburb, but no one answered the door. On my way back to the hotel, I stopped at a Target to pick up some deodorant, then also bought some T-shirts and a fancy hair gel. On a whim, I threw in some pacifiers, to see how the computers would react. Besides, our baby is now 9 months old. You can’t have too many pacifiers. When I paid, I didn’t receive any sudden deals on diapers or formula, to my slight disappointment. It made sense, though: I was shopping in a city I never previously visited, at 9:45 p.m. on a weeknight, buying a random assortment of items. I was using a corporate credit card, and besides the pacifiers, hadn’t purchased any of the things that a parent needs. It was clear to Target’s computers that I was on a business trip. Pole’s prediction calculator took one look at me, ran the numbers and decided to bide its time. Back home, the offers would eventually come. As Pole told me the last time we spoke: “Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.”