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

by Charles Duhigg

When Fennell began suggesting changes of his own, he saw the same kinds of roadblocks—department chiefs refusing to take responsibility or undercutting him with whispered threats to their subordinates—start to emerge. So he decided to turn his inquiry into a media circus. He called for public hearings that lasted ninety-one days and revealed an organization that had ignored multiple warnings of risks. He implied to newspaper reporters that commuters were in grave danger whenever they rode the subway. He cross-examined dozens of witnesses who described an organization where turf battles mattered more than commuter safety. His final report, released almost a year after the fire, was a scathing, 250-page indictment of the Underground portraying an organization crippled by bureaucratic ineptitude. “Having set out as an Investigation into the events of one night,” Fennell wrote, the report’s “scope was necessarily enlarged into the examination of a system.” He concluded with pages and pages of stinging criticisms and recommendations that, essentially, suggested much of the organization was either incompetent or corrupt. The response was instantaneous and overwhelming.