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title: "The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business"
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# Top #11 in Business Processes 39,987 reviews, 4.6⭐ avg rating Deep dive into habit neuroscience The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

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## Summary

> 🔥 Transform your routines, transform your life! 🔄

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## Key Features

- • **Master the Habit Loop:** Unlock the 3-step cue-routine-reward cycle to rewire your daily behaviors.
- • **Practical Habit Change Toolkit:** Includes an actionable appendix guiding you to lasting personal and professional transformation.
- • **Science-Backed Success Stories:** Learn from real-world examples like Starbucks, NFL, and Alcoa transforming habits into wins.
- • **Data-Driven Behavioral Insights:** Discover how companies like Target predict your needs before you do.
- • **Boost Willpower & Social Influence:** Harness belief and community power to overcome even the toughest habits.

## Overview

Charles Duhigg’s bestselling book reveals the neuroscience and psychology behind habit formation and change, blending investigative journalism with compelling stories from business, sports, and social movements. With nearly 40,000 reviews and a 4.6-star rating, it offers a practical framework to understand and reshape habits for personal and professional success.

## Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • MORE THAN 3 MILLION COPIES SOLD • This instant classic explores how we can change our lives by changing our habits. “Few [books] become essential manuals for business and living. The Power of Habit is an exception.”— Financial Times A WALL STREET JOURNAL AND FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR In The Power of Habit, award-winning business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives that take us from the boardrooms of Procter & Gamble to the sidelines of the NFL to the front lines of the civil rights movement, Duhigg presents a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential. At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, being more productive, and achieving success is understanding how habits work. As Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives. With a new Afterword by the author

Review: Now I Understand How to Create Lasting Change - Following a prologue in which a subject transforms utterly transforms herself, Duhigg lays out the structure of the book. "Part One: The Habits of Individuals" is broken into three chapters. Chapter 1, "The Habit Loop" describes the (wait for it...) the habit loop, which is the foundation for everything that follows. This is a 3-step process, in which a cue triggers a routine which is reinforced by a reward. Duhigg does a great job of describing the science that describes this pattern, and the science which explains it, without making the information so dry that you can't absorb it. Chapter 2, "The Craving Brain," examines individuals who suffered neurological damage and the impact that habits had on their ability to perform various functions and routines. This chapter had heart: imagining the daily lives of these individuals and their caregivers brought some real drama to the study of how habits operate in our brains. The point of the chapter was basically that habits are surprisingly delicate, to use Duhigg's term, and can be easily disrupted, with the right information. Chapter 3, "The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs" focused on the coaching career of of NFL coach Tony Dungy, and how he used his understanding of habits to transform the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indiana Colts. The Golden Rule is You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it. Midway through Chapter 3 Duhigg breaks away from NFL to consider Alcoholics Anonymous. If Chapter 2 is the heart of Part One, then Chapter 3 is the soul: both AA and Dungy's football program achieve their greatest success when the people operating under their respective guidance both arrive at belief in something greater than the individual. Duhigg shares more than that in this chapter, but there is a ton of information in this chapter about how habits can be disrupted to make way for more positive patterns. In Chapter 4, "Keystone Habits, Or the Ballad of Paul O'Neill: Which Habits Matter Most," Duhigg offers Paul O'Neill of Alcoa to illustrate how altering a single habit in an organization (albeit in a highly focused and disciplined manner) can transform the total organization. Chapter 5, "Starbucks and the Habit of Success," opens with a powerful story of a young man who was raised by drug addicts, and his subsequent struggles to maintain his employment. His pattern of failure changed when he went to work at Starbucks. This chapter discusses the importance of willpower and its limitations, how willpower can be strengthened, and planning for success. Chapter 6, "The Power of a Crisis," uses the examples of doctor error in a Rhode Island hospital, which Duhigg asserts was made inevitable by the toxic atmosphere in the workplace, and a fire in King's Cross Station, London, which was made inevitable by strictly observed divisions of labor, to provide opportunities for transforming the cultures of those two organizations into something stronger and more effective than could have been created as Paul O'Neill did, just by sheer force of leadership. Chapter 7, "How Target Knows What You Want Before You Do" is probably the most widely read section of the book, as it was excerpted by the New York Times (Duhigg's employer) and Forbes, among others. It's readable and informative, and fairly creepy in disclosing how much information we unwittingly distribute about ourselves, and how unlikely we are to curtail the activities that make it possible for Target to know a woman is pregnant before any of her immediate family members do. Several reviewers have described these sections as "filler," but I found that they addressed complaints common to people who claim to want to change their habits but lack willpower, and provided guideposts to an attentive reader for what qualities set one up for success. I did not find these sections to be filler, but powerful illustrations of how a thorough understanding of the mechanisms behind habits can provide the tools for large scale change, and a discussion of the nature of personal responsibility. Although the sections were more directly addressing corporate bodies, the information was driven by the individuals within those organizations and therefore applicable to me and my own private attempts to alter my habits. Part Three was an interesting summing up. Chapter 8, "Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott" addressed the components that made those movements (if one can call a mega-church a movement) successful. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, particularly, was really interesting: we celebrate Rosa Parks's heroism, deservedly, but the fact is, several other individuals had made similar stands without sparking the Civil Rights Movement. Duhigg's explanation for why Parks had the right stuff to make it happen makes for informative reading (the short version being, Parks was a genuinely nice and widely connected member of Montgomery society). Chapter 9, "The Neurology of Free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?" puts all the preceding information in perspective. It contrasts Brian Thomas, an Englishman who killed his wife while sleepwalking, with Angie Bachmann, a compulsive gambler who lost many hundreds of thousands of dollars. He describes the neurology of sleepwalking activity and of a compulsive activity such as gambling (or drinking, or binge eating) and concludes that habits are under are control and can be altered, which argues for self-awareness and personal responsibility. The information provided in the body of the book was enough for me to understand how to create a road map for how to change my habits, but Duhigg did provide a digest of the material in his Appendix, "A Reader's Guide to Using These Ideas." Overall, I found this book to be both readable and powerful, and I look forward to implementing what I've learned to further my own goals.
Review: The title may sound simple. The book is strong. - The Economist magazine calls this a "first-rate" business book and I agree. Charles Duhigg tells of people - individuals, businesses, and other organizations - who carry out routines and act on habits in recurrent situations. The book puts a spotlight on people who succeed at shedding some habits and bringing new ones to life - in themselves and in people around them. In these pages lie a powerful concept and illustrative stories. Habits can be efficient. When a habit is activated, we don't have to think so much about all the steps and breaths we take. Habits can be simple or more complex, making short work of such activities as: brushing one's teeth while thinking about the workday ahead; driving a car while listening to the radio; or tending to customers, fielding their requests, and responding routinely in a warm, appreciative manner. Routines can do a lot of good when it comes to maintaining desirable habits. But things can get challenging when we would like a habit to be changed. A big part of the value in this book is its parade of human stories about how people have succeeded in replacing old habits with new ones. There are a few stories, too, about people who tried but failed to change a bad habit. Along the way, the author sketches a do-it-yourself model. He talks about people identifying existing "habit loops" which may include external triggers of time, place, people, and situations. Then, the idea is to interrupt and redirect activity toward the desired goals, eventually forming new habits. In some examples, small "wins" are shown leading to bigger wins as people build skills and confidence in new ways of doing things. And in stories of organizational or cultural habits, positive changes are shown sometimes to set off a ripple effect, where new habits spread to more people in a kind of social contagion. Charles Duhigg is a New York Times journalist and a graduate of Harvard Business School. He draws together a sampling of psychological research and real-life examples in business and other organizational endeavors. "The Power of Habit" delivers Duhigg's report in the form of a book full of good stories about people who exemplify the concept of "habit" in action, including direct interviews with some of the players in the stories. With this Duhigg presents a psychological concept of habits that a general audience might apply in everyday business and personal life. This book, if it reaches a large readership, may follow in the grooves of what journalist and psychologist Daniel Goleman's books did to popularize "emotional intelligence" and "EQ." (Goleman focuses on business applications of emotional intelligence in his 1998 book, Working with Emotional Intelligence .) Duhigg's stories are interesting in their own right, easy to understand, and memorable. They run the gamut from sports to neurosurgery, and from marketing toothpaste to overhauling the managerial culture of a heavy industrial corporation. For example, chapter 2 "The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits," showcases breakthroughs in consumer marketing (and in one case, the dental health of a whole society) connected to habit changes. The examples cover a variety of marketing obstacles and breakaway solutions including Pepsodent toothpaste, Schlitz beer, and Febreze household deodorizer. Chapter 5, "Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic," talks about staff training programs that have been credited with enhancing customer service and tuning up whole organizational cultures. Examples besides Starbucks include Deloitte Consulting and the Container Store. Perhaps the most colorful and intriguing business story in the book is about the managerial successes of Paul O'Neill when he was CEO of the aluminum company Alcoa. (He later went on to serve as U.S. Treasury Secretary.) This is told mostly in Chapter 4, "Keystone Habits, or the Ballad of Paul O'Neill: Which Habits Matter Most." When O'Neill became CEO of Alcoa in 1987, he spearheaded the company on a headlong drive to achieve an error-free standard of employee safety. He rallied employees up and down the hierarchy, and across functions, to the cause of becoming "the safest company in America... [despite that]... employees work with metals that are 1500 degrees and can rip a man's arm off." (p. 98) At first, Alcoa's investors and employees alike were skeptical, seeing O'Neill's radical quest for superiority in employee safety as too narrow, quixotic, and off-center. O'Neill conceived of the safety charge as a focal point that would trigger all sorts of changes in routines and habits of accountability throughout the company. Preventing employee injuries became a "keystone habit" in Duhigg's lingo, that would set off a ripple effect leading to an upswing in total corporate performance. It worked. Within a year, Alcoa's profits reached an all-time high. Over a 13-year run with O'Neill at the helm, profits and the stock price both increased by 400%. Time lost to worker injuries declined to one-twentieth the U.S. average. Duhigg's book cites interviews with O'Neill himself and other Alcoa people who were there, and mentions that Alcoa stands as a case study in business schools. "The Power of Habit" shines a bright light on organizational habits, but not only that. Duhigg serves up stories that point to individual habits, with relevance for personal success, such as interrupting a snacking habit or ending addictions. I see Duhigg's concept of habit loops as compatible with and complementary to the work of food and marketing psychologist Brian Wansink in his excellent book, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (2006). At the other end of the scale, Duhigg talks about habits changing at a societal level of attitudes and behavior, offering an analysis of the civil rights movement's Montgomery bus boycott as an example. The one disappointment I find is a lack of chapter summaries and sub-chapter headings. While the book certainly is accessible "as is," such aids would make it easier to tie together diverse examples, remember themes and links, and go back to them later. The Audible.com version in particular is harder going without summaries and sub-headings because one is not looking at pages with the chapter heading in the upper right, nor is the listener just a page flip away from glancing at the book's table of contents. The Audible.com version also could do a better job of mentioning the printed book's many visual diagrams for listeners who are interested enough to cross-refer. The book begins and ends with fitting references to the 19th-century writings of an American philosopher and psychologist, William James, who elucidated the concept of habit before there was much science behind it. James was a prime mover in establishing two major streams of modern social science and philosophy: 1.) behavioral psychology - that is, putting a scientific focus on observable behavior and developing interventions to help people shape their lives according to their better ideals; and 2.) the philosophy of pragmatism - which for James meant evaluating scientific theories according to their "cash-value." In James's pragmatist view, a good theory is one that does good work in the minds of those who use it. James saw "habit," like Duhigg does, as a core aspect of human nature. Duhigg draws attention to success stories in habit replacement, from dental hygiene to aluminum manufacture. In keeping with the philosophical pulse of James the pragmatist, I give Duhigg's "The Power of Habit" a five-star rating for its eye-opening reports on useful research, chock full of real-world examples. Plus the book is written in a style that is vivid and inviting.

## Features

- Life changing novel

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #4,510 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #14 in Business Processes & Infrastructure #19 in Popular Social Psychology & Interactions #110 in Personal Transformation Self-Help |
| Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 40,122 Reviews |

## Images

![The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71wm29Etl4L.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Now I Understand How to Create Lasting Change
*by C***H on June 29, 2012*

Following a prologue in which a subject transforms utterly transforms herself, Duhigg lays out the structure of the book. "Part One: The Habits of Individuals" is broken into three chapters. Chapter 1, "The Habit Loop" describes the (wait for it...) the habit loop, which is the foundation for everything that follows. This is a 3-step process, in which a cue triggers a routine which is reinforced by a reward. Duhigg does a great job of describing the science that describes this pattern, and the science which explains it, without making the information so dry that you can't absorb it. Chapter 2, "The Craving Brain," examines individuals who suffered neurological damage and the impact that habits had on their ability to perform various functions and routines. This chapter had heart: imagining the daily lives of these individuals and their caregivers brought some real drama to the study of how habits operate in our brains. The point of the chapter was basically that habits are surprisingly delicate, to use Duhigg's term, and can be easily disrupted, with the right information. Chapter 3, "The Golden Rule of Habit Change: Why Transformation Occurs" focused on the coaching career of of NFL coach Tony Dungy, and how he used his understanding of habits to transform the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indiana Colts. The Golden Rule is You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it. Midway through Chapter 3 Duhigg breaks away from NFL to consider Alcoholics Anonymous. If Chapter 2 is the heart of Part One, then Chapter 3 is the soul: both AA and Dungy's football program achieve their greatest success when the people operating under their respective guidance both arrive at belief in something greater than the individual. Duhigg shares more than that in this chapter, but there is a ton of information in this chapter about how habits can be disrupted to make way for more positive patterns. In Chapter 4, "Keystone Habits, Or the Ballad of Paul O'Neill: Which Habits Matter Most," Duhigg offers Paul O'Neill of Alcoa to illustrate how altering a single habit in an organization (albeit in a highly focused and disciplined manner) can transform the total organization. Chapter 5, "Starbucks and the Habit of Success," opens with a powerful story of a young man who was raised by drug addicts, and his subsequent struggles to maintain his employment. His pattern of failure changed when he went to work at Starbucks. This chapter discusses the importance of willpower and its limitations, how willpower can be strengthened, and planning for success. Chapter 6, "The Power of a Crisis," uses the examples of doctor error in a Rhode Island hospital, which Duhigg asserts was made inevitable by the toxic atmosphere in the workplace, and a fire in King's Cross Station, London, which was made inevitable by strictly observed divisions of labor, to provide opportunities for transforming the cultures of those two organizations into something stronger and more effective than could have been created as Paul O'Neill did, just by sheer force of leadership. Chapter 7, "How Target Knows What You Want Before You Do" is probably the most widely read section of the book, as it was excerpted by the New York Times (Duhigg's employer) and Forbes, among others. It's readable and informative, and fairly creepy in disclosing how much information we unwittingly distribute about ourselves, and how unlikely we are to curtail the activities that make it possible for Target to know a woman is pregnant before any of her immediate family members do. Several reviewers have described these sections as "filler," but I found that they addressed complaints common to people who claim to want to change their habits but lack willpower, and provided guideposts to an attentive reader for what qualities set one up for success. I did not find these sections to be filler, but powerful illustrations of how a thorough understanding of the mechanisms behind habits can provide the tools for large scale change, and a discussion of the nature of personal responsibility. Although the sections were more directly addressing corporate bodies, the information was driven by the individuals within those organizations and therefore applicable to me and my own private attempts to alter my habits. Part Three was an interesting summing up. Chapter 8, "Saddleback Church and the Montgomery Bus Boycott" addressed the components that made those movements (if one can call a mega-church a movement) successful. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, particularly, was really interesting: we celebrate Rosa Parks's heroism, deservedly, but the fact is, several other individuals had made similar stands without sparking the Civil Rights Movement. Duhigg's explanation for why Parks had the right stuff to make it happen makes for informative reading (the short version being, Parks was a genuinely nice and widely connected member of Montgomery society). Chapter 9, "The Neurology of Free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Habits?" puts all the preceding information in perspective. It contrasts Brian Thomas, an Englishman who killed his wife while sleepwalking, with Angie Bachmann, a compulsive gambler who lost many hundreds of thousands of dollars. He describes the neurology of sleepwalking activity and of a compulsive activity such as gambling (or drinking, or binge eating) and concludes that habits are under are control and can be altered, which argues for self-awareness and personal responsibility. The information provided in the body of the book was enough for me to understand how to create a road map for how to change my habits, but Duhigg did provide a digest of the material in his Appendix, "A Reader's Guide to Using These Ideas." Overall, I found this book to be both readable and powerful, and I look forward to implementing what I've learned to further my own goals.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The title may sound simple. The book is strong.
*by G***N on April 10, 2012*

The Economist magazine calls this a "first-rate" business book and I agree. Charles Duhigg tells of people - individuals, businesses, and other organizations - who carry out routines and act on habits in recurrent situations. The book puts a spotlight on people who succeed at shedding some habits and bringing new ones to life - in themselves and in people around them. In these pages lie a powerful concept and illustrative stories. Habits can be efficient. When a habit is activated, we don't have to think so much about all the steps and breaths we take. Habits can be simple or more complex, making short work of such activities as: brushing one's teeth while thinking about the workday ahead; driving a car while listening to the radio; or tending to customers, fielding their requests, and responding routinely in a warm, appreciative manner. Routines can do a lot of good when it comes to maintaining desirable habits. But things can get challenging when we would like a habit to be changed. A big part of the value in this book is its parade of human stories about how people have succeeded in replacing old habits with new ones. There are a few stories, too, about people who tried but failed to change a bad habit. Along the way, the author sketches a do-it-yourself model. He talks about people identifying existing "habit loops" which may include external triggers of time, place, people, and situations. Then, the idea is to interrupt and redirect activity toward the desired goals, eventually forming new habits. In some examples, small "wins" are shown leading to bigger wins as people build skills and confidence in new ways of doing things. And in stories of organizational or cultural habits, positive changes are shown sometimes to set off a ripple effect, where new habits spread to more people in a kind of social contagion. Charles Duhigg is a New York Times journalist and a graduate of Harvard Business School. He draws together a sampling of psychological research and real-life examples in business and other organizational endeavors. "The Power of Habit" delivers Duhigg's report in the form of a book full of good stories about people who exemplify the concept of "habit" in action, including direct interviews with some of the players in the stories. With this Duhigg presents a psychological concept of habits that a general audience might apply in everyday business and personal life. This book, if it reaches a large readership, may follow in the grooves of what journalist and psychologist Daniel Goleman's books did to popularize "emotional intelligence" and "EQ." (Goleman focuses on business applications of emotional intelligence in his 1998 book, Working with Emotional Intelligence .) Duhigg's stories are interesting in their own right, easy to understand, and memorable. They run the gamut from sports to neurosurgery, and from marketing toothpaste to overhauling the managerial culture of a heavy industrial corporation. For example, chapter 2 "The Craving Brain: How to Create New Habits," showcases breakthroughs in consumer marketing (and in one case, the dental health of a whole society) connected to habit changes. The examples cover a variety of marketing obstacles and breakaway solutions including Pepsodent toothpaste, Schlitz beer, and Febreze household deodorizer. Chapter 5, "Starbucks and the Habit of Success: When Willpower Becomes Automatic," talks about staff training programs that have been credited with enhancing customer service and tuning up whole organizational cultures. Examples besides Starbucks include Deloitte Consulting and the Container Store. Perhaps the most colorful and intriguing business story in the book is about the managerial successes of Paul O'Neill when he was CEO of the aluminum company Alcoa. (He later went on to serve as U.S. Treasury Secretary.) This is told mostly in Chapter 4, "Keystone Habits, or the Ballad of Paul O'Neill: Which Habits Matter Most." When O'Neill became CEO of Alcoa in 1987, he spearheaded the company on a headlong drive to achieve an error-free standard of employee safety. He rallied employees up and down the hierarchy, and across functions, to the cause of becoming "the safest company in America... [despite that]... employees work with metals that are 1500 degrees and can rip a man's arm off." (p. 98) At first, Alcoa's investors and employees alike were skeptical, seeing O'Neill's radical quest for superiority in employee safety as too narrow, quixotic, and off-center. O'Neill conceived of the safety charge as a focal point that would trigger all sorts of changes in routines and habits of accountability throughout the company. Preventing employee injuries became a "keystone habit" in Duhigg's lingo, that would set off a ripple effect leading to an upswing in total corporate performance. It worked. Within a year, Alcoa's profits reached an all-time high. Over a 13-year run with O'Neill at the helm, profits and the stock price both increased by 400%. Time lost to worker injuries declined to one-twentieth the U.S. average. Duhigg's book cites interviews with O'Neill himself and other Alcoa people who were there, and mentions that Alcoa stands as a case study in business schools. "The Power of Habit" shines a bright light on organizational habits, but not only that. Duhigg serves up stories that point to individual habits, with relevance for personal success, such as interrupting a snacking habit or ending addictions. I see Duhigg's concept of habit loops as compatible with and complementary to the work of food and marketing psychologist Brian Wansink in his excellent book, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (2006). At the other end of the scale, Duhigg talks about habits changing at a societal level of attitudes and behavior, offering an analysis of the civil rights movement's Montgomery bus boycott as an example. The one disappointment I find is a lack of chapter summaries and sub-chapter headings. While the book certainly is accessible "as is," such aids would make it easier to tie together diverse examples, remember themes and links, and go back to them later. The Audible.com version in particular is harder going without summaries and sub-headings because one is not looking at pages with the chapter heading in the upper right, nor is the listener just a page flip away from glancing at the book's table of contents. The Audible.com version also could do a better job of mentioning the printed book's many visual diagrams for listeners who are interested enough to cross-refer. The book begins and ends with fitting references to the 19th-century writings of an American philosopher and psychologist, William James, who elucidated the concept of habit before there was much science behind it. James was a prime mover in establishing two major streams of modern social science and philosophy: 1.) behavioral psychology - that is, putting a scientific focus on observable behavior and developing interventions to help people shape their lives according to their better ideals; and 2.) the philosophy of pragmatism - which for James meant evaluating scientific theories according to their "cash-value." In James's pragmatist view, a good theory is one that does good work in the minds of those who use it. James saw "habit," like Duhigg does, as a core aspect of human nature. Duhigg draws attention to success stories in habit replacement, from dental hygiene to aluminum manufacture. In keeping with the philosophical pulse of James the pragmatist, I give Duhigg's "The Power of Habit" a five-star rating for its eye-opening reports on useful research, chock full of real-world examples. Plus the book is written in a style that is vivid and inviting.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ the brain stops fully participating in decision making which is a good thing because without the loops
*by I***N on April 12, 2017*

A study by Duke University researchers in 2006 found that more than 40% of the actions people performed each day weren't actual decisions, but habits. In the past decade, our understanding of the neurology and psychology of habits and the way patterns work in our lives, societies, and organizations has expanded in ways we couldn't have imagined 50 years ago. We know why habits emerge, how they change, and the science behind their mechanics. Duhigg applies these insights in three contexts – the individual, the organizational, and societal. Habit replacement or eradication is virtually impossible without an understanding of the three-step loop of habit formation. First there is a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical, mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. With time, this loop – cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward – becomes more and more automatic. When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making which is a good thing because without the loops, our brains would shut down, overwhelmed by the minutia of daily life. Simply understanding how habits work makes them easier to control. In the early 1900’s the health of Americans teeth was in steep decline as the nation had become wealthier, and people started buying larger amounts of sugary, processed foods. When the government started drafting men for World War I, so many recruits had rotting teeth that officials declared dental hygiene a national security risk. At the time only 7% of Americans had a tube of toothpaste in their medicine chests. A decade later that number jumped to 65%. The change was caused by advertising produced by Claude Hopkins. He had been approached by a friend who had discovered a new toothpaste, a minty, frothy concoction he called Pepsodent. The success story, as told by Hopkins, required educating the nation on the importance of toothbrushing and then to have them choose Pepsodent continuously. Hopkins projected the mucin plaque that forms on teeth as a “cloudy film” that obscures the whiteness of your teeth and the beauty of your smile. The cue was the feeling of film on one’s teeth, the routine was brushing, and the reward was a beautiful Pepsodent smile, just like Shirley Temple and Clark Gable. (More careful investigation identified the fresh sensation after brushing as the reward rather the promise of a beautiful smile.) It became one of the world’s best-selling consumer goods and remained so for more than 30 years. The golden rule of habit change that emerges from a plethora of research is that if you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you need only insert a new routine. You cannot extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it. Duhigg describes how the golden rule has influenced the treatment for alcoholism, obesity, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and hundreds of other destructive behaviours, and how an understanding the loop can help anyone change their own habits. Organizations have been effectively transformed through the understanding of habits. Duhigg sites Alcoa and Starbucks as examples of how leaders identified keystone habits and built them into their organisations with profound impact on the bottom line. Alcoa, the giant American aluminium manufacturer after enjoying decades of success, was beginning to make misstep after misstep. There was some relief among shareholders when the Board announced the appointment of a former government bureaucrat named Paul O'Neill as CEO and scheduled an opportunity for investors to meet him. Investor relief turned to horror as O'Neill announced that he intended to make Alcoa the safest place to work in America – no mention of boosting profits, lowering costs, new “synergies,” “rightsizing,” “co-opetition” or other buzz words that are the standard in a new CEO’s speech. He even pointed out the safety exists in the hall in which they were gathered. Many thought he would kill the company and immediately sold their holdings, only to deeply regret it when within a year profits hit a record high. When O’Neill left the company its net income was five times larger than when he arrived. O'Neill had identified a keystone habit which he drove relentlessly through the organisation. He told staff, unions and managers that he was happy to negotiate with them about anything, but that there was one thing he would never negotiate with them and that was worker safety in Alcoa’s very dangerous environment. “If you want to argue with me about that, you are going to lose.” He demanded weekly reports on safety issues, participated in safety investigations, and fired very senior executive jeopardising a joint-venture safety violation. The obsession with safety created an environment committed to excellence and discipline. The genius of choosing this keystone habit was that no one would raise objection, not staff, not unions and not management. When Starbucks founder, Howard Schultz, returned to take control of his faltering 17,000 store enterprise, he put in place to keystone habit very similar to that of O'Neill. Among other changes, he placed great emphasis on the courteous manner in which baristas served every cup of coffee to every customer, every time. The training processes utilises the best insights into habit formation and focused on the development of self-discipline under the trying conditions of a quick service coffee shop. “We're in the people business serving coffee. The entire business model is based on fantastic customer service. Without that, we're toast.” The solution for Starbucks was to turn the self-discipline required to exhibit nothing but courteous service into an organisational habit. Their financial results are testimony to the efficacy of the approach. The implications of this book are wide-ranging and powerful. Of the many books that have come out recently dealing with behavioural psychology and sociology, The Power of Habit is one of the most accessible and entertaining. Readability Light -+--- Serious Insights High -+--- Low Practical High -+--- Low Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy

## Frequently Bought Together

- The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
- Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
- Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century (Think and Grow Rich Series)

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*Product available on Desertcart United States of America*
*Store origin: US*
*Last updated: 2026-05-19*