The Power of Habit

When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly.

But sometimes, even destructive habits can be transformed by leaders who know how to seize the right opportunities.

This was the final way that keystone habits encourage widespread change: by creating cultures where new values become ingrained.

Routines reduce uncertainty… because without them, policy formulation and implementation would be lost in a jungle of detail.

Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along relatively peacefully… because they have routines—habits—that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get a day’s work done.

However, sometimes even a truce proves insufficient… Sometimes, as Rhode Island Hospital discovered, an unstable peace can be as destructive as any civil war.

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

Sometimes, one priority—or one department or one person or one goal—needs to overshadow everything else…

Creating successful organizations isn’t just a matter of balancing authority. For an organization to work, leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced peace and, paradoxically, make it absolutely clear who’s in charge.

‘The more I know about someone, the better I can guess their buying patterns. I’m not going to guess everything about you every time, but I’ll be right more often than I’m wrong.’