The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (21 page)

After the meeting, O’Neill asked her to come to his office. The nun’s religious order owned fifty Alcoa shares, and for months they had been asking for a shareholder vote on a resolution to review the company’s Mexican operations. O’Neill asked Sister Mary if she had
been to any of the plants herself. No, she told him. To be safe, O’Neill asked the company’s head of human resources and general counsel to fly to Mexico to see what was going on.

When the executives arrived, they poked through the Acuña plant’s records, and found reports of an incident that had never been sent to headquarters. A few months earlier, there had been a buildup of fumes within a building. It was a relatively minor event. The plant’s executive, Barton, had installed ventilators to remove the gases. The people who had become ill had fully recovered within a day or two.

But Barton had never reported the illnesses.

When the executives returned to Pittsburgh and presented their findings, O’Neill had a question.

“Did Bob Barton
know
that people had gotten sick?”

“We didn’t meet with him,” they answered. “But, yeah, it’s pretty clear he knew.”

Two days later, Barton was fired.

The exit shocked outsiders. Barton had been mentioned in articles as one of the company’s most valuable executives. His departure was a blow to important joint ventures.

Within Alcoa, however, no one was surprised. It was seen as an inevitable extension of the culture that O’Neill had built.

“Barton fired himself,” one of his colleagues told me. “There wasn’t even a choice there.”

This is the final way that keystone habits encourage widespread change: by creating cultures where new values become ingrained. Keystone habits make tough choices—such as firing a top executive—easier, because when that person violates the culture, it’s clear they have to go. Sometimes these cultures manifest themselves in special vocabularies, the use of which becomes, itself, a habit that defines an organization. At Alcoa, for instance, there were “Core Programs” and “Safety Philosophies,” phrases that acted like suitcases, containing whole conversations about priorities, goals, and ways of thinking.

“It might have been hard at another company to fire someone who had been there so long,” O’Neill told me. “It wasn’t hard for me. It was clear what our values dictated. He got fired because he didn’t report the incident, and so no one else had the opportunity to learn from it. Not sharing an opportunity to learn is a cardinal sin.”

Cultures grow out of the keystone habits in every organization, whether leaders are aware of them or not. For instance, when researchers studied an incoming class of cadets at West Point, they measured their grade point averages, physical aptitude, military abilities, and self-discipline. When they correlated those factors with whether students dropped out or graduated, however, they found that all of them mattered less than a factor
researchers referred to as “grit,” which they defined as the tendency to work “strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years
despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress.”
^4.26
,
4.27

What’s most interesting about grit is how it emerges. It grows out of a culture that cadets create for themselves, and that culture often emerges because of keystone habits they adopt at West Point. “There’s so much about this school that’s hard,” one cadet told me. “They call the first summer ‘Beast Barracks,’ because they want to grind you down. Tons of people quit before the school year starts.

“But I found this group of guys in the first couple of days here, and we started this thing where, every morning, we get together to make sure everyone is feeling strong. I go to them if I’m feeling worried or down, and I know they’ll pump me back up. There’s only nine of us, and we call ourselves the musketeers. Without them, I don’t think I would have lasted a month here.”

Cadets who are successful at West Point arrive at the school armed with habits of mental and physical discipline. Those assets, however, only carry you so far. To succeed, they need a keystone habit that creates a culture—such as a daily gathering of like-minded friends—to help find the strength to overcome obstacles. Keystone habits transform us by creating cultures that make clear the values
that, in the heat of a difficult decision or a moment of uncertainty, we might otherwise forget.

In 2000, O’Neill retired from Alcoa, and at the request of the newly elected president George W. Bush, became secretary of the treasury.
¹
He left that post two years later, and today spends most of his time teaching hospitals how to focus on worker safety and keystone habits that can lower medical error rates, as well as serving on various corporate boards.

Companies and organizations across America, in the meantime, have embraced the idea of using keystone habits to remake workplaces. At IBM, for instance, Lou Gerstner rebuilt the firm by initially concentrating on one keystone habit: IBM’s research and selling routines. At the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, a culture of continuous improvement is created through a keystone habit of wide-ranging internal critiques that are at the core of every assignment. Within Goldman Sachs, a keystone habit of risk assessment undergirds every decision.

And at Alcoa, O’Neill’s legacy lives on. Even in his absence, the injury rate has continued to decline. In 2010, 82 percent of Alcoa locations didn’t lose one employee day due to injury, close to an all-time high. On average, workers are more likely to get injured at a software company, animating cartoons for movie studios, or doing taxes as an accountant than handling molten aluminum at Alcoa.

“When I was made a plant manager,” said Jeff Shockey, the Alcoa
executive, “the first day I pulled into the parking lot I saw all these parking spaces near the front doors with people’s titles on them. The head guy for this or that. People who were important got the best parking spots. The first thing I did was tell a maintenance manager to paint over all the titles. I wanted whoever got to work earliest to get the best spot. Everyone understood the message: Every person matters. It was an extension of what Paul was doing around worker safety. It electrified the plant. Pretty soon, everyone was getting to work earlier each day.”

STARBUCKS AND THE HABIT OF SUCCESS
When Willpower Becomes Automatic

The first time Travis Leach saw his father overdose, he was nine years old. His family had just moved into a small apartment at the end of an alleyway, the latest in a seemingly endless series of relocations that had most recently caused them to abandon their previous home in the middle of the night, throwing everything they owned into black garbage bags after receiving an eviction notice. Too many people coming and going too late at night, the landlord said. Too much noise.

Sometimes, at his old house, Travis would come home from school and find the rooms neatly cleaned, leftovers meticulously wrapped in the fridge and packets of hot sauce and ketchup in Tupperware containers. He knew this meant his parents had temporarily abandoned heroin for crank and spent the day in a cleaning frenzy. Those usually ended badly. Travis felt safer when the house was messy and his parents were on the couch, their eyes half-lidded, watching cartoons. There is no chaos at the end of a heroin fog.

Travis’s father was a gentle man who loved to cook and, except for a stint in the navy, spent his entire life within a few miles of his parents in Lodi, California. Travis’s mother, by the time everyone moved into the alleyway apartment, was in prison for heroin possession and prostitution. His parents were, essentially, functional addicts and the family maintained a veneer of normalcy. They went camping every summer and on most Friday nights attended his sister and brother’s softball games. When Travis was four years old, he went to Disneyland with his dad and was photographed for the first time in his life, by a Disney employee. The family camera had been sold to a pawn shop years before.

On the morning of the overdose, Travis and his brother were playing in the living room on top of blankets they laid out on the floor each night for sleeping. Travis’s father was getting ready to make pancakes when he stepped into the bathroom. He was carrying the tube sock that contained his needle, spoon, lighter, and cotton swabs. A few moments later, he came out, opened the refrigerator to get the eggs, and crashed to the floor. When the kids ran around the corner, their father was convulsing, his face turning blue.

Travis’s siblings had seen an overdose before and knew the drill. His brother rolled him onto his side. His sister opened his mouth to make sure he wouldn’t choke on his tongue, and told Travis to run next door, ask to use the neighbor’s phone, and dial 911.

“My name is Travis, my dad is passed out, and we don’t know what happened. He’s not breathing,” Travis lied to the police operator. Even at nine years old, he knew why his father was unconscious. He didn’t want to say it in front of the neighbor. Three years earlier, one of his dad’s friends had died in their basement after shooting up. When the paramedics had taken the body away, neighbors gawked at Travis and his sister while they held the door open for the gurney. One of the neighbors had a cousin whose son was in his class, and soon everyone in school had known.

After hanging up the phone, Travis walked to the end of the alleyway and waited for the ambulance. His father was treated at the hospital that morning, charged at the police station in the afternoon, and home again by dinnertime. He made spaghetti. Travis turned ten a few weeks later.

When Travis was sixteen, he dropped out of high school. “I was tired of being called a faggot,” he said, “tired of people following me home and throwing things at me. Everything seemed really overwhelming. It was easier to quit and go somewhere else.” He moved two hours south, to Fresno, and got a job at a car wash. He was fired for insubordination. He got jobs at McDonald’s and Hollywood Video, but when customers were rude—“I wanted
ranch dressing,
you moron!”—he would lose control.

“Get out of my drive-through!” he shouted at one woman, throwing the chicken nuggets at her car before his manager pulled him inside.

Sometimes he’d get so upset that he would start crying in the middle of a shift. He was often late, or he’d take a day off for no reason. In the morning, he would yell at his reflection in the mirror, order himself to be better, to suck it up. But he couldn’t get along with people, and he wasn’t strong enough to weather the steady drip of criticisms and indignities. When the line at his register would get too long and the manager would shout at him, Travis’s hands would start shaking and he’d feel like he couldn’t catch his breath. He wondered if this is what his parents felt like, so defenseless against life, when they started using drugs.