Book Review: The Power of Habits (Part2: Chapter 4, 5, and 6)

Hello guys! Today i'm back with another story. I'd still like to talk about the chapter review from the book i'm reading at this time. If i talked about the part 1 in the previous post (Click here), right now i want to make a chapter review from the part 2. Be ready for yourself because this blog is gonna be long.

The part two in The Power of Habits is talking about The Habits of Successful Organization. So, we're gonna talking about how a success company or an organization build their habits.

Chapter 4: Keystone Habits, or The Ballad of Paul O’Neill (Which Habits Matter Most)

The author provides a story about a CEO from The Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), Paul O'Neill, who was succeed in making the company stood up again. O'Neill was able to overcome Alcoa's problems. The keystone that O'Neill made was considered the worker safety, he wanted to make Alcoa become the safest company. He changed Alcoa's habit loops by changing it from the keystone. When O'Neill conveyed his idea on his first meeting in front of the investors, they were shocked. Because O'Neill was a straightforward person and he focused on the worker safety that the investors think it was in an unprofitable area. But then, O'Neill made the investors shocked again in 13 years later because Alcoa became more profitable than ever.

These are the habit loops that O'Neill create by changing the company's keystone. The cue was employee injury. The routine was the unit president had to report when there was an injured employee to O'Neill and the unit president had to make a plan that the accident will never be happened anymore. The reward was O'Neill will give those who embraced the system a promotion.

To find the habits keystone, Charles said that we have to consider the "small wins" first. Small wins are progress points to achieve a small advantage.

Chapter 5: Starbucks and The Habits of Success (When Willpower Become Automatic)

In this chapter, the author talks about how willpower could give big effect to our habits. Willpower is like the way someone control him/herself. According to this book, willpower gives much more success than intelligence. There was an experiment to test the impact of willpower which conducted in 1960s to a group of four year olds. The kids are sat in a room and are presented a marshmallow. They offered two choices that they could eat one marshmallow right away, or waiting for 15 minutes so they could eat two marshmallows. Decades later, the researcher found the kids who waited up for two marshmallows were gaining the best grades, having SAT scores 210 points higher than the average, having popularity, and did fewer drugs.

Charles provides a story about Travis Leach, a man who was easier to upset. But, Travis's habit is changed when he applied a job to starbucks as barista until he finally at his twenty-five age became a manager of two starbucks. Travis told that being trained in starbucks has changed his habits or even his life. He trained how to to live, how to focus, how to get to work on time, and how to master his emotions, or in other words he taught to master his willpower.

In training, managers drill new baristas to picture realistic scenarios and to follow the LATTE method. They stand for (L)isten to your customers, (A)cknowledge the complaint, (T)ake action by solving the problem, (T)hank the customer, and (E)xplain why the problem occurred.

The book also tells how to develop the willpower. To develop the willpower is by predicting the most painful points and make a spesific plan earlier for how we'll work through them.

Chapter 6: The Power of A Crisis (How Leaders Create Habits Through Accident and Design)

In this chapter, the author talks about how an emergency situation can create new and better habits in order to improve something bad in the past. However, an organization makes decisions based on deliberate thinking. Or in fact, many companies adopted the habits loop from their ancestors.

For instance, Charles provides a story about King's Cross Station that had a fire accident in 1987. There were 31 were died and 100 were injured. This caused by destructive habits. First, a ticketing clerk, Breckell, noticed that there were burning tissues, but he didn't investigate it further and didn't report the issue. Second, the station employees weren't trained to be capable in using sprinkler system. Third, they used their department’s street-level hydrants rather than the subway level hydrants, because they were instructed not to use the equipment of other agencies. Fourth, before everything gone worse, they were ignored the risk of a fire that had been reported.

However those destructive habits happened for reasons. For instance, the habits that kept ticketing clerks focused on selling tickets instead of doing anything else, including keeping an eye out for warning signs of existed because years earlier, the Underground had problems with understaffed kiosks. So a new policy forced ticketing clerks to keep within their regulations to make it efficient

Finally, we reach the end of this blog. Those chapters are giving me dozens of knowledge about how great organizations work which are something new for me. So, that's all the chapter review from the part 2. Actually, there's one more chapter in part 2, but i haven't finished reading it yet. I consider to talk about the chapter 7 and the part 3 of this book in another round.


Thanks for reading, guys! Catch you later!