The Power of Habit

by

Charles Duhigg

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Paul O'Neill Character Analysis

Paul O’Neill was the CEO and chairman of Alcoa from 1987 to 2000, and then the Secretary of the Treasury under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002. By focusing on worker safety, O’Neill completely transformed Alcoa’s culture. In addition to eliminating almost all serious accidents, O’Neill’s policy also unified the workforce behind a single goal and gave ordinary workers the power to share their ideas with upper management. Ultimately, this helped Alcoa’s profits and stock price skyrocket. Charles Duhigg uses O’Neill’s tenure at Alcoa as a key example of how keystone habits can transform organizations by offering small wins, creating frameworks for further change, and changing organizational culture. Ultimately, he attributes O’Neill’s success to his time working as a budget analyst for the U.S. government—which helped him develop effective management habits and showed him how such habits determined organizations’ effectiveness.

Paul O'Neill Quotes in The Power of Habit

The The Power of Habit quotes below are all either spoken by Paul O'Neill or refer to Paul O'Neill . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Habits, Human Behavior, and Success Theme Icon
).
Chapter 4 Quotes

Where should a would-be habit master start? Understanding keystone habits holds the answer to that question: The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.

Related Characters: Charles Duhigg (speaker), Paul O'Neill
Related Symbols: Keystone Habits
Page Number: 101
Explanation and Analysis:

What most people didn’t realize, however, was that O’Neill’s plan for getting to zero injuries entailed the most radical realignment in Alcoa’s history. The key to protecting Alcoa employees, O’Neill believed, was understanding why injuries happened in the first place. And to understand why injuries happened, you had to study how the manufacturing process was going wrong. To understand how things were going wrong, you had to bring in people who could educate workers about quality control and the most efficient work processes, so that it would be easier to do everything right, since correct work is also safer work.
In other words, to protect workers, Alcoa needed to become the best, most streamlined aluminum company on earth.

Related Characters: Charles Duhigg (speaker), Paul O'Neill
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:

O’Neill’s experiences with infant mortality illustrate the second way that keystone habits encourage change: by creating structures that help other habits to flourish. In the case of premature deaths, changing collegiate curriculums for teachers started a chain reaction that eventually trickled down to how girls were educated in rural areas, and whether they were sufficiently nourished when they became pregnant. And O’Neill’s habit of constantly pushing other bureaucrats to continue researching until they found a problem’s root causes overhauled how the government thought about problems like infant mortality.

Related Characters: Charles Duhigg (speaker), Paul O'Neill
Related Symbols: Keystone Habits
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis:
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The Power of Habit PDF

Paul O'Neill Quotes in The Power of Habit

The The Power of Habit quotes below are all either spoken by Paul O'Neill or refer to Paul O'Neill . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Habits, Human Behavior, and Success Theme Icon
).
Chapter 4 Quotes

Where should a would-be habit master start? Understanding keystone habits holds the answer to that question: The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns.

Related Characters: Charles Duhigg (speaker), Paul O'Neill
Related Symbols: Keystone Habits
Page Number: 101
Explanation and Analysis:

What most people didn’t realize, however, was that O’Neill’s plan for getting to zero injuries entailed the most radical realignment in Alcoa’s history. The key to protecting Alcoa employees, O’Neill believed, was understanding why injuries happened in the first place. And to understand why injuries happened, you had to study how the manufacturing process was going wrong. To understand how things were going wrong, you had to bring in people who could educate workers about quality control and the most efficient work processes, so that it would be easier to do everything right, since correct work is also safer work.
In other words, to protect workers, Alcoa needed to become the best, most streamlined aluminum company on earth.

Related Characters: Charles Duhigg (speaker), Paul O'Neill
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:

O’Neill’s experiences with infant mortality illustrate the second way that keystone habits encourage change: by creating structures that help other habits to flourish. In the case of premature deaths, changing collegiate curriculums for teachers started a chain reaction that eventually trickled down to how girls were educated in rural areas, and whether they were sufficiently nourished when they became pregnant. And O’Neill’s habit of constantly pushing other bureaucrats to continue researching until they found a problem’s root causes overhauled how the government thought about problems like infant mortality.

Related Characters: Charles Duhigg (speaker), Paul O'Neill
Related Symbols: Keystone Habits
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis: