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Mark Muraven
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:
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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.
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In his fourth chapter, Duhigg uses the story of Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neill to introduce the concept of keystone habits—or the key habits on which other habits depend. By identifying and changing keystone habits first, people can make it easier to change other habits further down the line. For instance, O’Neill focused on improving worker safety at Alcoa. This allowed him to unite divided factions in the company, change the company’s management culture, and empower its workers. These shifts made a series of other important changes much easier—and these other changes ultimately made Alcoa much more profitable. Similarly, an individual Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusantium est. Mollitia eaque ipsa. Perferendis consectetur et. Dicta impedit ut. Ducimu
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.
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In this passage, Duhigg explains precisely how Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neill’s focus on worker safety led to a series of other valuable habit changes throughout the company. In essence, O’Neill realized that the changes Alcoa needed to make to protect its workers were the same changes that it needed to make to become more profitable and efficient. First, as Duhigg explains here, O’Neill recognized that safety was a keystone issue because it reflected how the company’s core manufacturing processes were running. Thus, he viewed every worker injury not only as a tragedy to prevent in the future, but also as Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus ea
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.
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Duhigg argues that keystone habits contribute to further, long-term improvement in three ways. The first is that they create small wins, and the third is that they enable change in an organization’s culture. But here, he explains the second: keystone habits “creat[e] structures that help other habits to flourish.” Paul O’Neill learned this principle while analyzing infant mortality data for the government. He realized that changing college biology curriculums could address infant mortality by improving high school biology instruction and getting better health and nutrition information to under-resourced young mothers. He came to this solution by doing three things. First, Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commodi necessitatibus voluptas. Accusamus eaque omnis. Velit eaque error. Possimus corrupti soluta. Qui aut a. Rerum voluptas debitis. Voluptatem accusant
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Paul O'Neill Character Timeline in The Power of Habit
The timeline below shows where the character Paul O'Neill appears in The Power of Habit. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4: Keystone Habits, or the Ballad of Paul O’Neill: Which Habits Matter Most
...with the new CEO of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), the former bureaucrat Paul O’Neill. To everyone’s surprise, instead of promising to increase profits, he spoke about worker safety, which...
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At first, O’Neill wasn’t sure if he wanted the CEO job at Alcoa. After rising through the Veterans...
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When O’Neill joined Alcoa, the company was struggling—quality was suffering and its workers were inefficient. But O’Neill...
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After taking over at Alcoa, O’Neill faced opposition from Wall Street, the workers’ unions, and the company’s vice presidents. But he...
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O’Neill’s focus on safety also changed other parts of Alcoa’s culture. Unions agreed to measure individual...
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Six months into his job at Alcoa, Paul O’Neill learned that a young worker in Arizona had jumped over a safety wall to try...
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When O’Neill was analyzing infant mortality data for the government, he learned to get to the root...
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At Alcoa, O’Neill used safety as a justification for building a company-wide email network. This happened in the...
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...report dangerous working conditions at an Alcoa plant in Mexico. While this was inconsistent with O’Neill’s records, he sent a team to Mexico to investigate. They learned about an unreported accident...
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In 2000, O’Neill left Alcoa to become the U.S. secretary of the treasury. Other companies have adopted his...
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