Perhaps you’re among the folks in America who are more than a little fired up about the NFL season that’s about to kick off. (Non-football fans, hang in there – this isn’t a sports column!) And if you’re a typical New England Patriots fan, there’s no love lost between you and the Indianapolis Colts. But you may just have a modicum of respect for that team’s highly accomplished former head coach Tony Dungy and wonder how such a quiet, unassuming man built that powerhouse, a team that was so consistently excellent for so long. Well, the answer lies in this month’s book selection, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. With last month’s featured book Do You Matter?, we discussed the ongoing improvement of design, and there’s no denying Dungy knows a thing or two about designing a winning football team. In Duhigg’s excellent work, he explains how Dungy implemented a key rule: you can’t extinguish your people’s bad habits, you can only work to change those habits. The biggest Patriots fans out there will recall January 21, 2007, when our hometown team held a seemingly insurmountable 21 – 3 halftime lead in the conference championship game against the hated Colts. Read this book if you can stomach really understanding what Dungy did to lead his team to victory and on to that year’s Super Bowl (yeah, the one they won – ouch). It wasn’t just the locker room speech, although that was apparently pretty inspiring; the most important work Dungy did started many years prior to the big game, all the way back to the days when he coached the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Duhigg says, “Habits are a three-step loop – the cue, the routine, and the reward,” and that Dungy knew it was “easier to convince someone to adopt a new behavior if there was something familiar at the beginning and end.” Duhigg further reports that “to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.” Although only a small part of the book is about football, fans will appreciate the expert breakdown of the culture Dungy built within his teams, how he taught players to focus on small signals (the cues) on the path to what they all want – the highlight reel play (the rewards). The key is to not overthink the situation, rather simply to zero in on certain signs that give away the opponent’s position. In football, you might look at your opponent’s feet or shoulders to make an intelligent guess as to what he’s going to do next. What might that mean on an important sales call, in a tough negotiation, or during a tense meeting with your CEO? Say the cue in any of these scenarios is you get asked a tough question, and the reward is a sale, concession or raise. The key is to focus on and improve your routine.
So read The Power of Habit because you want to know, as the subtitle states, why we do what we do in life and business. Here you’ll find remarkable stories about Alcoa, Starbucks, and perhaps most creepily Target. The retailing behemoth used invasive – albeit brilliant – algorithms to understand the buying habits of women to predict that they were pregnant… or working on it. Sure, new parents are a highly profitable market for stores selling cribs, diapers and baby formula – not to mention all the other stuff the sleep-deprived will throw in their carts in a mindless buying stupor – but to go so far as to predict a woman was trying to get pregnant so as to then sneakily alter coupon distribution in hopes she was successful? Well, that was crossing the line of decency for many. Faithful reader beware: If you buy this book at your local Target, don’t be shocked when you suddenly start getting coupons for nicotine patches, diet pills and running shoes.