Book of the week: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

(Random House, $28)

If you’re seeking self-improvement, “an ever-growing army of charlatans” stands ready to take your money, said Jesse Singal in TheDailyBeast.com. Charles Duhigg, a New York Times business reporter, might offer real help. In his first book, Duhigg “brings a heaping, much-needed dose of social science and psychology” to the subject of personal habits and offers “a clear, convincing” approach to how any of us can establish good ones and discard the bad. The key is in recognizing that every habit has three components: a cue (such as post-lunch boredom), the behavior itself (eating a cookie, perhaps), and the reward one enjoys (slight relief from boredom). Duhigg doesn’t promise that the cue can be eliminated or the reward forfeited; “habit loops” are fairly indelible. The cookie, however, appears to be eminently replaceable.

Duhigg isn’t interested in self-help alone, said Leigh Buchanan in Inc.com. He discovers that marketers are far ahead of the rest of us in understanding habit loops and that wise business leaders establish institutional habits that bolster corporate performance. “The stories Duhigg has knitted together are all fascinating,” said Jerry Harkavy in the Associated Press. When coach Tony Dungy wanted to change the fortunes of a woeful NFL franchise, he harnessed the power of habit by training his players to react automatically to opponents’ subtle visual cues. When Paul O’Neill became CEO of Alcoa, he made worker safety his top priority and forced a change in organizational habits that in turn caused profits to soar.

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Some of Duhigg’s juiciest, most “confounding” anecdotes concern the ways marketers exploit the power of habit, said David Dobbs in Wired.com. Knowing that a major life event presents a rare chance to change a consumer’s buying habits, Target, for instance, has devised an algorithm that allows it to identify first-time mothers during their second trimester. But is Target really any more Machiavellian than the rest of us? said David Brooks in The New York Times. It’s “sort of disturbing” that we all accept that to become effective individuals, we must “coolly appraise” our unconscious habits and then devise strategies to trick our brains onto a different path. Duhigg never claims that all behavior is habit. But you couldn’t be blamed for wondering if we’ve arrived at a moment when every relationship is manipulative—“including your relationship with yourself.”