organization or company they’ve scrutinized.

“Individuals have habits;

groups have routines,” wrote the academic Geoffrey Hodgson, who
spent a career examining organizational patterns. “Routines are the
organizational analogue of habits.”
To O’Neill, these kinds of habits seemed dangerous. “We were
basically ceding decision making to a process that occurred without
actually thinking,” O’Neill said. But at other agencies, where change
was in the air, good organizational habits were creating success.
Some departments at NASA, for instance, were overhauling
themselves by deliberately instituting organizational routines that
encouraged engineers to take more risks. When unmanned rockets
exploded on takeoff, department heads would applaud, so that
everyone would know their division had tried and failed, but at least
they had tried. Eventually, mission control filled with applause every
time something expensive blew up. It became an organizational habit.
Or take the Environmental Protection Agency, which was created in
1970. The EPA’s first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, consciously
engineered organizational habits that encouraged his regulators to be
aggressive on enforcement. When lawyers asked for permission to file
a lawsuit or enforcement action, it went through a process for
approval. The default was authorization to go ahead. The message was
clear: At the EPA, aggression gets rewarded. By 1975, the EPA was
issuing more than fifteen hundred new environmental rules a year.
“Every time I looked at a different part of the government, I found
these habits that seemed to explain why things were either succeeding
or failing,” O’Neill told me. “The best agencies understood the
importance of routines. The worst agencies were headed by people
who never thought about it, and then wondered why no one followed
their orders.”
In 1977, after sixteen years in Washington, D.C., O’Neill decided it
was time to leave. He was working fifteen hours a day, seven days a
week, and his wife was tired of raising four children on her own.
O’Neill resigned and landed a job with International Paper, the world’s
largest pulp and paper company. He eventually became its president.
By then, some of his old government friends were on Alcoa’s board.