Business bookshelf: 'The Power of Habit'

We like to think of our daily choices as the result of reason and will. But for the most part they are the products of unconscious habits: habits that at best make our lives more efficient and at worse trap us in self-destructive behavior.

Charles Duhigg, a reporter for the New York Times, has immersed himself in the scientific literature on habits, a field that has taken off in recent years after decades in the doldrums. His book is divided into three parts, focusing on individuals, organizations and societies.

The first section shows how entrenched habits shape lives and analyzes how those habits can be broken and rearranged. Duhigg argues, for example, that people can be trapped by a predictable cycle: You flag in midafternoon, you eat a biscuit, you feel much better. Pavlovian marketers reinforce these routines by fiddling with the rewards: Slot-machine companies have increased the number of near misses because they help keep people hooked.

In the book's second part, Duhigg shows how managers can change entire firms by changing a handful of "keystone habits." Changing these creates a chain reaction, with the new habits rippling through the organization and changing other habits as they go. Finally, Duhigg argues that some of the greatest social reformations have been produced as much by rewiring social habits as by agitating for grand abstractions like justice. The civil-rights movement took a huge step forward when Rosa Parks refused to do what Alabama's blacks had routinely done before and sit in a blacks-only section of a bus.

"The Power of Habit" leaves many questions unanswered. Is it reasonable, for example, to put a serious addiction like alcoholism in the same category as a predilection for cupcakes? The author also has a penchant for producing endless bits of academic research. Minor gripes aside, this is a first-rate book -- based on an impressive mass of research, written in a lively style and providing just the right balance of intellectual seriousness and practical advice.