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4 • Habits - Part 1

To a great extent, any person's personality consists of his own individual pattern of actions, thoughts, and habits. And much of what we do every day is determined by a carefully conditioned and developed pattern of habits.

These habits are useful to us in many ways. They consist, of course, of successful solutions to problems that we have met up with and faced before. And, because so many of the "problems" that we face every day are of a repetitious nature, we can use these previously successful solutions over and over again. In one way this is all to the good because it frees our minds to think about more important things. The big danger of habitual living is that our habit of using past problem solutions often prevents us from seeing a better solution. And, of course, we eventually lose the very worthwhile habit of actually looking for new solu­tions to problems.

In our work, habits of certain kinds are a necessity. As business becomes larger and more complex, companies must reduce more and more of their operations to standardized procedures—or habits. We are forced to accept certain "habits" in our day-to-day working. But here, too, it is easy to get the habit of accepting habit without challenge. We do many things because someone has said, "That's company policy." Habit may make us accept this without questioning whether or not the whole thing makes sense. But if something doesn't make sense, then the chances are it is not company policy—unless the company is intentionally heading into bankruptcy.

There are times when we do find something that doesn't make sense, but does indeed seem to be company policy. Often this will turn out to be a policy that started out as expediency. One business consultant put it this way: "I often get the impression that 'the "way we do things around here' developed back in the early days of the company when some overworked executive was tossed a problem. He made a snap decision as to how it could be handled and, fortunately, it worked. Later, someone wrote this into a manual and permanently froze the thinking on it. Ever since, 'that is the way we do it.' No one else ever had the guts to challenge the old way by proposing a new way. Con­sequently, these 'standard procedures' are costing American business millions of dollars a year!"

Related terms include business trainingsmall business ideas and business operations.