The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (52 page)

The Rhode Island Board of Medical Licensure and Discipline, in a consent order, wrote that the physician “failed to make an accurate assessment of the location of the hematoma prior to performing the surgical evacuation.” The State Department of Health found that “an initial review of this incident reveals hospital surgical safeguards are deficient and that some systems were not followed.”

Representatives of both the Board and Department of Health declined to comment further.

6.10
the surgeon yelled
In a statement, a representative of Rhode Island Hospital wrote “I believe [the surgeon] was the one who noticed that there was no bleeding—there are various versions as to what he said at that time. He asked for the films to be pulled up, confirmed the error and they proceeded to close and perform the procedure on the correct side. Except for [the surgeon’s] comments, the staff said the room was very quiet once they realized the error.”

6.11
ever working at Rhode Island Hospital again
In the physician’s letter responding to fact-checking inquiries, he wrote that “no one has claimed that this mistake cost [the patient] his life. The family never claimed wrongful death, and they personally expressed their gratitude to me for saving his life on that day. The hospital and the nurse practitioner combined paid more towards a $140,000 settlement than I did.” Rhode Island Hospital, when asked about this account, declined to comment.

6.12
The book’s bland cover and daunting
R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter,
An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982).

6.13
candidates didn’t pretend to understand
R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter, “The Schumpeterian Tradeoff Revisited,”
The American Economic Review
72 (1982): 114–32. Winter, in a note in response to fact-checking questions, wrote: “The ‘Schumpeterian tradeoff’ (subject of a 1982 AER paper and a kindred chapter, 14, in our book) was only a facet of the project, and not a motivating one. Nelson and I were discussing a collection of issues around technological change, economic growth and firm behavior long before 1982, long before we were together at Yale, and particularly at RAND in 1966–68. Nelson went to Yale in 1968; I went to Michigan that year and joined the Yale faculty in 1976. We were ‘on the trail’ of the 1982 book from 1967, and started publishing related work in 1973.… In short, while the ‘Schumpeter’ influence is obviously strong in the heritage, the specific ‘Schumpeterian tradeoff’ aspect is not.”

6.14
Within the world of business strategy
For an overview of subsequent research, see M. C. Becker, “Organizational Routines: A Review of the Literature,”
Industrial and Corporate Change
13 (2004): 643–78; Marta S. Feldman, “Organizational Routines as a Source of Continuous Change,”
Organization Science
11 (2000): 611–29.

6.15
before arriving at their central conclusion
Winter, in a note in response to fact-checking questions, wrote: “There was very little empirical work of my own, and even less that got published—most of that being Nelson on aspects of technological change. In the domain of firm behavior, we mostly stood on the shoulders of the giants of the Carnegie School (Simon, Cyert, and March), and relied on a wide range of other sources—technology studies, business histories,
development economics, some psychologists … and Michael Polanyi, however you classify him.”

6.16
thousands of employees’ independent decisions
Winter, in a note in response to fact-checking questions, clarified that such patterns that emerge from thousands of employees’ independent decisions are an aspect of routines, but routines also “get shaped from a lot of directions, one of which is deliberate managerial design. We emphasized, however, that when that happens, the actual routine that emerges, as opposed to the nominal one that was deliberately designed, is influenced, again, by a lot of choices at the individual level, as well as other considerations (see book [
Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change
] p. 108).”

6.17
These organizational habits—or “routines”
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”
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