Good morning and welcome to the Increasing Impact Podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 1,9006.

Today's episode is a reminder of a story that I probably shared a long time ago. And it's from a great book called The Power of Habits by Charles Duhigg. And he's telling a story about Paul O'Neill, who is the CEO of Alcoa, and he says this.

O'Neill's first meeting with Wall Street analysts following his appointment to CEO of Alcoa

was this.

He said this, quote, I want to talk to you about worker safety.

Every year, numerous Alcoa workers are injured so badly that they miss a day of work.

Our safety record is better than the general American workforce, but it's not good enough.

I intend to go for zero injuries.

Close quote.

After someone raised their hand to ask about inventories, O'Neill said,

I'm not certain you heard me.

If you want to understand how Alcoa is doing, you need to look

at our workplace safety figures. If we bring our injury rates down, it'll be because the

individuals at this company have devoted themselves to creating a habit of excellence. Safety

and safety only will be an indicator that we're making progress in changing our habits

across the entire institution. Within one year of this speech, profits hit a record high.

And by the time O'Neill retired, which was 13 years later, Alcoa profits had grown five times larger than before his arrival,

and its market capitalization had risen by $27 billion with the B billion dollars.

What's more, all that growth occurred while Alcoa became one of the safest companies in the world.

Before O'Neill's arrival, almost every Alcoa plan had at least one accident per week.

Once his safety plans was implemented, some facilities would go years without a single employee losing a workday due to an accident.

The company's worker injury rate fell to 1 20th of the U.S. average. So how did O'Neill make one of the largest and most potentially dangerous companies into a profit machine for safety?

...