The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People | Stephen R. Covey

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People | Stephen R. Covey | Major Role In The Development Of Saturn's Operating Systems And Philosophy

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The 7 Habits of Hi...

	The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen R. Covey Free Press, 2004 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 809 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Helps Plan and Maximize A Life

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

This classic book provides steps to building a productive and organized life. Valuable for personal and business application. I review it in the last two lectures of my Principles of Management course to assist students in developing life and career plans.

Major Role In The Development Of Saturn's Operating Systems And Philosophy

"Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People played a MAJOR ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SATURN'S OPERATING SYSTEMS AND PHILOSOPHY.
Our commitment to quality and to our customers has its roots in the 7 Habits."
- Skip LeFauve, president, Saturn Corporation/General Motors
[from the back cover of the audio CD case]

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simplicity

I bought this book over a year ago. Now I can judge the results of the book from experience. Overall, the book is great tool for any person to begin changing her life, but it does lack the how-to quite often. That part is left to the reader unexpressed.

As many of the negative reviews of this book indicate, there are some underlying Christian, more specifically Mormon, ideas presented in the 7 Habits. I myself am an agnostic yet after reading the 7 Habits I found nothing to dissuade me from testing the ideas put forth by Covey. None of the habits suggests the reader should convert, abandon his/her own thoughts or be eternally damned. If I dismissed his writing simply due to my assumptions of his belief or my disagreement of some of this thoughts, I would be no different than all the fundamentalists who do so in the name of God. So I tested the habits.

I was already a person who enjoyed a successful family and financial life as fruits of my own labor. That didn't stop the book from making a difference. Truly seeking to empathize while silencing my own thoughts and experiences led to a far greater bond with my family members. Putting first things first and beginning with the end in mind, ABSOLUTELY progressed my life. It has been over a year. Thanks to this book, I found the courage, discipline, and time to create a vision for myself. I left my 6 figure salary job that I knew deep down made no difference beyond the appropriate use of my paycheck to start my own company; one that created synergy and actively and selflessly gave back to the community. The company is doing great and my employees are onboard for life. I have never been so fulfilled inside yet I know my self-development is not yet complete. I believe I had the thirst and initiated the search myself. Eventually I would get there with or without the 7 habits, but it held my hand through the initial stages.

What the book lacks is further practices on such topics as nurturing one's independent will. The wording itself is rather proprietary, so beyond a thorough explanation Covey should have provided more ideas or exercises on the development of this "human endowment". This is a trend throughout the 7 Habits; one that I feel takes away from the effectiveness of it.

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7 Habits We All Need To Adopt

Covey shares insight that should be considered by all. His "7 habits" apply to everyone, whether they wish to be more effective as leaders, parents, students, or just more effective as members of society. The habits he outlines perk the minds of and prompt the audience to self-examination. Immediately, I started to think of my own perceptions and attitudes in relation to my personal effectiveness as a Soldier, a leader, a parent, a husband, and as a friend. By adopting the habits, every aspect of my life could benefit.
The habits are not only presented and explained, but the author uses personal anecdotes to help us more readily relate to them. Covey outlines a plan for making the habits our own and explains how we will reap the benefits of using the habits as we journey through life. Covey creates a set of parameters in the habits that can provide guidance and control for anyone who wishes to be more effective at anything. It is not a quick fix, but a personal attitude and behavioral adaptation that can be developed in a positive way. I recommend "7 Habits" to everyone I know.

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Some good points, some bad points.

Dr Covey has written a book with some valuable points, which would be useful for any person to remember and apply. Although some say that they're common sense, sometimes we need reminding of common sense. Being proactive (i.e. doing something is better than doing nothing), starting with the end in sight (i.e. visualise what you really want and plan to get it), putting first-things-first (i.e. don't procrastinate), think Win-win (obviously valuable), and Seek-first-to-understand-then-to-be-understood are all useful and valuable habits. The idea of being principle-centred is also worth examining, as is the idea of concentrating on your circle of influence.

However, this book could have been much shorter; probably less than half the length. Dale Carnegie covered many of the ideas fifty years earlier, and wrote more clearly. Dr Covey's writing style would have George Orwell spinning in his grave. Like many authors in the 'self-help' genre, Dr Covey's writing is imprecise, long-winded, laden with exaggeration, and littered with clichés.

The 'Synergize' chapter should simply be excised; Dr Covey spends an entire chapter gushing about situations in which enthusiastic people got together, opened-up, became excited, and produced something wonderful. That isn't a habit; it's an effect. It's all very nice when it happens, but it ignores the situations where enthusiastic people get together, open-up, become excited, and produce something terrible or utterly disastrous because they were all too excited to examine risk. Late-90's dot-com companies in particular spring to mind. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds was written about this phenomenon.

Dr Covey's advice relating to tyrannical bosses is awful. I would expect that anyone who adopts Dr Covey's advice in a situation where they are forced to deal with a sociopath is about to discover the meaning of 'disappointment'. Dr Covey makes the error of assuming that deep-down, all people are reasonable... if they were, his ideas would work. Unfortunately, they are not, and adopting Dr Covey's techniques with a sociopathic manipulator (they're more common than you think), or even worse, a sycophantic group of sociopaths, is a recipe for disaster. Sometimes, the best advice is 'get as far as you can from that person and situation, as fast as you can'; I doubt whether Dr Covey has ever given anyone that advice.

This leads me to another thread common to self-help writers; the unwillingness to admit that their approaches won't necessarily work for all people in all situations, and the accompanying focus on only the positive outcomes that can come from following their advice. Dr Covey's book is an example of this; no warnings, no caveats; the whole thing is presented as a path to salvation.

Finally, the anecdotes... they're tedious. One after the other, we hear unverifiable anecdotes, which could have just as easily have been invented. Or they could be completely one-sided; the other people in the situation may have had a completely different interpretation. I couldn't help when reading the book but wonder if Dr Covey's anecdotes were all that they seemed.

So there you have it; a middling book which promises much and delivers some. This book is worth a read if you go in with your eyes open, and think critically. But for the impressionable reader (it is often impressionable people who buy self-help books) some parts of the book may lead to disappointment.

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