Seven Habits One Of Covey's Ideas example essay topic

Stephen R. Covey is chairman and founder of Covey Leadership Center, a worldwide, 700 member leadership development firm. He is author of the phenomenally successfull best-seller The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, with over 6 million copies sold in 32 languages. Dr. Covey is respected internationally as an author, lecturer, teacher and leadership mentor. For more than 30 years, he has trained thousands of leaders in business, industry, education, and government.

His current clients include such prominent corporate names as IBM, Procter & Gamble, Du Pont, Bonneville International, Coldwell Banker, Johnson &Johnson, Pillsbury, Aetna, Metropolitan Life Insurance, McDonnell Douglas, Disney Imagine ering, Hewlett-Packard, Trammell Crow, and U.S. West. Dr. Covey's expertise encompasses the fields of personal relations, organizational development, management and leadership. His presentation topics include: ! P Principle-Centered Leadership! P Win-Win Negotiation & Problem Solving! P Seven Basic Habits of Highly Effective People!

P The 9-"S" Paradigm of Management! P Six Conditions of Organizational Effectiveness! P Seek First to Understand! P Corporate Character: Ethics in Organizations! P Leadership vs. Management. Stephen has a doctorate degree from Brigham Young University, an M.B.A. degree from Harvard University, and a bachelor of science degree cum Laude, from the University of Utah.

He has served as an officer and board member of several corporations, an administrative assistant to the president of Brigham Young University, a visiting professor at the University of Utah and at Belfast Technical College, as well as a popular faculty member for the Young President's Organization. Dr. Covey is also the creator of "The Masters", a nationally acclaimed management development program; publisher of Executive Excellence, an executive advisory newsletter; and producer of the Seven Habits video and audio training programs and organizer. He is married to Sandra Merrill Covey, and they are the parents of nine children. Dr. Stephen Covey has inspired millions with his writing and speeches. He is arguably the most influential non-fiction author of the '90's - with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People firmly planted on the best-sellers list since 1989.

The book has sold more than 12 million copies in 28 languages and 40 countries throughout the world. In 1998 he was recognized as one of Time magazine's 25 most influential Americans. Dr. Covey also authored Principle-Centered Leadership, First Things First, (co-authored with Roger and Rebecca Merrill), and his most recent, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families, which contains precious lessons for creating and sustaining a strong family in a turbulent world. Dr. Covey focuses on transforming human and organizational effectiveness using Principle-Centered Leadership and Living Skills that help you succeed by putting first things first everyday: because where you " re heading is more important than where you " re going.

His work in Principle-Centered Leadership has been adopted by thousands of organizations as a foundational inside-out approach to significantly improving quality, leadership, innovation, trust, teamwork, customer-focused service, organizational alignment, and many other strategic corporate initiatives. Dr. Covey is vice chairman of Franklin Covey Company, the largest management and leadership development organization on the world. Dr Stephen R. Covey is an internationally respected leadership authority, family expert, teacher and organisational consultant. He has made teaching principle-centred living and principle-centred leadership his life's work. He is perhaps best known as the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which has sold more than 12 million copies in 33 languages throughout the world. Dr Covey is co-founder and vice-chairman of Franklin Covey Company, a leading global professional services firm which offers learning and performance solutions.

His other books include Principle-Centred Leadership and (with A. Roger Merrill and Rebecca R. Merrill) First Things First. Dr. Covey earned his MBA from Harvard and completed his doctorate at Brigham Young University. He has been awarded four honorary doctorate degrees and has been recognised as one of Time magazine's 25 most influential Americans. Stephen R. Covey writes in his blockbuster self-improvement tome, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, about the "social band-aid" effect of much recent success literature, the tendency to create personality-based solutions to problems that go deeper. "Success became more a function of personality, of public image, of attitudes and behaviors, skills and techniques, that lubricate the processes of human interaction", he wrote. Covey acknowledges the importance of the "personality ethic", but he sought to go deeper and emphasize the "character ethic", something Covey saw as a fading concept.

He went back further and found inspiration in figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Thoreau, and Emerson. Indeed, everything old is new again in Covey's works. The author himself would admit that nothing he is saying is terribly new; but Covey's synthesis of years and years of thinking about effectiveness resulted in a smash personal growth title -- one that continues to be a top seller nearly 15 years after its first publication. The title, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, makes it sounds like a quick-fix path to power, but Covey's philosophy is rooted in exactly the opposite notion: There are no quick fixes, no shortcuts. He is writing about habits, after all, which can be as tough to institute as they can be to break.

His list: Be proactive; begin with the end in mind; put first things first; think win-win; seek first to understand, then to be understood; synergize; sharpen the saw. Covey's subsequent titles are based in some way or another on this seminal book. First Things First offers a time-management strategy and a new way of looking at priorities. Principle-Centered Leadership is an examination of character traits and an "inside-out" way of improving organizational leadership. Covey, a Mormon, also wrote two religious contemplations of human effectiveness and interaction, The Spiritual Roots of Human Relations and The Divine Center. These were Covey's first two titles; his esteem for spirituality is not absent from subsequent work but appears as just one more tool that can be applied in self-improvement.

Like Spencer Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese? , 7 Habits has been able to achieve astonishing sales success by espousing ideas applicable beyond an office setting. Covey's books are about self-improvement more than they are about corporate management, which has enabled him to create a successful version of the philosophy for families (entitled, of course, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families) in addition to attracting people who just want to be more efficient in their lives, or bolster that diet. Most attractive about Covey is his versatility in conveying his ideas. His books are structured in appealing, number-oriented groupings ("Three Resolutions,"Thirty Methods of Influence", four quadrants of importance in time management) and big umbrellas of ideas, but within these pockets Covey draws from a wide range of resources: anecdotes, business school exercises, historical wisdom, and diverse metaphors. Sometimes, Covey uses himself as an example.

He knows as well as anyone that practicing what he preaches is tough; but he keeps trying, which makes him an inspiring testimonial for his own books. (Christina Nunez) Good to Know Covey is married to Sandra Merrill Covey. They have nine children. Covey is co-chair of FranklinCovey, a management resources firm based in Provo, Utah.

He has also been a business professor at Brigham Young University, where he earned his doctorate. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has sold more than 12 million copies in 33 languages and 75 countries throughout the world. Dr. Stephen R. Covey, founder and chairman of the Covey Leadership Center (CLC), has made teaching principle-centered living and leadership his life's work. A respected author, lecturer, teacher and organizational consultant, Dr. Covey holds an M.B.A. from Harvard and a doctorate from Brigham Young University, where he was a professor of organizational behavior and business management and had served as administrative assistant to the president and director of university relations. For more than 25 years, he has taught millions of individuals in business, government and education, the transforming power principles rooted in unchanging natural laws that govern human and organizational effectiveness. Dr. Covey is the author of several acclaimed books including, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a New York Times #1 bestseller, which has also been on the Business Week, USA Today and Publisher's Weekly best-seller list for more than four years and has sold more than six million copies in 28 languages and 72 countries throughout the world.

His book Principle-Centered Leadership, is one of the best selling business books of the decade. In its first year, Dr. Covey's recent book, First Things First, doubled the hardcover sales that The 7 Habits achieved in the same time period. Among recent acknowledgements, Dr. Covey has received the Wilbur M. Mcneely Award from the International Management council for significant contributions to management and education; the 1994 International Entrepreneur of the Year Award; the 1994 Toastmaster's International Top Speaker Award; the 1994 Sales and Marketing Executives International Tops in Marketing Award; the first Thomas More College medallion for continued service to humanity; and Inc. magazine's Regional Products and Services Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Dr. Covey's organizational legacy to the world is the Covey Leadership Center, founded with the vision of teaching organizations to implement and embody Principle-Center Leadership deeply into their culture.

Appearing on the 1994 Inc. 500 List of the Fastest Growing Companies, CLC's client portfolio includes half of the Fortune 500 companies and thousands of small and mid-size companies. Programs taught by Covey Leadership Center associates in more than 75 cities in North America and 40 countries worldwide reach an estimated quarter of a million people annually. The Center has created pilot partnerships with several cities seeking to become principle-centered communities. CLC associates are teaching The 7 Habits to teachers and administrators in more than 3,000 school districts and universities nationwide, while comprehensive statewide initiatives have been formed with education leaders in 27 states. Seven hundred Covey Leadership Center associates and thousands of client facilitators worldwide join Dr. Covey in his commitment to empower people and organizations with the principles necessary to create high-trust, high-performance cultures.

Dr. Covey's belief that effective, useful and peaceful lives result from one's proactive influence and unselfish service to society is expressed well in a favorite statement by George Bernard: "This is the true joy of life... being used for a purpose recognized by your self as a mighty one... being a force of Nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me.

It's a sort of splendid torch which I've got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations". The Covey Leadership Center offers a wide range of seminars, audio and video cassettes, time management tools and other services designed to help empower individuals and organizations with effectiveness. On The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey This book is a surprise: an inspirational self-empowerment book that isn't a complete pile of fluff. Maybe I'm just at that stage in life where one begins to appreciate self-help books, but I don't think so; I think this one really is head and shoulders better than the others.

That's not to say that it is completely fluff less; Covey's ideas are all couched in phraseology with the texture if not the smell of fluff dom. But the ideas themselves are worth putting up with the nagging suspicion that by publicly admitting enjoyment of this book one is going to be ostracized forevermore as a confirmed airhead. The Seven Habits One of Covey's ideas is that everyone goes through three maturity stages: dependence, independence, and interdependence. I discuss this more in the perfect employee document, but the new idea is that reaching our so-American ultimate achievement of adult independence is not the be-all and end-all after all. We have to then learn to work with others to achieve goals beyond the means of any single individual. Obvious when said right out, but I've never really thought about it so explicitly before.

Covey then lays out how his 7 habits fit into this maturity scale, using the following drawing: THE SEVEN HABITS PARADIGM This typically self-help ish hokey-looking figure is a good memory device for Covey's seven habits. The idea is that one starts at the bottom, acquires the first 3 habits to become independent rather than dependent, acquires the next 3 habits to move to interdependence, then uses the last habit to improve further. The First Three Habits The first three habits let you take conscious control of your actions (so that you can proceed to change your habits, which would otherwise just form unconsciously in an unplanned way); make you plan what your goals are; and force you to use strict time management to achieve those goals. Covey gives plenty of real-life examples and concrete guidance techniques for each habit, so that the book acts as a concrete how-to guide rather than just philosophical pablum. For instance, for Habit 3 (on time management) Covey explain the difference between urgent and important tasks, and how one can get out of crisis (aka fire-fighting) mode so as to have time for the really important things. The thing is, these really are the key points in organizing one's life and achieving one's goals.

If more people adopted these first three habits, they'd be happier and more successful. Very simple basic truths, well stated here. Many people reach the independence plateau through application of these first three habits, and think they " ve reached the pinnacle of achievement. Company founders are often at this level; they " re super competent in many areas, have achieved great things, but something seems to be missing in moving on to a successful company. What's missing is an understanding of how to work with other people.

The Next Three Habits The next three habits allow one to work cooperatively, to mutual benefit, rather than competitively; to improve communication skills to bring out the best in other people; and to work with other people so that skills complement and the result is far better than one could do alone. If everyone had these skills, backbiting office politics would become a thing of the past. People really can work together to achieve more than they would as individuals, and this shows how to do it. The Last Habit The seventh habit doesn't ring very true for me.

The idea is that one can continually strive to improve, but the great value of the other six habits is that Covey has worked out in detail a plan that one might never create for oneself no matter how hard one tries. In other words, the seventh habit is a platitude rather than a concrete guideline, in comparison to the others. Or who knows, perhaps I'm just not at a maturity level to appreciate it yet. It's a Management Book, Too Covey's ideas are offered as a way to achieve one's personal goals, but the spillover into one's business life is unavoidable.

These habits will unavoidably cause one to become a leader first of oneself, and then of others. Reading this book will not turn you into a manager against your will, but the inner direction these habits supply one do prove attractive to others who haven't yet achieved such direction. In other words, it " ll make you a leader, not a manager. To quote Covey quoting Drucker, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things".

As John Walker mentions, good executives lead, poor ones simply manage and should stick to lower levels of the company. But again, we " re not talking about a pathway to getting large salaries and bossing around groups of people; becoming a leader in one's own life is the most valuable aspect of leadership; ability to lead others is a consequence you may choose to employ or not, as best fits your life goals.