In Search of Effectiveness

High­ly recommended.

I expect­ed much less, and avoid­ed read­ing this for a long time. I was expect­ing a book about orga­ni­za­tion, about build­ing task lists and about manip­u­lat­ing oth­er peo­ple. I was expect­ing a book much like the rest of busi­ness lit­er­a­ture, shal­low and quick-fix oriented.

I only picked it up after hear­ing peo­ple that I admire per­son­al­ly refer to some ideas as «Sev­en Habits» con­cepts. And so the first sev­er­al times I tried to read it, I imme­di­ate­ly found that there was much more to it than I was will­ing to dig in to. Cov­ey sets forth an impor­tant idea: that we can­not be effec­tive in our endeav­ors with­out spir­i­tu­al awak­ened integri­ty. He nev­er cross­es the line into reli­gion, and stays very prac­ti­cal about it all, but through­out the book runs the same theme: you can become effec­tive by being a bet­ter per­son faster than you can become a bet­ter per­son by being more effec­tive (if the lat­ter is even possible).

If «sev­en habits» sounds a lit­tle like a quick-fix solu­tion, it’s not. It’s a tidy way of pack­ag­ing a set of process­es toward integri­ty in order to make them acces­si­ble. It’s far too easy to get off-track into abstrac­tion when talk­ing about the paths of right action, too easy to be side­tracked by mum­bo-jum­bo and the trap­pings of per­son­al reli­gion or phi­los­o­phy. Sev­en habits sounds too sim­ple, but what about Pope Gre­go­ry’s Sev­en Virtues (Faith, Hope, Char­i­ty, For­ti­tude, Jus­tice, Pru­dence and Tem­per­ance for those that nev­er got past the Dead­ly Sins)? Those seem too all-encom­pass­ing for a self-help book, but some­one could do a lot worse than expand on the Virtues as busi­ness tools.

There was a lot more in the Sev­en Habits than I bar­gained for, and truth­ful­ly read­ing through the book can in no way be enough. There are actions at the end of each chap­ter that are much more than illus­tra­tive or teach­ing exam­ples, they’re prac­ti­cal tasks for bring­ing these prin­ci­ples in line with our lives. I’ve set aside a note­book for start­ing the process of devel­op­ing a per­son­al mis­sion state­ment. Once that is devel­oped (note that I did­n’t write fin­ished) then I can look at revis­it­ing some of the oth­er tasks.

I’m also think­ing about invest­ing in some Franklin/Covey sem­i­nars or cours­es. That’s how impressed I am with the con­tents of the book. I’ve been assured by some­one who has been through a cou­ple of them that unlike the Land­mark Forum, Franklin/Covey’s cours­es spend more time on ideas than on sell­ing the next course. And I won’t be expect­ed to recruit oth­ers. As he wrote to me yes­ter­day, they say that «car­ry­ing a lit­tle bur­gundy binder [is] enough to get you in the cult.» Sounds to me like attrac­tion rather than pro­mo­tion, which I con­sid­er to be a pru­dent pub­lic rela­tions policy.