The seven habits of successful people and its author

Steven Covey, the author of seven habits died recently and the daily Telegraph published an obituary that is worth a read.

" Seven Habits — in order they are: Be proactive; Begin with the end in mind; Put first things first; Think “win-win”; Seek first to understand, then to be understood; Synergise; and Sharpen the saw [ie look after yourself] — made its author a fortune by the repetitive use of words such as synergy, paradigm and interdependent, as in: “Although you cannot control the paradigms of others in an interdependent interaction of the synergistic process itself, a great deal of synergy is within your circle of influence.”

His book became a bible for aspiring middle managers and organisers of personal development courses, providing a rich new source of management-speak. It is largely thanks to Covey that terms such as “proactive” and “win-win” have become part of everyday conversation.

On the back of the book’s success, Covey, a Yul Brynner look alike from Utah, built a leadership development business...Covey’s clients included three quarters of the Fortune 500 companies as well as schools and government agencies aiming to turn this world into super-efficient managers. When Bill Clinton reached his lowest ebb in 1994, he summoned Covey to advise him; Tony Blair, not surprisingly, was also said to be a follower of Covey’s managerial techniques. “Coveyism,” as The Economist put it in 1996, “is total quality management for the character, re-engineering for the soul”. In 1996 Time magazine named Covey one of the 25 most influential Americans.

Covey followed Seven Habits with a succession of lucrative spin-offs, such as The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families (1997), in which he advocated that families should come up with their own mission statements and establish “emotional bank accounts” into which members make “deposits” through such things as kindness, honesty and reliability.

Covey’s genius was to mix the language of management consultancy with the sort of moral exhortations familiar to readers of the motivational literature put out by Alcoholics Anonymous. But there were cynical souls who suggested that he was merely in the business of repackaging stale bromides as breakthroughs of world-shattering importance. One detractor described Seven Habits as the book “behind which nearly every corporate bulls-----r hides”; and there were many parodies, including one entitled The Seven Habits of Highly Defective People: And Other Bestsellers That Won’t Go Away.

One of Covey’s own habits was littering his speeches with approving references to well-managed firms which had benefited from his expertise, though in 2009 these included General Motors’ Saturn division, which was going out of business at the time.

Meanwhile, when British families in a Channel 4 documentary attempted to apply Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families, mission statements and emotional bank accounts proved no match for surly adolescents. “Being proactive sounds like a good idea when you are sitting outside a mock French chateau in Utah,” noted one critic, “but less alluring on a wet afternoon with bored kids in Plaistow.”

Stephen Richards Covey was born into a Mormon family in Salt Lake City on October 24 1932. After taking a degree in Business Administration at the University of Utah, and an MBA at Harvard, he went on Mormon missions in England and Ireland. Part of his work involved training fledgling church leaders: “I got so turned on by the idea of training leaders that it became my whole life’s mission,” he explained in 2004."