The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Written from secondary sources (the publisher’s and FranklinCovey’s descriptions, reference articles and a review), not from the text.

Stephen Covey’s 1989 book argues that lasting effectiveness comes from character built on principles, which he calls the character ethic, and not from the techniques and image-management he calls the personality ethic. Its first subtitle was “Restoring the Character Ethic”.

The seven habits are a sequence. Three make up a “private victory” that takes a person from dependence to independence: be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first. Three make up a “public victory” that moves on to interdependence: think win-win, seek first to understand and then to be understood, synergize. The seventh, sharpen the saw, is renewal, the upkeep that keeps the other six working. Along the way come tools that outlived the book: the circle of influence inside the circle of concern, a grid that sorts tasks by urgent and important, and the “emotional bank account” as a picture of trust.

Covey, who died in 2012, held a Harvard MBA and a doctorate in religious education from Brigham Young University, and built on the book a training business that became FranklinCovey. The publisher says it has sold over 40 million copies. Other figures in print run from 20 million to 65 million, and none is audited.

Two things are worth having beside it. Clayton Christensen, among others, described the habits as a secular distillation of Latter-day Saint teaching. And the often-repeated story that the book grew out of Covey’s doctoral study of two centuries of success literature does not match the university’s record of his 1976 thesis, which describes a classroom experiment in human-relations training that found no significant difference.