 Highly recommend for potential highly effective people
A very good read! You can read the whole way thru once but it's a book that you continually need to read and re-read, time and time again to learn and apply the concepts. It's not a quick-fix self-help book. In the end, it will all be worthwhile. After all, it's your life. Ultimately, it's your choice to live it to the fullest and maximum capacity.
Principles that STILL work...
One of the main points of Dr. Covey's work is that principles are unchanging whereas "techniques" come and go. I've been acquainted with Covey's philosophy for almost 40 years -- which predates this book by about 18. I was fortunate to have Dr. Covey as my Professor of Organizational Behavior when I studied for my MBA back then. I had come out of an undergraduate engineering program and this study was rather foreign to me at the time. The "principles" he taught and nurtured in us then are all summed up, refined, condensed and made particularly useful in this book. He narrates the book himself in a down-to-earth way that is all his own.
The value of these principles, however, goes way beyond a souvenir or fond memory. I have been a manager in a manufacturing environment for 30 of the past 40 years. My successes have been directly proportional to my use of these teachings in leading groups toward positive results. Conversely, my failures, too, have come about as a result of ignoring or forgetting this material.
At this time I am contemplating retirement. For the past 10 years I have had the privilege of being the director of a substantial manufacturing plant. When I came here I renewed my commitment to Covey's philosophy and taught classes to 33 of my managers and supervisors based on Covey's 7 Habits. I then set about to reinforce those behaviors over the past ten years. The plant has broken records year after year, but, more importantly, the managers and supervisors are aligned around a common value set and they actually collaborate in ways previously unknown for this group. They actually "synergize" -- to quote Habit #6.
The story is a great story beyond the scope of this space. But the success, as I said above, is directly proportional to our application of these principles to our daily work and interaction with one another. Covey is the last person who would claim these principles as his own -- new or revolutionary. His "value added" is in combining them into a set and showing the dependence and interdependence of them on one another.
If you have a managerial or leadership responsibility in ANY SETTING you need to seriously consider the contents of this book. Those contents have worked for me for 40 years. He's right: techniques come and go, but principles last forever !
 A Book Beyond the Author's Expertise
I've spent a good amount of time looking at self-help books and I generally distinguish between those books actually written by psychologists or at least grounded in a theory of psychology, and all the rest. Stephen Covey is not a psychologist and yet his book is written in a very pseudo-scientific style. He doesn't have even one cite in his book, one reference to a study or trial. Virtually every example in this book is anecdotal. And yet the suggestions he makes, in my opinion, are far beyond his ability or expertise. Psychology is the science of the mind and this author seems to meddle in exactly that without any credentials to do so. While this is very common in self-help books, I didn't expect it from a book that has sold 15 Million copies. Now, if this were a book more like Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" the author's lack of credentials wouldn't bother me in the slightest. We all have friends to a lesser or greater extent and certainly we could write a book about our own experiences and extract principles from those experiences to help others make friends. But the views in this book go way beyond that in my opinion. Maybe I am wrong, but I can't stop asking myself on what basis is this author qualified to write a book like this?
 Must Read and Re-read Book
It is one of the best books by far on self-development. I bought more copies for my siblings and recommended it to friends and several others.
You will find yourself inside this book. You will come to understand why you are the way you are or why you act/react the way you do. On this book, I have have summarized lines and paragraphs to one word - my name.
Read this book and come to know yourself better.
A Painful Read
I seriously hate this book!! I had to get it for a class I was taking, and ending up and had to do a project on it and it was the worst book I've ever read. It was just a very dry and boring read and I would never read anymore of it then I already have because it was serioulsy that bad!
|
