Personal effectiveness and principles
Argued that effectiveness comes from character and principles rather than from techniques and tricks.
Photograph: Neshan H. Naltchayan · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of the best-selling business books ever written, and its argument was a deliberate corrective. Covey reviewed two centuries of success literature and concluded that the recent stuff was about personality — technique, image, quick wins — while the older material was about character.
The seven habits build in order: private victory first (be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first), then public victory (think win-win, seek first to understand, synergise), then renewal (sharpen the saw).
The time management matrix — urgent against important — is the most borrowed part, and the point of it is that Quadrant II work (important, not urgent) is where everything valuable lives and is always the first thing displaced.
Decide what the outcome should look like before you start. Applied to a business it is the difference between a strategy and a to-do list, and applied to a meeting it saves the meeting.
His fifth habit, and the one with the highest immediate return in negotiation, complaints and management. Most people listen in order to reply.
You can be concerned about many things and influence rather fewer. Working inside the circle of influence expands it; complaining about the circle of concern shrinks it.
These links go to their own work. We summarise and point — we do not republish it.
Anyone who has read a shelf of tactics books and noticed nothing changed.
Earnest, long, and heavy on frameworks-within-frameworks. The ideas are better than the prose.