July 16, 2012

Stephen R. Covey dies; author of ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ was 79

Stephen R. Covey, a former business professor whose 1989 leadership manifesto “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” sold more than 20 million copies on the way to becoming one of the most highly effective volumes in the history of self-help publishing, died July 16 at a hospital in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He was 79.

He died of complications from injuries he sustained in a bicycle accident three months ago. The death was announced by FranklinCovey, the multimillion-dollar business and leadership consulting firm he co-founded in his home state of Utah.

Stephen Covey’s ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’: A look at author Stephen Covey’s “habits” through the prism of seven successful leaders.

Dr. Covey was quick to admit that few new ideas could be found in his landmark book and the publishing and motivational-speaking empire he built around it. He was preceded in self-help business literature by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr., the McKinsey consultants who wrote “In Search of Excellence” (1982). Before them came Dale Carnegie, author of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (1936).

Yet millions of readers turned to Dr. Covey’s books, whose titles included “First Things First,” “The Leader In Me” and “Everyday Greatness.” Fortune 500 executives lined up for top-dollar seminars where Dr. Covey was treated like a rock star, and President Bill Clinton once summoned him to Camp David, but not because Dr. Covey knew something they did not.

Dr. Covey had articulated a philosophy that – however platitudinous it seemed to detractors – transcended business and spoke to the centuries-old American values of self-improvement and self-reliance.

“This is not some kind of Big Bang theory,” Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn said in an interview. Dr. Covey’s achievement, she said, was a practical action plan for business leaders who no longer wished to be “the man in the gray suit” as they headed into the 21st century.

Instead, Koehn said, Dr. Covey challenged readers and listeners to think about their “character and integrity and a sense of one’s place not only relative to . . . one’s professional standing but one’s place in the cosmos.”

Dr. Covey disdained what he called the “flood of trendy philosophies” emanating from the modern workplace and instead offered seven seemingly timeless maxims. They had very little to do with business and everything to do with character.

And, he told the Daily Telegraph in 2004, “there was nothing esoteric or special about why I chose the number seven. . . . It just happened to turn out that way.”

The maxims are:

1. Be proactive.

2. Begin with the end in mind.

3. Put first things first.

4. Think win/win.

5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

6. Synergize.

7. Sharpen the saw – a Benjamin Franklin-esque injunction to seek constantly to improve oneself.

In 2004, as self-help books occupied ever more real estate in bookstores, he amended his 1989 book with “The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness.”

As Americans found their lives increasingly busy and cluttered, Dr. Covey emphasized the differences between tasks that are urgent but unimportant, important but not urgent, and every other permutation of the two.

On this day...

• Holiness has a beginning in the little - 2012
• Spurious Texts - 2011
• Advice to a Drowning Man - 2007
• Proverb 12:11 - 2007
• Personal Identity Before Godly Communion - 2007
• Wisdom Is Best Served As Action - 2007