Those of you who know me knew I’d have to get to this one eventually.

This is the classic “business” bestseller – or perhaps it’s a self-help bestseller¹ and I just read it as a business bestseller – introducing the definition of “effectiveness” as balancing results with the care of that which produces the results. You know, the old “put your oxygen mask on first before helping others to put on their mask.” If you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of others. And, if you burn out your employees, your business will suffer.

Covey introduces 7 concepts that he says build character:

• Be proactive
• Begin with the end in mind
• Put first things first
• Think win-win
• Seek first to understand, then to be understood
• Synergize
• Sharpen the saw

Covey goes into detail on what each of these means, giving examples from his business life and from his home life. He provides tools and tips for applying them in your life.

I own several copies of this book. One, faded and dogeared, with tape flags down the side and across the top, and much marginalia. And another pristine copy that I kept on my shelf at work, back when I worked somewhere that everyone had bookshelves at work² that I could pull down and refer to as needed or loan to a struggling employee. A third copy lived on my living room bookshelves, I guess where ditto. (Actually not sure how I ended up with the third copy. Did I, could I have, maybe, perhaps I actually attended some kind of Covey workshop – is that possible?)

It’s funny, how much this book influenced my approach to work, business, life… I laugh at myself now but, when I flip through the pages, I find myself saying, “Oh, that’s where I got that” over and over. Circle of Concern vs Circle of Influence. The Time Management Matrix. The Emotional Bank Account. Seeking First to Understand Then to Be Understood.³ It’s like a primer for people going into business: what you need to know to be a half-way decent manager. Perhaps it should be required reading, say, in silicone valley.

And the anecdotes stayed with me: the story about delegating lawn-mowing to his son; the story about the man on the subway whose children were running wild; how he went about helping colleagues understand how he set priorities at work, and said no without saying no.

Wow, this thing really got inside me.

I did, however, hit a wall with it. I could never get through the chapter on what he calls, the Principle Center: a circle with each wedge neatly labeled with things like Money, Work, Family, Church⁴, Self, etc. I tried. I understood the concept but, when I tried to apply it, I tied myself into knots and went a little crazy. So I stopped trying and lived much more happily without it. From which I developed my own habit: Take from business and self-help books what you can, leave the rest, and move on.⁵

Despite my problems with the Principle Center, I still recommend this book to people. I think it’s a great way to balance your pursuit of success with caring for the people, communities, and environment that make that success possible.

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1. The cover of one of my editions features a quote from the Editor-in-Chief of Success magazine^*, calling it the “personal leadership handbook for the decade.” That was in 1990. Isn’t it funny how this was going to be “the personal leadership handbook” of a decade now associated with “irrational exuberance,” an increase in capitalism and entrepreneurship (to quote the Wikipedia page on the ’90s). This is the decade in which much of Gen X entered the workforce, perhaps leading at least one Baby Boomer to say to a Gen X, “Your generation is so money-centric” to which a GenXer replied, “Because we know we’re going to have to pay to take care of your ass someday.” I think it’s ironic that so many GenXers – the slacker generation – went on to enter the Risky Business / Working Girl / Wall Street workforce. Where they then read books like, T7HOHEP, The Customer Comes Second, and Who Moved My Cheese.
   *To my surprise Success is still around and still publishing stories like, “The Holy Grail of Investing with Tony Robbins” (eye-roll emoji). ↩︎
2. Sigh. ↩︎
3. Which, incidentally, does not work with psychopaths. They just run you over. He needed to add a chapter about how to work with unprincipled people. ↩︎
4. Covey’s other books include things like Spiritual Roots of Human Relations and The Divine Center. Though he doesn’t preach or even mention god much in this book, it runs beneath the words. For all that, I still recommend it. ↩︎
5. “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” ↩︎