Product Description

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, honesty, and human dignity -- principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #539795 in Books
• Published on: 1991-06
• Binding: Audio Cassette

Amazon.com Audiobook Review
Anyone who thinks the audiocassette adaptation of Stephen Covey's bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is a shortcut to reading the book has another thing coming. As a preview, the cassette is worth every one of its 90 minutes; as a substitute for the original, it will only leave you wishing for the rest. There's a reason 7 Habits has sold more than 5 million copies and been translated into 32 languages. Serious work has obviously gone into it, and serious change can likely come out of it--but only with constant discipline and steadfast commitment. As the densely packed tape makes immediately clear, this is no quick fix for what's ailing us in our personal and professional lives.

The tape opens to the silky-smooth, overtrained voice of the female narrator, who's responsible for tying together audio clips from actual Covey seminars. Leaving aside the occasional attempts at promoting Covey and his institute, her script does a first-rate job of making sense of Covey's own intense, analogy-rich style of explaining his habits. There's nothing simple about his approach to becoming an effective person. The first three habits alone--which have to do with personal responsibility, leadership, and self-management--could take years to master. Yet the last four are unattainable, the narrator insists, if you can't acquire the personal security--the "inner core," says Covey--that presumably comes from a mastery of the foundation.

Throughout our lessons, Covey's presence is both learned and thoroughly appealing. He drops references to the likes of Socrates, T.S. Eliot, and Robert Frost with the aplomb of an English professor. And his knack for mixing everyday stories with abstract concepts manages to clarify difficult issues while respecting our intelligence. You could argue that the cassette is nothing more than a clever marketing tool for selling another few million copies of the book. But, even at that, it's worth the investment in time and concentration: in the end, we're moved to learn more about integrating all seven habits in our struggle to become better and, yes, more effective people. (Running time: 1.5 hours, one cassette) --Ann Senechal

Chronique amazon.fr
Amazon.co.uk Review According to Steven R. Covey, to live with security and wisdom, and to have the power to take advantages of the opportunities that change creates, we need fairness, integrity, honesty and human dignity. Quite a tall order when you consider that most of us live our lives in a permanent state of flux, questioning our ideals and values and fighting a daily battle with the lack of self-confidence that stops us from taking risks of any kind. But, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey manages to make it sound as if changing the way we look at ourselves and the world around us so that we can become more successful both personally and professionally an absolute doddle. He defines the "habits" as "the intersection of knowledge, skill and desire" and states that the "Seven Habits" of the title are not mutually exclusive, but rather when developed together help to form a well-rounded, sensitive, confident and effective human being. As with many self-help books, much of what you read here is based on basic common sense and can at times be irritatingly obvious. However, what Covey manages to do so successfully is to break down the barriers which prevent all of us from taking a long hard look at ourselves, and then gradually introduces new rules which allow us to move first from dependence to independence and then towards the ultimate goal of interdependence. But of course, the only real way to test the value of The Habits--be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, think "win/win", seek first to understand and then to be understood, synergise, sharpen the saw-- is to work on them. This book is as good as any place to start on the road to self-awareness and self-improvement in the workplace and in the home without becoming too irritatingly smug and self-satisfied. --Susan Harrison

From AudioFile
Delivered with one of the most genuine voices in the personal development field, the principles in Covey's 1989 bestseller are placed in a new frame by the author's thoughtful comments before and after the unabridged text. The meat of this thinking is well known: Take the initiative, align behavior with beliefs, form partnerships with people you understand and respect, develop yourself. These lessons are still relevant to finding one's rudder in a world that doesn't tell one how and provides no compass. With corporations obsessing over this week's numbers instead of their human capital, Covey's talent for speaking to our deepest aspirations takes center stage again in a lively audio learning experience. T.W. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Not an E-Z read.
For a personal change book, I found it rather a hard read. The book to me is, well, complicated. The seven habits make sense and all, but the whole process seems to involve making layers of change, with each layer being a whole book in itself. Not a very quick read, and I'm not saying its not worthwhile and all, it's more a book that you have to be willing to work with. Readers who like less sophisticated personal change books might enjoy The Sixty-Second Motivator.

An absolute classic
Stephen Covey today counts as one of the absolute top-management gurus. If you read this book, you'll understand why.

The book is divided into four parts.

The first part deals with the fundamentals that everything else builds upon: paradigms and principles. An important theme running through all of Covey's work is that of ethical behaviour and delivering one's contribution to society as a necessary ingredient of succesful living.

In part two the author shows you a number of principles that help you to deal with yourself, such as taking responsibility for your own actions and prioritizing your goals.

Part three talks about working with other people, addressing such issues as win/win thinking and active listening.

The fourth and last part talks about sustaining the things that you have learned and continuing to grow.

This book is not a push-over. It has a high level of abstraction. Also, part of this book sounds more like philosophy or even religion, which will not sit well with everyone. However, the author is perfectly correct in first discussing basic values and priorities ("doing the right things") before discussing techniques for raising efficiency ("doing things right").

Also, it is important that you realise that this is not a self-help book for people who have real specific issues on their hands (self-discipline, traumas, lacking social skill etc.) They will probably need to deal with those specific issues first, before they will be able to take the maximum out of this book.

For those who feel that their life is reasonably sorted out, but would like to go (much) further, this is a must-read book.

Highly recommended.

If wishes were horses we'd all be highly effective.
Author's Qualifications

Stephen Covey brings "25 years of working with people in business, university and marriage and family settings," as his credentials in writing this book. With an MBA from Harvard, a professorship at Brigham Young University and a marriage that has survived many years and nine children, these credentials certainly ring true. The principles he describes are not the products of academic research or controlled studies. Neither do they stem from deeply moving personal experiences that a Nelson Mandela or a Viktor Frankl may speak about. They are the principles that grandma may have talked about, if only she were more articulate. And yet, for this very reason, one feels compelled to listen to Covey for his experiences are close to those of us common folk.

Thesis and Critique

The book certainly presents a well structured attempt at restructuring our lives in the pursuit of personal excellence. In this review however, I will focus on its role as a management handbook. Covey makes a special effort to remind us that his is not a "time management" book. While this is a book about organizational excellence, Covey emphasizes that the foundation of organizational excellence is personal excellence. The seven habits he describes in great detail are tools leading to that goal. They can be applied in nearly every situation in our lives, and, if successfully practiced, will help us to improve our personal as well as professional lives. In describing Habit 1 (Be Proactive) Covey uses a vast array of allusions ranging from Pavlovian conditioned reflexes to Frankl's holocaust experiences. His erudite tone, laced with pithy personal anecdotes soon lulls the reader into acceptance in true Socratic fashion. The second Habit emphasizes a sense of mission. Under the influence of Covey and his cohorts, every corporate office now has some variation on a mission statement. The more inept and slow-moving the organization, the more prominent is the display of "The Vision of Our Corporation." While mission statements are valuable for organizations such as Procter and Gamble and Coke, they can be a hindrance in today's fast moving biotechnology and information systems companies whose very survival is based on constant redefinition and opportunistic adaptation to market demands and new technological developments. Habit 3 deals with time management and is perhaps the most useful section of the book. A reader in love with the Pareto principle could read this section and get most of the utility out of the book. A unique feature is the analysis of activities based on four quadrants. Covey stresses quadrant II activities such as relationship building and recognizing new opportunities. These are certainly critical management skills and deserve to be emphasized. Covey's worksheets for time management are also novel and represent an improvement over to-do lists and appointment books. The division of time based on ones many "roles" certainly is a way to achieve greater balance between the personal and the professional. With Habit 4 Covey again descends into sermonizing. Predecessors such as Jesus and Buddha have done a far better job at illustrating this principle through their lives and words. From a modern author angling at the management crowd one would expect a more "how-to" approach set in a real-world context, but this is lacking. A far superior treatment of this aspect is Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff's Co-opetition that shows the applications of this noble principle in a business setting. Habit 5 emphasizes empathic communication. The chapter showcases Covey's talents as an empath. Habit 6, Synergy is another great concept much touted by merging organizations. This chapter alone could explain Covey's tremendous success in an otherwise astute business community. Habit 7, picturesquely called "sharpening the saw," belongs more in a Deepak Chopra book with its quasi-religious overtones.

The overwhelming success of this book emphasizes the human mind's love of simplification. If seven, easy to understand habits could enrich our lives, the world quickly would become a much better place. These habits and their virtues are not new to us and have been an open secret for millennia. The difficulty of course lies in their application. On closing the book the following verse from Alice in Wonderland comes to mind:

'You are old,' said the youth, 'as I mentioned before, And have grown most uncommonly fat; Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door-- Pray, what is the reason of that?'

'In my youth,' said the sage, as he shook his grey locks, 'I kept all my limbs very supple By the use of this ointment--one shilling the box-- Allow me to sell you a couple?'