Stephen Covey
Stephen Covey
Stephen Richards Coveywas an American educator, author, businessman, and keynote speaker. His most popular book was The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His other books include First Things First, Principle-Centered Leadership, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, The 8th Habit, and The Leader In Me — How Schools and Parents Around the World Are Inspiring Greatness, One Child at a Time. He was a professor at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University at the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSelf-Help Author
Date of Birth24 October 1932
CitySalt Lake City, UT
CountryUnited States of America
Unfortunately, too many executives believe the myths about trust. Myths like how trust is soft and is merely a social virtue. The reality is that trust is hard-edged and is an economic driver.
Executives need to understand the economic benefits of trust dividend, especially when the behavior is real, not artificially or superficially created as PR to manipulate trust.
In my own experience, both personally and professionally, I've learned that you don't wait to confront reality. It doesn't get easier. It doesn't get better. And, in some cases, if you don't get the relevant information from people and act quickly, you start losing options. You're into damage control.
All the well-meaning advice in the world won't amount to a hill of beans if we're not even addressing the real problem.
We may find it convenient to live with the illusion that circumstances or other people are responsible for the quality of our lives, but the reality is that we are responsible-response-able-for our choices.
In a very real sense, there are only two roles in organisations: customers and suppliers. Everybody functions simultaneously in both roles, whether inside or outside the organisation the essence of good business, therefore, is the quality of the relationship between customer and supplier.
Independent thinking alone is not suited to interdependent reality.
I'm convinced that we can write and live our own scripts more than most people will acknowledge. I also know the price that must be paid. It's a real struggle to do it. It requires visualization and affirmation. It involves living a life of integrity, starting with making and keeping promises, until the whole human personality the senses, the thinking, the feeling, and the intuition are ultimately integrated and harmonized.
Real excellence does not come cheaply. A certain price must be paid in terms of practice, patience, and persistence - natural ability notwithstanding.
When people have a real sense of legacy, a sense of mattering, a sense of contribution, it seems to tap into the deepest part of their heart and soul. It brings out the best and subordinates the rest.
When a person has access to both the intuitive, creative and visual right brain, and the analytical, logical, verbal left brain, then the whole brain is working...And this tool is best suited to the reality of what life is, because life is not just logical-it is also emotional.
The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.
There are principles that govern human effectiveness - natural laws in the human dimension that are just as real, just as unchanging and unarguably there as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension.
We're often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we don't even realise we're in the wrong jungle.