Maybe a bit of both. At this point I can admire Stephen Covey to have been one of the first business influencer’s with a whole kingdom of workshops and other business books behind him. Would I read them all? Fuck nope, but I felt obliged on reading this one after finding it lying around in a book swap nook and having already read the 7 Habits. If this motherfucker writes the 9th Habit, it’s likely that I won’t touch it with a 40 foot pole.
So what is the 8th Habit? Do you even remember the first seven? After not having read the 7 Habits for about a year, I actually still remember three of them, but don’t ask me whether I’ve implemented them in my life. After all, I’m an obsessive reader, not a life coach. The ones I remember: Be proactive, think win-win and begin with the end in mind. Surprisingly, I totally forgot about First seek to understand, then be understood, but perhaps this is because I lack empathy and thus a bit of a douche.
This is the 8th Habit:
Find your voice and inspire others to find their voice
To be fair, it’s more like two more habits because you need to find your voice first and then getting other people to get off their asses too. But that’s okay, you can get off your ass no issues because you already covered this in the first habit: Be Proactive. Or are you still stuck on that? You’re not the only one. The 7 Habits is not an easy way to live.
In this respect, the 8th Habit also mirrors the 7 Habits: first focus on yourself, then focus on others. The whole anchor of this is the spirit, mind, body and heart. Thus, we are also accountable in our conscience, vision, discipline and passion, which we can use to mold the world around us and to shape different realities. However, the anchors also extend to helping others find their voice: the spirit in modelling, the mind in pathfinding, the body in aligning and the heart in empowering.
In fact, this whole concept of the spirit, body, mind and heart is quite central to the Covey’s doctrine of achieving balance in order to move your agenda forward. And in some ways, there is a logical and cohesion in this theory to the central message of empowering the voice. Covey addressed in how we improve these four anchors, we can also influence our colleagues and the organisation, even perhaps on a macro-level if you’re thinking big enough.
Do I buy the ideas? Well, the fact that my mind is a bit allergic to business books lingo and its soppy messaging don’t really help at all. However, I would argue that Covey writes marginally better and less pretentious than most business writers, even though at times, his narrative and examples also follow the predictable pattern of problem problem problem, conflict conflict conflict, compromise compromise and suddenly, FUCKING BANG! Everybody is magically happy and the company makes ridiculous amounts of profits. It reads like a Grimm’s fairy tale happy ending in a business context, and I’m skeptical of happy endings which makes fairy tale endings somewhat more believable.
Being a management theory book, he also quotes and compares from other business writers, such as Jim Collins (who I don’t bloody like) and even included categories of management theories in the appendix, albeit in a table with font much too small for my almost forty year old eyes to squint over. But this is quite useful, and the fact that Covey admitted that some of his ideas are quite comparable to other theories, just packaged in a different way is a mark of humility in my books.
Covey also borrows heavily from other literary figures and management gurus, peppering the book with quotes from all sorts of sources, which at times can just get a little bit too much. The main flaw of the 8th Habit for me is that it doesn’t feel any different than reading the 7 Habits, as it is re-emulated heavily in this book. For this reason, yes, I do feel like the book is a cash cow and does not really add too much to management theory. Hordes of business leaders disagree with me, with all the testimonials at the start of the book, but these guys tend to suck each other’s dicks.
And in the end, I stand by my statement when I say that all business books teach you the same sorts of shit. There may be some differences here, but it all comes down to the issue of semantics and paradigm. Us, as readers and professionals, need to pick and choose the theories that makes sense to us and our values and just go with it. If it helps, it helps.
If the 7 Habits work for you and you turn out to be a better person, great. If the 8th Habit also help you on the way you perceive the world around you and your organisation, also great, whatever floats your boat. For mine, I couldn’t find a single idea that would change the way I do things or which would add much to my life, but that’s just me.
