To summarise, here are the 7 Habits:
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 be understood
6. Synergize
7. Sharpen the saw
Seems simple enough, but my dad really wanted me to read the teen version of this book when I was like 12, and even though I got through the first couple of chapters I never really did pick it up again until 2021. So there’s a good 20 year difference there. The book is still widely read as management textbook that they pass on in universities. The runaway success of the book makes the 7 habits its own industry with Covey opening up offices all over the world and consulting Fortune 500 companies.
The sell is that the 7 habits is not something to achieve and be done with, but a constant work in progress. There are times when we can be super proactive, but there are times when we may struggle. In terms of my takeaway from the book, there are a few passages here which I find useful, but I do feel like any self-help business books, it is padded beyond the recognition of its central messages and has more fat than meat. There are two things which strike me while reading the text.
The first is in habit 4 — Think win / win. What happens when there is just no chance that you’re gonna get a win/win? Then no deal is a better alternative. What’s the point of beating a dead horse? I think it’s another way of saying that you should avoid the mentality of the sunken cost fallacy, that just because you’re too invested in something over a long period of time, that there are no exit options. There are always exit options, and there should be from the beginning.
The other is in putting things first. We’ve always been guilty of not spending enough time on what matters and waste too much time on trivial things. If we divide our actions into quadrants on urgent vs non urgent tasks, and high value vs low value tasks, then we find that we spend a lot of time on urgent tasks, but not enough on important non-urgent tasks. These are the tasks that in the long run will reduce the firefighting in the long run. I know this because my team spend a lot of our working lives bug-fixing and fire-fighting.
There are other things that I agree with Covey (but guilty of not doing in my personal life), such as focusing on principles. The principles that he has laid in the book are synthesised from success and business literature over many many years. He doesn’t claim them as his own, but summarised them into the 7 habits. Perhaps much of the frameworks and method that he suggests are a little obsolete. For example, scrum teams in theory have ways of keeping the long-term and short-term goals by working in manageable sprints. The manager’s time now are more dynamic than the rigid schedules that he proposes.
Get out of it what you may. I got a couple of things here and there out of it, like any business books. You’d have to get through 350 pages of crap to get through the handful of pages that you might find useful. Is there a place of it in the current business (or personal) landscape? That’s not for me to say. If it had helped people like my dad to better himself, then who am I to say that there is no value?
