Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey (8 page)

That experience was not a planned P experience; it was the serendipitous fruit of a PC investment.

It was bonding and very satisfying. But we enjoyed golden eggs, too, as the goose -- the quality of the relationship -- was significantly fed.

One of the immensely valuable aspects of any correct principle is that it is valid and applicable in a wide variety of circumstances. Throughout this book, I would like to share with you some of the ways in which these principles apply to organizations, including families, as well as to individuals.

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When people fail to respect the P/PC Balance in their use of physical assets in organizations, they decrease organizational effectiveness and often leave others with dying geese.

For example, a person in charge of a physical asset, such as a machine, may be eager to make a good impression on his superiors. Perhaps the company is in a rapid growth stage and promotions are coming fast. So he produces at optimum levels -- no downtime, no maintenance. He runs the machine day and night. The production is phenomenal, costs are down, and profits skyrocket.

Within a short time, he's promoted. Golden eggs.

But suppose you are his successor on the job. You inherit a very sick goose, a machine that, by this time, is rusted and starts to break down. You have to invest heavily in downtime and maintenance.

Costs skyrocket; profits nose-dive. And who gets blamed for the loss of golden eggs? You do. Your predecessor liquidated the asset, but the accounting system only reported unit production, costs, and profit.

The P/PC Balance is particularly important as it applies to the human assets of an organization -- the customers and the employees.

I know of a restaurant that served a fantastic clam chowder and was packed with customers every day at lunchtime. Then the business was sold, and the new owner focused on golden eggs -- he decided to water down the chowder. For about a month, with costs down and revenues constant, profits zoomed. But little by little, the customers began to disappear. Trust was gone, and business dwindled to almost nothing. The new owner tried desperately to reclaim it, but he had neglected the customers, violated their trust, and lost the asset of customer loyalty. There was no more goose to produce the golden egg.

There are organizations that talk a lot about the customer and then completely neglect the people that deal with the customer -- the employees. The PC principle is to always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.

You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain. That's where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his resourcefulness.

PC work is treating employees as volunteers just as you treat customers as volunteers, because that's what they are. They volunteer the best part -- their hearts and minds.

I was in a group once where someone asked, "How do you shape up lazy and incompetent employees?" One man responded, "Drop hand grenades!" Several others cheered that kind of macho management talk, that "shape up or ship out" supervision approach.

But another person in the group asked, "Who picks up the pieces?"

"No pieces."

"Well, why don't you do that to your customers?" the other man replied. "Just say, 'Listen, if you're not interested in buying, you can just ship out of this place.'"

He said, "You can't do that to customers."

"Well, how come you can do it to employees?"

"Because they're in your employ."

"I see. Are your employees devoted to you? Do they work hard? How's the turnover?"

"Are you kidding? You can't find good people these days. There's too much turnover, absenteeism, moonlighting. People just don't care anymore."

That focus on golden eggs -- that attitude, that paradigm -- is totally inadequate to tap into the powerful energies of the mind and heart of another person. A short-term bottom line is important, but it isn't all-important.

Effectiveness lies in the balance. Excessive focus on P results in ruined health, worn-out machines, depleted bank accounts, and broken relationships. Too much focus on PC is like a person who runs for three or four hours a day, bragging about the extra 10 years of life it creates, unaware he's spending
THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart
them running. Or a person endlessly going to school, never producing, living on other people's golden eggs -- the eternal student syndrome.

To maintain the P/PC Balance, the balance between the golden egg (Production) and the health and welfare of the goose (Production Capability) is often a difficult judgment call. But I suggest it is the very essence of effectiveness. It balances short term with long term. It balances going for the grade and paying the price to get an education. It balances the desire to have a room clean and the building of a relationship in which the child is internally committed to do it -- cheerfully, willingly, without external supervision.

It's a principle you can see validated in your own life when you burn the candle at both ends to get more golden eggs and wind up sick or exhausted, unable to produce any at all; or when you get a good night's sleep and wake up ready to produce throughout the day.

You can see it when you press to get your own way with someone and somehow feel an emptiness in the relationship; or when you really take time to invest in a relationship and you find the desire and ability to work together, to communicate, takes a quantum leap.

The P/PC Balance is the very essence of effectiveness. It's validated in every arena of life. We can work with it or against it, but it's there. It's a lighthouse. It's the definition and paradigm of effectiveness upon which the Seven Habits in this book are based.

Before we begin work on the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I would like to suggest two Paradigm Shifts that will greatly increase the value you will receive from this material.

First, I would recommend that you not "see" this material as a book, in the sense that it is something to read once and put on a shelf.

You may choose to read it completely through once for a sense of the whole. But the material is designed to be a companion in the continual process of change and growth. It is organized incrementally and with suggestions for application at the end of each habit so that you can study and focus on any particular habit as you are ready.

As you progress to deeper levels of understanding and implementation, you can go back time and again to the principles contained in each habit and work to expand your knowledge, skill, and desire.

Second, I would suggest that you shift your paradigm of your own involvement in this material from the role of learner to that of teacher. Take an Inside-Out approach, and read with the purpose in mind of sharing or discussing what you learn with someone else within 48 hours after you learn it.

If you had known, for example, that you would be teaching the material on the P/PC Balance principle to someone else within 48 hours, would it have made a difference in your reading experience?

Try it now as you read the final section in this chapter. Read as though you are going to teach it to your spouse, your child, a business associate, or a friend today or tomorrow, while it is still fresh, and notice the difference in your mental and emotional process.

I guarantee that if you approach the material in each of the following chapters in this way, you will not only better remember what you read, but your perspective will be expanded, your understanding deepened, and your motivation to apply the material increased.

In addition, as you openly, honestly share what you're learning with others, you may be surprised to find that negative labels or perceptions others may have of you tend to disappear. Those you teach will see you as a changing, growing person, and will be more inclined to be helpful and supportive as you work, perhaps together, to integrate the Seven Habits into your lives.

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In the last analysis, as Marilyn Ferguson observed, "No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or by emotional appeal.

If you decide to open your "gate of change" to really understand and live the principles embodied in the Seven Habits, I feel comfortable in assuring you several positive things will happen.

First, your growth with be evolutionary, but the net effect will be revolutionary. Would you not agree that the P/PC Balance principle alone, if fully lived, would transform most individuals and organizations?

The net effect of opening the "gate of change" to the first three habits -- the habits of Private Victory

-- will be significantly increased self-confidence. You will come to know yourself in a deeper, more meaningful way -- your nature, your deepest values and your unique contribution capacity. As you live your values, your sense of identity, integrity, control, and inner-directedness will infuse you with both exhilaration and peace. You will define yourself from within, rather than by people's opinions or by comparisons to others. "Wrong" and "right" will have little to do with being found out.

Ironically, you'll find that as you care less about what others think of you; you will care more about what others think of themselves and their worlds, including their relationship with you. You'll no longer build your emotional life on other people's weaknesses. In addition, you'll find it easier and more desirable to change because there is something -- some core deep within -- that is essentially changeless.

As you open yourself to the next three habits -- the habits of Public Victory -- you will discover and unleash both the desire and the resources to heal and rebuild important relationships that have deteriorated, or even broken. Good relationships will improve -- become deeper, more solid, more creative, and more adventuresome.

The seventh habit, if deeply internalized, will renew the first six and will make you truly independent and capable of effective interdependence. Through it, you can charge your own batteries.

Whatever your present situation, I assure you that you are not your habits. You can replace old patterns of self-defeating behavior with new patterns, new habits of effectiveness, happiness, and trust-based relationships.

With genuine caring, I encourage you to open the gate of change and growth as you study these habits. Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it's holy ground. There's no greater investment.

It's obviously not a quick fix. But I assure you, you will feel benefits and see immediate payoffs that will be encouraging. In the words of Thomas Paine, "That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only which gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price on its goods."

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Part Two

Habit 1: Be Proactive
--
Principles of Personal Visio
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

-- Henry David Thorea

As you read this book, try to stand apart from yourself. Try to project your consciousness upward into a corner of the room and see yourself, in your mind's eye, reading. Can you look at yourself almost as though you were someone else?

Now try something else. Think about the mood you are now in. Can you identify it? What are you feeling? How would you describe your present mental state Now think for a minute about how your mind is working. Is it quick and alert? Do you sense that you are torn between doing this mental exercise and evaluating the point to be made out of it?

Your ability to do what you just did is uniquely human. Animals do not possess this ability. We call it "self-awareness" or the ability to think about your very thought process. This is the reason why man has dominion over all things in the world and why he can make significant advances from generation to generation.

This is why we can evaluate and learn from others' experiences as well as our own. This is also why we can make and break our habits.

We are not our feelings. We are not our moods. We are not even our thoughts. The very fact that we can think about these things separates us from them and from the animal world.

Self-awareness enables us to stand apart and examine even the way we "see" ourselves -- our paradigm, the most fundamental paradigm of effectiveness. It affects not only our attitudes and behaviors, but also how we see other people. It becomes our map of the basic nature of mankind.

In fact, until we take how we see ourselves (and how we see others) into account, we will be unable to understand how others see and feel about themselves and their world. Unaware, we will be unable to understand how others see and feel about themselves and their world. Unaware, we will project our intentions on their behavior and call ourselves objective.

This significantly limits our personal potential and our ability to relate to others as well. But because of the unique human capacity of self-awareness, we can examine our paradigms to determine whether they are reality- or principle-based or if they are a function of conditioning and conditions.