Stephen Covey (1932–2012) was an American self-improvement author. His chart-topping The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People has sold more than 12 million copies since its 1989 publication and helped spawn a business empire based on the “Seven Habits” premise.
Born into a Mormon family in Provo, Utah, Covey got a bachelor’s degree in business administration at the University of Utah and an MBA at Cambridge. He also served as a Mormon missionary in Nottingham, England. Covey later taught at Brigham Young University, earned a PhD in business and education in 1976, and left academics to start the Covey Leadership Center in 1983.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) became immensely popular, appearing on the New York Times best-seller list for more than five years. The Covey Leadership Center—a spin-off management-training center that focused on the book’s tenets—merged with Franklin Quest in 1997 to form the day-planner publisher Franklin Covey.
Covey wrote a number of other books on related themes, including Principle-Centered Leadership (1991,) First Things First (1994,) The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families (1997,) The Eighth Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (2004,) and The 3rd Alternative: Solving Life’s Most Difficult Problems (2011.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Stephen Covey
Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Management, Success, Leadership
Empathy takes time, and efficiency is for things, not people.
—Stephen Covey
I believe that a life of integrity I the most fundamental source of personal worth. I do not agree with the popular success literature that says that self-esteem is primarily a matter of mind set, of attitude—that you can psych yourself into peace of mind. Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Life, Mind, Attitude, Peace, Integrity, Persona, Principles, Believe, Values, Success
The personal power that comes from principle-centered living is the power of a self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive individual, unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviors, and actions of others or by many of the circumstances and environmental influences that limit other people.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Power, Persona, War, Act, People, Knowledge, Action, Attitude, Rest
Independent will is our capacity to act. It gives us the power to transcend our paradigms, to swim upstream, to rewrite our scripts, to act based on principle rather than reacting based on emotion or circumstance.
—Stephen Covey
People can’t live with change if there’s not a changeless core inside them. The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Change
A long, healthy, and happy life is the result of making contributions, of having meaningful projects that are personally exciting and contribute to and bless the lives of others.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Life, Live, Happy, Persona, Habit, Health
Don’t argue for other people’s weaknesses. Don’t argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it—immediately.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Mistakes
To ignore the unexpected (even if it were possible) would be to live without opportunity, spontaneity, and the rich moments of which “life” is made.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Life, Opportunity, Rich, Live
Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.
—Stephen Covey
Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Entrepreneurs
To focus on technique is like cramming your way through school. You sometimes get by, perhaps even get good grades, but if you don’t pay the price day in and day out, you’ll never achieve true mastery of the subjects you study or develop an educated mind.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Talent
Priority is a function of context.
—Stephen Covey
Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Learning, Thoughts, Experience, Habit, Act, Power, Learn
Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Challenges
Someone once inquired of a Far Eastern Zen master, who had a great serenity and peace about him no matter what pressures he faced, “How do you maintain that serenity and peace?” He replied, “I never leave my place of meditation”. He meditated early in the morning and for the rest of the day, he carried the peace of those moments with him in his mind and heart.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Meditation, Rest, Habit, Great, Peace, Heart, Master, Mind, Zen
Wisdom is your perspective on life, your sense of balance, your understanding of how the various parts and principles apply and relate to each other. It embraces judgment, discernment, comprehension. It is a gestalt or oneness, and integrated wholeness.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Wisdom
The “Inside-Out” approach to personal and interpersonal effectiveness means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self—with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves recedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Relationships
Begin with the end in mind is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There’s a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation to all things.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Mind, Create
Management works in the system; Leadership works on the system.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Time Management, Time
Seek first to understand and then to be understood.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Understanding
We may be very busy, we may be very efficient, but we will also be truly effective only when we begin with the end in mind.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Create, Goals, Mind, Beginning, Busy
You can’t live principals you can’t understand.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Principles
This represents one of the great tragedies and wastes in life, because so much potential remains untapped — completely undeveloped and unused. Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential.
—Stephen Covey
When you listen with empathy to another person, you give that person psychological air.
—Stephen Covey
Accountability breeds response-ability.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: One liners, Responsibility
When you have a challenge and the response is equal to the challenge, that’s called “success”. But once you have a new challenge, the old, once-successful response no longer works. That’s why it is called a “failure
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Challenges
In addition to self-awareness, imagination and conscience, it is the fourth human endowment-independent will-that really makes effective self-management possible. It is the ability to make decisions and choices and to act in accordance with them. It is the ability to act rather than to be acted upon, to proactively carry out the program we have developed through the other three endowments. Empowerment comes from learning how to use this great endowment in the decisions we make every day.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Decisions
In effective personal leadership, visualization and affirmation techniques emerge naturally out of a foundation of well thought through purposes and principles that become the center of a person’s life.
—Stephen Covey
Topics: Purpose, Persona, Principles, Leadership, Life
Personal leadership is the process of keeping your vision and values before you and aligning your life to be congruent with them.
—Stephen Covey
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Tom Peters American Management Consultant
Orson Scott Card American Author
Peter Senge American Management Consultant
Robin Sharma Canadian Writer, Motivational Speaker
Margaret J. Wheatley American Management Consultant
Peter Drucker Austrian-born Management Consultant
Thomas S. Monson American Mormon Religious Leader
Gordon B. Hinckley American Mormon Religious Leader
Sheryl Sandberg American Executive, Author
Marvin J. Ashton American Mormon Religious Leader