This was a groundbreaker when it was first published in 1989, and it continues to be a business bestseller with more than 10 million copies sold. Stephen Covey, an internationally respected leadership authority, realizes that true success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness, so this book is a manual for performing better in both arenas. His anecdotes are as frequently from family situations as from business challenges.
This means taking responsibility for your attitudes and actions. Proactive people develop the ability to choose their response, making them more a product of their values and decisions rather than their moods and conditions.
Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
This means living your life with a clear understanding of your desired direction and destination.
Habit 3: Put First Things First
This means organizing and managing your time and tasks around the goals you have identified in habit 2.
Habit 4: Think Win-Win
This means collaborating with people to produce outcomes in which everyone benefits - not just yourself.
Stephen Covey
Habit 5: Seek First to Understand Then to be Understood
This means really listening to and understanding another person's point of view before communicating your own.
Habit 6: Synergize
Synergy is where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It results from valuing differences by bringing different perspectives together in the spirit of mutual respect. People then feel free to seek the best possible alternative, often the "third alternative," one that is substantially different and better than either of the original proposals.
Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw
This is the habit of self-renewal.
This book has had a tremendous influence on me and I like to summarize the habits as follows's comments:
Take responsibility for your life.
Figure out what you want to do with your life.
Do it! No excuses!
Don't walk over other people or let them walk over you!!
Communicate openly.
Don't go it alone. Collaborate.
Continually develop your abilites. Learn!
What are Social Tools? - Euan Semple
Mini-clip interview for Gurteen Knowledge with Euan Semple. What are Social Tools? Shot at the Unicom Seminars Conference on Social Networking Tools In London, September 2006.
Quotations from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People:
Many people have not really experienced even a moderate degree of synergy in their family life or in other interactions.
They've been trained and scripted into defensive and protective communications or into believing that life and other people can't be trusted.
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.
They experience synergy only in small, peripheral ways in their lives.
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 precedes 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.
If you are interested in Knowledge Management, the
Knowledge Café
or the role of conversation in organizational life then you my be interested in this online book I am writing on
Conversational Leadership
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