Therapist to the New Economy

Profiles of various businesspeople who have embraced the teaching of Stephen Covey, and why.

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No guru's lessons are more popular among company builders than Stephen Covey's. What hunger does he feed? And what happens to companies whose leaders put Coveyism at the center of the workplace?

Stephen Covey is fit, drum-chested, 62 years old, and bald. He has fleshy lips, a strong nose, no eyebrows, very clean fingernails, and a powdery smoker's voice. Only he doesn't smoke or drink, not even coffee (he's a Mormon); he just talks for a living. His audience is vast, influential, and varied. It includes executives of big corporations (half the companies on the Fortune 500 have taught Covey's Seven Habits to their employees); successful entrepreneurs (last year's Inc. 500 CEOs chose Covey as their favorite business-book author); and President Clinton, who recommended Covey to every working person in America in a speech a couple of years ago and afterward invited him to a sleep-over at Camp David.

"I do not want to be a guru," Covey insists. Meanwhile, his most famous book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, has sold nearly 10 million copies worldwide and has been a fixture on best-seller lists since it appeared, in 1989. It's available in 27 languages, in 75 countries. ("The book is going gangbusters in Korea, India, Asia," Covey croons.) There are tapes, videos, a Seven Habits Organizer, frequent personal appearances (his fee is $45,000), and a full lineup of seminars, from one-day crash courses at a Marriott near you to weeklong retreats in the mountains outside Provo, Utah. Covey Leadership Center, the corporate underpinning of the Covey phenomenon, made the Inc. 500 list in 1994. Its sales last year topped $70 million, with net earnings approaching $7 million. ("No margin, no mission" is the Covey aphorism that applies.) This year sales are projected to hit $100 million, and next year a new book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families, will probably push sales even higher.

Astounding numbers, but what's behind them? What's going on here? How does one account for Covey's sustained fame, his reach, his effectiveness?

One could start by asking the man himself. "It's not Stephen Covey," he insisted one day last spring during a break in an all-day appearance at Caesar's Palace, in Las Vegas, "at all. It's the principles." Well, sure, but Dale Carnegie, in How to Win Friends and Influence People, referred to principles, too, and for the same reason Covey does. A principle is genuine, true, forever; it's the opposite of a fad, which, if you're Covey or Carnegie -- or Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Ken Blanchard, Tony Robbins, Tom Peters, Peter Drucker, Peter Senge, or anyone else in the crowded business-self-help field -- is definitely not what you're about, you hope.

Is it the power of his prose? Hardly. While millions admire Covey, scarcely anyone enjoys reading his books. Some blame themselves ("I've had only a year of college"), but it's not their fault. The Seven Habits is a punishing read: the charts, the arrows, the mind-numbing calls to "Be Proactive!" "Think Win/Win!" and "Synergize!" It can't possibly be his personality. He's a celebrity now, which induces a glow (set off nicely by the excellent suits he wears). But really, Covey has as much native charisma as the proverbial dentist. Even one of his biggest fans, John McCormack, CEO of Visible Changes, a $30-million chain of hair salons based in Houston, concedes that Covey live can be "boring and bad."

Covey's influence might be easier to parse if there were anything like a recognizable Covey school of management, but there is not. Widely different organizations -- Shell Oil, Yarnell's Ice Cream, the United Auto Workers, the U.S. Postal Service, the entire city of Columbus, Ind. -- have embraced Covey for reasons as different as those organizations are to begin with; and after the embrace, they're still different. Covey is not the father -- in the way W. Edwards Deming is, for example -- of a management system. He is not a subject taught at Harvard Business School. Covey is more likely to show up on "Oprah" than in the Wall Street Journal. What happens between Covey and his readers, it seems, is personal and therefore subjective. "Covey's not a productivity tool so much as he's an awakening tool" is how McCormack describes his appeal.

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