Profiles of various businesspeople who have embraced the teaching of Stephen Covey, and why.
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.
A sympathetic reading of Covey suggests right away that the Seven Habits he preaches are much more than time-management tips; also that they're not bad habits. (Everyone should have such habits.) Covey confirms what people already know. He insists, comfortingly, that nobody has to choose between being happy at home and being successful at work, that effective people can be both. He inspires, asserting that you -- not your boss, your competitors, or the global economy -- control your destiny. Covey creates a vision of order in a period of economic chaos. He is therapist to the conscripts of the new economy. He is also a spiritualist on the eve of the millennium, carrying a New Age, profamily message that resonates with forty-somethings and strikes a chord in Gingrich's America.
But those aren't reasons for Covey's popularity; they're clues. They don't explain the spell Covey is casting over people in business any more than the GOP platform explained Ronald Reagan's hold on the American electorate. In both cases, understanding what's behind the phenomenon requires one to actually look behind it -- at the followers, not the leader.
What's fascinating about the Covey phenomenon isn't Covey; it's his audience. Not the dish but the appetite. What are company builders and business executives looking for when they turn to someone like Covey? What are they seeking when they enlist whole organizations in their quests? And why do their employees so willingly sign on? What, in other words, is the hunger Covey feeds?
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Everybody at Searcy Industrial Laundry who isn't a salesperson wears a uniform. That includes the owner, Joe Giezeman, who sports one of the company's popular executive sets: navy blue slacks and a sky blue short-sleeved shirt, with "Searcy Industrial Laundry" on one breast and "Joe" on the other. Giezeman likes being in uniform because it's easy and neat and helps drive home the point that at his company, the owner and the employees are a team.
