The latter group meets Friday mornings at 9:30 in the conference room, adjacent to the plant floor. Outside, where it's noisy, the line keeps moving, tended by the company's 60-odd production workers, most of whom haven't yet had their Covey training. Inside, where it's quiet, a dozen managers, supervisors, salespeople, and office assistants sit around a large table. All eyes are on Thomas Hodges, who is in charge of maintenance and quality control at Searcy Industrial Laundry. He places a 30-minute hourglass on the conference table, turns it over, and picks up a pair of dice. The assignment for this week's meeting was to read pages 162 through 170 in The Seven Habits and come to the meeting prepared to lead the discussion. Hodges rolls the dice to determine which of the people around the table will actually lead: five. Bowman, in the fifth chair to Hodges's left, beams. "If I talk too fast, y'all slow me down!"
It has been less than a year since Bowman was first exposed to Covey, and less than six months since she completed the course. In that time she has embarked on a far-reaching personal makeover, with astonishing results. The promotions aren't even the half of it. Because of Covey, Bowman has said, she got back together with her estranged husband, bought a house, began planning a family, quit smoking, enrolled in night school (she got an A in her first class), and committed herself to losing one pound a week.
Bowman kicks off the discussion by asking everyone in the group to name an important role in his or her life and choose a goal to meet within that role -- something that can be accomplished in the next seven days. Donna Reynolds, in her role as a mother, says she'll try to scale back her teenager's phone time. Dean McGlothin, as a father, wants to help his daughter get organized before she enlists in the navy next week. Ron Bubb hopes to finalize plans for a vacation with his wife. Bowman wants to shed another pound.
The more they talk, the stranger (and more personal) it gets. They're all wearing their company uniforms, sitting in company chairs, meeting on company time, and yet the last thing on anybody's mind, apparently, is his or her role as an employee of Searcy Industrial Laundry. That kind of response to Covey is neither atypical nor unintended. The man himself says he uses "about one-third family illustrations, two-thirds organizational/business" ones in his books and speeches because the family stuff gets "to their deepest part, where they're hurting the most." ("Go where the pain is," he says.) The chapter in The Seven Habits on mission statements begins with an unoriginal but affecting exercise in which the reader is asked to imagine being at a funeral, approaching the casket, peering inside, and coming "face-to-face with yourself." "Look carefully at the people around you," Covey writes. "What difference would you like to have made in their lives?"
The leap of faith, from management's point of view, is that all that soul-searching eventually makes employees more productive. Maybe it does. Gail Joye, senior vice-president at Community Group, a bank-holding company in Chattanooga , knows that Covey seminars can resemble therapy sessions, and that's OK. "It helps people in their personal lives, which makes them happier, better employees," she says. Doug Sanders, senior vice-president for sales and marketing at Yarnell's Ice Cream, up the street from Searcy Industrial Laundry, goes further. It gives them "more kinship with each other and more understanding," he says. "It encourages them not to be as judgmental, not to jump to conclusions, not to assume everybody's out to get them. We feel it gives us a competitive advantage in communication."
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Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard Business School who is writing a book about the nature of work in the 21st century, dismisses Covey's Seven Habits as "homiletic" and "the level of depth of the samplers that my grandma would knit." At the same time, Zuboff wishes to "honor the real need in people" that draws them to Covey. "I think people sense the future will be different from the past in unpredictable ways," she says. "They sense that the things they have relied upon -- the anchors, the benchmarks, the external goals, the institutional structures -- are not reliable in ways they once believed they were." No wonder, then, that they should be "looking for someone who can help them feel stronger, more courageous in the face of things, and have some internal markers that are more enduring."
Zuboff is among those who have noted how Covey appeals to, among others, the pool of disaffected workers Patrick Buchanan tried to reach during his presidential campaign, but in a different way. Whereas Buchanan said, "I can forestall all this change, I can make it go away," Covey groups corporate downsizing, declining wages, and America's fading primacy in the global economy within most people's "circle of concern" -- things they can worry about but can't change. He would counsel workers to focus instead (Habit One: Be proactive) on their "circle of influence," things over which they have some control. If Covey's teaching "doesn't make the change go away," says Zuboff, "at least it can make your own fear and sense of vulnerability go away."
Or that's the promise, anyway. What if it's just a tease? "In times of social change, you see medicine men proliferate," says Zuboff. "My biggest hope is that Covey doesn't do people any harm by creating expectations that can't be met." Actually, "medicine man" is among the kinder labels pinned on Covey, particularly by members of the academic community. He's been called a charlatan, a snake-oil salesman, a charismatic demigod, a megalomaniac, a false messiah, even, almost, a Nazi, as in, "Absolutely do not quote me as saying he's a Nazi, but . . . " Many have noted the overlap between companies that aggressively promote Covey and companies that are aggressively downsizing. (Imagine getting a pink slip from AT&T clipped to this message from Covey: "Anytime we think the problem is 'out there,' that thought is the problem.")
