7 Habits of Highly effective People by Stephen R. Covey

Ironically I do believe that they work, I would just rather Covey showed me rather than told me. The examples do not illustrate the application of Coveys values (I insist they are values, not habits), but rather are dogmatic insistence that they work. Then X thought 'win-win', or 'understood' Y's position first, and they reached an agreement! There's no elaboration into what these win-win positions entailed, what made them viable and desirable to both parts, how X had initially failed to understand the position of Y, or how and why this understanding influenced Y.

This pattern is played out again and again: business or person X was in a tough negotiation or disagreement with business or person Y. Then my 'habits' were applied, with no details. When the examples are purportedly based on real-life, they become so vague as to hand-waving that could be reduced to «This was a bad situation. When they are fictitious they are are caricaturesque, such as a father trying to first understand his son's disappointment with school rather than berating him, or a family conflict in which a holiday the dad planned for ages clashes with the mum's wish to visit her ailing mother.

There are very few examples of application. Still, it means that in the best case scenario this book has either not aged well in 25 years or is aimed specifically at people living a highly toxic idea of what it means to be successful. Maybe that was the case in the early 1990s, or in American business culture. I can only imagine that a society in which «Put first things first» ('habit' 3), «Think win-win» ('habit' 4) and «Seek first to understand, then to be understood» ('habit' 5) are considered ground-breaking ideas is a deeply damaged one. I do believe that Covey's advice is good, but I find it hard to imagine how it is deserving of such praise. If the book's title was 'Seven values for becoming well-balanced' that would have gained the book one full star in my opinion, up to three. What Covey lists can hardly be called 'habits' in any behavioural sense of the word. He came up with an arbitrary set of reasonable values which he believes constitute a decent and well-balanced person, and artificially coerces them into a coherent ideology. Did Covey first define what a highly effective person is, gather a large set of people who fit the definition, and search for what habits they had in common? No. As others have noted, it implies there was underlying research carried out by Covey. It's rare that I feel negatively towards a well regarded book, but it wouldn't be fair if I kept my opinion on 'The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People' to myself.

I also have no idea why I am in the minority in this opinion. I have no idea how this book became a classic bestseller. Common-sense wrapped in arcane ideas and language

7 Habits of Highly effective People by Stephen R. Covey