The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness: Miniature Edition
The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness: Miniature Edition
From Stephen R. Covey, the author of the 15 million copy bestseller 7 Habits of Highly Effective People–named one of the 25 most influential Americans by Time magazine–comes The 8th Habit, a book that holds powerful insights that challenge us to find our voice and inspire others to find theirs.
This mini edition is culled from the original The 8th Habit, which has already sold nearly 200,000 copies since its November 2004 release. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People guided individuals to effectively improve their lives and organizations. The 8th Habit takes it a step further, and inspires us to thrive, innovate, and lead in order to move beyond effectiveness and into greatness.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars It’s A Classic For A Reason
This book was gifted to me at Christmas by an employer years ago when it was “The Seven Habits”. Covey is a classic. This book will change your life. I promise you. Is you follow it - the positive changes will begin immediately. You will begin to get way more done douring the course of your day and still have more time for family…etc…
There is a reason this book has been selling so well for so long. Don’t be the only person at work that has not read it.
5 Stars Takes the 7 Habits to the Organizational Level
The book is a good companion to the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The 7 Habits looks into becoming an effective person, while the 8th Habit explores becoming an effective leader. What the 7 Habits is to personal organization and excellence, the 8th Habit is to leadership and organizational excellence. It is the same principles applied to your company or organization.
Like the 7 Habit, the 8th Habit builds from the inside out. Covey looks at how you must first master your own leadership or “find your voice” and build outward to your organization (”help others find their voice”). The book itself is build around the concept of “the whole person” and I think he makes a convincing case for why this is a good way to approach people and lead your organization. His focus on conscience and the need to serve a higher cause is inspiring and, I think, well stated.
My only complaint about this book is that you will recognize many of the examples from the 7 Habits and this can feel a bit repetitive at times. The book includes a companion DVD, but I did not watch it due to the fact that this was a friend’s book.
3 Stars Good read - if you haven’t already read “7 Habits”
Sometimes follow up efforts by authors are better than their first book and sometimes they’re worse; author Stephan Covey’s book titled - “The 8th Habit” - falls somewhere in between those two extremes. His seminal work “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” was a truly revolutionary work that significantly advanced the school of thought around personal development. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to duplicate that success and 8th Habit falls short. The book centers on the premise that today’s “Knowledge Worker” (not sure why the author gravitates toward such Orwellian descriptors) needs to find their own voice while helping others find theirs as well. Soundview likes that concept but wishes there was a stronger quantitative link to its claim that this 8th Habit is the catalyst for anyone or any organization seeking to jump from being effective to great. Additionally, there is a lot of discussion of the previous 7 habits to set the appropriate context of the 8th habit - which makes it a decent read if this is the first time you’ve been exposed to Covey’s concepts, but a bit slow for those of us who read it the first time.
3 Stars Still inspirational, slightly disappointing and somewhat too long
8th Habit is another book in the Stephen Covey 7 Habits series. It extends the 7 habits with the 8th one which is called “Finding your voice and helping others to find theirs”. Its an important habit, though I didn’t think the book was a very good read.
The book is split in three parts. The first part is an introduction part which is some chapters about how many people are currently lost in their job and their lives. It continues to talk about the change from the industrial age to the knowledge worker age and how everyone needs to be deeply involved in their work. I thought the first couple of chapters were great and looked forward to the rest of the book.
The next part is “finding your voice” which isn’t very large and largely repeats Coveys earlier work. If you have read the previous books in this series, like me, then you’ll probably gradually fall asleep! It is not that the things he talks about are unimportant or that he doesn’t use the Covey inspirational way of writing, its just that it takes too long and has too much repetition.
The third part, by far the largest part of the book, talks about helping others to find it. Covey uses four “roles” to structure his work. They are “modeling”, “pathfinding”, “aligning” and “empowering”. Modeling and pathfinding are part of what he calls “focus”. Modeling refers to being a model for others. Pathfinding relates to creating a common vision for which people are passionate.
The third and fourth role are what he calls “execution”. The first one is aligning which relates to aligning the system and goals. The last is empowering, which I guess is clear what it means. Most of the things Covey discusses are quite standard in leadership and organizational literature. I don’t think, in this case, he contributed very much, instead he tried to link everything together and squeeze it in his model of the world. Sometimes the linking of things seemed fairly arbitrary to me, which made me somewhat uncomfortable.
All in all, I think the 8th habit was a huge disappointment. His earlier work is concrete and inspirational. However, 8th habit is more abstract, still inspirational and … too long. It probably should have been a new chapter to the 8th habits instead!
I wouldn’t really recommend picking up the 8th habit. It’s probably better to look at Coveys older work (7 habits). After reading these, this one is not worth reading. It is not a bad book either thus 3 stars.
5 Stars World Changing: Expand your influence Stephen!!
A Zen master once said:”You go to University and spend time studying hundreds of books, we prefer to spend all our time studying one book to get all the essence out of it”. If I had to choose one book that I would like to study again and again it would be this one.
If you have read and applied Stephen Covey’s previous books, then don’t expect the 8th Habit to be similar as it is very dense, so not as easy to apply. However I think it is the best success book I have ever read. Whilst First Things First and 7 habits are applicable to your daily life, this book is applicable to the world surrounding you: your community, your organization and your planet. It gives strategies for turning things around to success in a much more holistic way and it works!!
This book could be the subject of a PHD on changing the world and making organizations and communities successful.
Here is one area and example I chose where this book applies (and there are many others): Managing and Leading Corporations.
Today we are suffering either through lay offs or the dwindling of our savings from corporations run by CEOs bad at their jobs. Millions of people are suffering, including the CEOs and board members. Corporations over a hundred years old are disappearing. People are demotivated in the workplace, only 5% of their capacities is used and no amount of top down initiatives can motivate them. Nobody really wants this. So why is it happening? It could be that capitalism is made of creation and destruction. But what is key to survival then? Steven Covey’s book in my opinion answers these questions. He gives the key to turning around corporations to success in a more effective way than 6 Sigma processes, big 5 consulting reorganizations and all the hypes that come and go. As I said the book is very dense, but here are some highlights:
- S. Covey explains the context: we have moved from an industrial era to a knowledge era. This changes the rules of how success is achieved.
- What is key now is people and leading them to get the best of them. We can no longer be lead by specialists in Finance and PR jobs who play lip service to employees. “Employees are on the forefront of our minds”;
- S. Covey explains how to motivate people;
- S. Covey explains the importance of devising synergistic solutions. So many companies are run through silos. The objective of one department is defeating the objective of another.
- S. Covey outlines the importance of focus by limiting goals to 3 wildly important goals;
- S. Covey explains how you cannot change the laws of nature. Ethics is a cornerstone of his principles and again this is an area where too many companies just play lip service to. Ultimately whether Ethics is not applied or is just a PR job the company pays the price.
And so on…extremely powerful concepts. No amount of financial restructuring and marketing can make up for all these basic concepts.
This book is to be put in the hands of all CEOs (and those who hire them :)), Presidents and Leaders (and we are all leaders). More organizations should employ S. Covey’s consulting services. S. Covey should create a research community that brings the edge to these corporations and devises of simple ways of rolling them out. The proof is in the pudding old tricks no longer work and in my opinion S. Covey has the secret.
Filed under: Personal Development Book Reviews