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2012年8月1日 星期三

Stephen Covey, Herald of Good Habits, Dies at 79


史蒂芬·柯維 | 1932-2012

美管理學大師柯維去世


史蒂芬·R·柯維(Stephen R. Covey)已經贏得了遍及天下的追隨者。自1989年開始,他那本把自助類圖書和商業文學融為一體的《高效人士的七種習慣:性格倫理的回歸》(The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic)在各大暢銷書榜上呆了五年時間。周一(本文發表於7月16日——編注),柯維先生逝世於美國愛達荷州愛達荷福爾斯的一家醫院,享年79歲。
他的家人在一份聲明中說,他死於三個月前一場單車事故引起的併發症。
柯維先生的書在全球售出了2500萬冊,也是史上第一本銷售量超過100萬的有聲書籍的作者。1994年感恩節,時任美國總統的比爾·克林頓與柯維 先生進行了一次會談,事後克林頓說,如果大家都聽從柯維先生的建議,美國的生產率將會大幅度提高。超過三分之二的全球財富500強企業都在爭相使用他所創 辦的諮詢公司提供的服務。
柯維先生對自己的成功有點迷惑不解。他說,自己只是告訴人們一些他覺得大家都已經知道的東西:好習慣的益處。他說,人們所需要做的就是把最好的天性養成習慣,他把自己的7個想法稱之為萬有引力一般的自然法則。這七個想法是:
1,主動積極
2,以始為終
3,要事第一
4,雙贏思維
5,知己知彼
6,統合綜效
7,不斷更新
“我們相信組織行為就是個人行為的集體化,”柯維先生說。2004年,他把自己的思想完善為《第八種習慣:從高效到卓越》(The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness),在這本書裡面,他敦促人們去發現自己的獨特聲音,然後再去鼓勵其他人這樣做。
他的作品還包括:1997年的《高效家庭的七個習慣》(Seven Habits for Highly Effective Families),書里倡導每個家庭都應該想出使命宣言。2008年的《我是領導》(Leader in Me),這本書詳細描述了他的教育改革思路。柯維先生說他的目標是改變社會,把他的教義問答稱之為首要的行動方案。“常識並非慣例。”他如是說。
柯維先生是摩門教教徒,雖然他的語言是大眾化的,但仍有人在他的作品中看到了大量的摩門教思想。柯維先生否認他的書中存在任何摩門教的偏見,他宣稱自己是從宗教經典和歷史上最偉大的思想家那裡獲得靈感的。
1996年,《時代周刊》雜誌將柯維先生評為最有影響力的25名美國人之一,《福布斯》把“第七種習慣”稱作有史以來十佳商業管理書籍之一。美國眾議院發言人紐特·金里奇聽取了柯維先生的意見,並請柯維幫忙為一名選了自己課程的大學生寫一篇關於美國文化中個人實力的文章。
“七個習慣”已成為大家的口頭禪,米特·羅姆尼(Mitt Romney)在去年的艾奧瓦州共和黨初選競選活動中提到了這本書,他說的是“非常成功的經濟活動中的七個習慣”。拙劣的模仿之作不斷出現。其中的一本於 1996年出版,書名叫做《有重大缺陷人士的七種習慣:不會消失的其他暢銷書》。
史蒂芬·理查茲·柯維於1932年10月24日出生在鹽湖城,在城郊一個養雞場里長大。因為腿疾,他本來前途看好的運動員生涯被迫中斷,青少年時期,他甚至還拄了3年拐杖。
在1994年《財富》雜誌的一次採訪中,他談到父母一直鼓勵他。“你這次肯定能考好,”如果第二天學校有考試,臨睡前的那個晚上,他記得媽媽總會這麼說:“你會實現你的目標。”
16歲的時候,他進入猶他大學(the University of Utah)學習,獲得了商業管理學學位。在英國作了兩年的摩門教傳教士後,他又回到美國哈佛商學院(Harvard Business School)讀工商管理碩士。有時候他會在波士頓公園傳播摩門教教義。
在愛爾蘭又作了一段時間的傳教士以後,他在楊百翰大學(Brigham Young University)獲得了宗教教育的博士學位。他的博士論文是關於美國歷史上的“成功文學”。
在楊百翰大學,他成為校長助理,並開始在校園裡教授自助的觀念,每次上課都能吸引到一千多名學生。1983年,他賭上全部身家成立了柯維領袖中心(Covey Leadership Center),這家培訓與諮詢公司位於猶他州普羅沃市。
1997年,該中心與富蘭克林會斯特(Franklin Quest)合并,後者是由時間管理專家海侖·史密斯(Hyrum Smith)創辦的,兩公司合并後組成了富蘭克林柯維公司(Franklin Covey Company)。該公司目前業務遍及全球50多個國家,去年的銷售額為1.608億美元。
柯維先生身後留下了妻子(結婚前的名字是桑德拉·美林[Sandra Merril])、9個子女,以及50多個孫輩。
柯維先生討厭浪費時間。他把文件複印後放在辦公桌下面的公文包里,以防原件丟失。他還喜歡同時做好幾件事情。《財富》雜誌報道說,有一次有人看見他躺在一個健身房淋浴室的地板上,在三個噴頭對着他噴水的同時,他還一邊刷牙一邊刮鬍子。
在解釋他推薦的第二個習慣——以始為終——柯維先生敦促人們去考慮想以什麼樣的方式留在其他人的記憶中。“如果你曾經仔細考慮過,希望人們在你的葬禮上如何評價你,那麼你也就找到了自己對成功的理解。”他說。
本文最初發表於2012717日。
翻譯:馬志彥


Stephen R. Covey, Herald of Good Habits, Dies at 79


Stephen R. Covey, who won a global following and a five-year run on best-seller lists by fusing the genres of self-help and business literature in his 1989 book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic,” died on Monday at a hospital in Idaho Falls, Idaho. He was 79.
The cause was complications of a bicycle accident three months ago, his family said in a statement.
Mr. Covey’s book sold more than 25 million copies worldwide, and also became the first audiobook to sell more than a million copies. After conferring with Mr. Covey over Thanksgiving in 1994, President Bill Clinton said American productivity would greatly increase if people followed Mr. Covey’s advice. More than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies flocked to use a consulting company he had founded.
Mr. Covey was a bit baffled by his success. He said he was simply telling people what he thought they already knew: the efficacy of good behavior. All that people had to do was form habits out of their best instincts, he said, calling his seven nuggets of knowledge natural laws, like gravity. They are:
1. Be proactive
2. Begin with the end in mind
3. Put first things first
4. Think “win-win.”
5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood
6. Synergize
7. Sharpen the saw; that is, undergo frequent self-renewal.
“We believe that organizational behavior is individual behavior collectivized,” Mr. Covey said. He expanded the lesson in 2004 in “The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness,” in which he urges people to find their own distinctive voices and to encourage others to find theirs.
Among his other books, “Seven Habits for Highly Effective Families,” published in 1997, advocates that families come up with mission statements. “The Leader in Me,” published in 2008, embodies his ideas for educational reform. His goal was to change society, he said, calling his catechism first and foremost an action plan. “What is common sense isn’t common practice,” he declared.
Mr. Covey was a Mormon, and some saw large elements of Mormon theology in his work, though his language was ecumenical. He denied any Mormon bias in his books, saying he drew inspiration from the Scriptures and from history’s great thinkers.
In 1996, Time magazine named Mr. Covey one of the 25 most influential Americans, and Forbes called “Seven Habits” one of the top 10 business management books ever. As speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich drew on Mr. Covey’s advice and asked him to help write a chapter on personal strength in American culture for a student reading in a college course Mr. Gingrich taught.
“Seven Habits” became part of the vernacular. Campaigning in the Iowa Republican primary last year, Mitt Romney referred to the book in offering his “seven habits for highly successful economies.” Parodies have cropped up. One, published in 1996, was titled “The 7 Habits of Highly Defective People: And Other Bestsellers That Won’t Go Away.”
Stephen Richards Covey was born on Oct. 24, 1932, in Salt Lake City, and grew up on an egg farm outside the city. A promising athletic career was cut short by degeneration in his legs, causing him to use crutches for three years as a teenager.
In an interview with Fortune magazine in 1994, he told of his parents’ constant encouragement. “You’re going to do great on this test,” he remembered his mother saying as he went to sleep the night before a school exam. “You can do anything you want.”
He entered the University of Utah at 16 and earned a degree in business administration. He spent two years in Britain as a Mormon missionary before returning to the United States to earn an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He sometimes preached the Mormon doctrine on Boston Common.
After another missionary stint, in Ireland, he earned a doctorate in religious education from Brigham Young University. His thesis was on “success literature” in American history.
At Brigham Young, he became an assistant to the university’s president and began teaching his self-help ideas on campus, drawing as many as 1,000 students in a single class. In 1983 he gambled everything he owned on starting the Covey Leadership Center, a training and consulting concern in Provo, Utah.
In 1997 it merged with Franklin Quest, founded by Hyrum Smith, a time-management expert, to become the Franklin Covey Company. It now operates in more than 50 countries and had $160.8 million in sales last year.
Mr. Covey is survived by his wife, the former Sandra Merrill; nine children; and more than 50 grandchildren.
Mr. Covey hated to waste time. He made copies of documents and kept them in briefcases under his desk in case he lost an original. And he liked to do more than one thing at a time. Fortune reported that he was once seen at a gym lying on the floor of the shower room being sprayed by three shower heads while he brushed his teeth and shaved.
In explaining his second recommended habit — Begin with the end in mind — Mr. Covey urged people to consider how they would like to be remembered. “If you carefully consider what you want to be said of you in the funeral experience,” he said, “you will find your definition of success.”


***
 2012.4.29
Stephen Covey 成名近25年  成立龐大的企管勵志讀物公司也超過20年
這本是新作 可能是20分之1

The Soft Stuff Is the Hard Stuff

Douglas R. Conant, coauthor of TouchPoints: Creating Powerful Leadership Connections in the Smallest of Moments, introduces an excerpt from The 3rd Alternative: Solving Life’s Most Difficult Problems, by Stephen R. Covey, that proposes a more thoughtful approach for problem resolution.

In my 35-year corporate journey and my 60-year life journey, I have consistently found that the thorniest problems I face each day are soft stuff — problems of intention, understanding, communication, and interpersonal effectiveness — not hard stuff such as return on investment and other quantitative challenges. Inevitably, I have found myself needing to step back from the problem, listen more carefully, and frame the conflict more thoughtfully, while still finding a way to advance the corporate agenda empathetically. Most of the time, interestingly, this has led to a more promising path forward and a better relationship, which in turn has made the next conflict easier to deal with.
Stephen Covey provides a more direct approach to successful problem solving in the excerpt below from his new book. From the outset, his “3rd Alternative” approach engages everyone involved in an issue to advance the agenda in a winning way. The soft stuff will forever be the hard stuff, but leveraging 3rd Alternative thinking can make the soft stuff significantly easier to resolve productively.
— Douglas R. Conant


An excerpt from Chapter 3 of The 3rd Alternative: Solving Life’s Most Difficult Problems


If you’re a 3rd Alternative supervisor, you’ll neither flee nor fight. You’ll look for something better [when conflict arises], a solution that will provide your employee with a huge emotional payoff and create for the firm new and significant value.
A friend of mine explained how a 3rd Alternative leader dealt with exactly this situation in his life:
I was new at the job and had come in hoping for a better salary. I settled for something a lot less than I’d hoped for just to get in the door. But after a couple of months, it was clear that my family was struggling. We couldn’t get by because of some medical expenses. Besides that, I felt more and more that I was getting paid too little for the work I was doing. So I took a real risk and went to talk to the big boss about a raise. I didn’t know her very well and she didn’t know me. I had no real track record yet with that company.
But she invited me into her office and I explained why I was there. I was kind of surprised when she said, “Tell me more.” I told her about my family situation. She just listened, and I talked quite a lot about what I’d been doing for the firm. She asked me what I thought about the company, its customers, its products. It was odd. We had this long conversation that I thought was going to be about my pay, but instead was about me — how I was doing, what I thought, what I’d learned in my few months at the company.
Then she asked me about a certain customer I’d been working with. She wanted to know my ideas for expanding our business with that client, and I actually did have some thoughts that I shared.
A couple days later, she invited me back into her office. Three or four other people joined us, and she had put up on a whiteboard my ideas for this client. We had quite the discussion, and a lot more discussions after that. I was excited. Finally, they offered me an expanded job with higher pay and responsibility for a new level of service to this important client.
For my friend, these discussions were just the beginning of a swift rise in that company; he eventually became a partner to the “big boss.”
I’ve rarely heard of a wiser leader than this woman. She had a fine capacity for 3rd Alternative thinking. How easy it would have been for her either to fight my friend or just to give in to his request. Instead, she sensed the possibility of a dramatic win-win. Rather than haggling over the existing pie, she could envision the prospect of a much bigger pie. She suspected that combining my friend’s needs and energies with the client’s needs might well produce growth for everyone. The eventual result was a whole new line of business and a partner who increased his worth to the company every year. From what I know of this young man’s contribution to his firm, he was ultimately responsible for doubling its size.
Consider how this woman led her team to a 3rd Alternative:
  • First, she took time to listen empathetically. She wanted to understand her young employee’s issue and his feelings about it. On the face of it, she wanted to know why his salary bothered him. But more deeply, she wanted to grasp what he was all about and what he could bring to the company that would pay off for everyone, not just for him.
  • Then she sought him out. She brought him back again and again, explored his thinking and involved other thinkers. She valued his distinctive gifts and insights.
  • Finally, the group arrived at synergy: new services, new products, new ways of meeting the needs of an important client, and beyond that the needs of a new segment of clients.
All of this came about because the boss has the habit of reaching for the 3rd Alternative whenever the opportunity arises. An employee comes in with a complaint and she sees a chance to build her business. She sees conflict as fertile ground instead of battleground.
Most thinkers about conflict resolution treat a conflict as a transaction. It’s about dividing up the pie. You can either accommodate or confront your opponent. You can give away the pie or you can fight over it, and there are techniques and tricks to gain an advantage. But divide it as you will — in the end, it’s the same pie.
By contrast, the 3rd Alternative is to transform the situation. It’s about making a new pie that’s bigger and better — perhaps exponentially bigger and better. Where most conflict resolution is transactional, the 3rd Alternative is transformational.
If I find myself caught up in a conflict at work, I mustn’t fall automatically into the defensive mind-set. This is crucial, but it’s also highly counterintuitive. The natural, unthinking response to a challenge is to fight or flee. This is what animals do out of instinct; they have only the 2 Alternatives. But mature human beings can choose a 3rd Alternative.
Remember the first paradigm of synergy: “I See Myself.” I have the power to stand outside myself and think about my own thoughts and feelings. I can examine my own motives: “Why am I caught up in this? Am I being egocentric? Do I need attention or affirmation? Do I feel my status is being threatened? Or am I genuinely concerned about this issue?” If I am already sure of my own self-worth, if I already feel confident about my own contribution and capability, I don’t need to defend myself against you. I can express myself candidly to you.
But I also need to remember the second paradigm of synergy: “I See You.” That means I have profound respect for you. I value your ideas, your experience, your perspective, and your feelings.
Therefore, I practice the third paradigm of synergy: “I Seek You Out.” I am fascinated — not threatened — by the gap between us. Nothing defuses the negative energy of a conflict faster than to say, “You see things differently. I need to listen to you.” And mean it.
If you practice these paradigms, you’ll inevitably arrive at a 3rd Alternative that makes the conflict irrelevant: “Let’s look for something better than either of us has thought of.” Everybody wins, everybody is energized. Often you won’t even remember what the fight was about.
— Stephen R. Covey
Copyright © 2011 by FranklinCovey Co. Excerpted with permission from Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.


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