Stephen Covey, author of the mega-seller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, died Monday at the age of 79.
Back in the summer of 1993, I was fortunate to sit in on a “7 Habits” training that Covey himself kicked off with a 3-hour session. We got star treatment because the Secretary of Energy, Hazel O’Leary, brought the entire senior staff of the Department of Energy out to the Milliken Institute for training in total quality management.
Coincidentally, I had just finished the manuscript for my book Lean and Clean Management: How to Boost Profits and Productivity by Reducing Pollution, which discusses TQM and its intimate relationship with pollution prevention. You can buy copies here for as little as 10 cents plus shipping! I believe it is still a good book on systems thinking; in any case, it was that manuscript that got me an invite to the training even though I was just a newly-hired Special Assistant for Policy and Planning to Deputy Secretary Bill White.
Covey was awesome. He was a genuinely optimistic and passionate person who cared about people. I spent about an hour yesterday looking through a dozen boxes to find my notes, but while I found my date book that shows I attended this in August 1993, I may have written the notes on a handout and not a notebook, which means it will take me a lot longer to find assuming I still have it.
I distinctly remember Covey talking about his limp, but I can’t remember the details, which I have found online here. Covey loved athletics in school, but then got “slipped epiphysis, which is a deterioration of the thigh and hip bone during the growth process.” That put him in crutches starting in junior high school. The result:
“It totally shifted me from athletics to academics, which I’m grateful for now. So it turned out to be a blessing in my life; but the time, you know, I thought my life was about over, particularly when I was told I had to go on crutches for a full year. Then I tried to get back fast, too fast, and I was impatient, and I had to do that like over again for an entire year! Then it went to my next leg…. But anyway, that totally changed my approach to academics, and I began to love learning for its own sake.”
The rest, as they say, is history. This is, as Shakespeare put it in Romeo and Juliet, “adversity’s sweet milk.”
The 7 Habits is one of the few self-help books I would recommend without hesitation because it is based on examining what the most effective people do. And what the most effective people do is act systematically. Covey’s approach to analyzing what the best people was one of the inspirations for my new book — out next month — in which I examine what the most effective communicators do. If course, they use a system also: rhetoric.
The 7 habits are ones that everyone would be wise to follow, but because they are systems oriented — and because they are aimed at bringing about change — they have a particular value for climate hawks who want to change the energy system in time to preserve a livable eco-system. Here is the short version of them (with my additions in parentheses and links to Covey’s longer description of them):
SELF-MASTERY (independent systems thinking)
- Habit 1: Be Proactive
- Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
- Habit 3: Put first things first (prioritize)
INTERDEPENDENCE (working with others systematically)
SELF-RENEWAL
- Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw (continuously improve)
These may seem obvious. But as is the case with most self-help advice the trick is actually doing them. Every day. Clearly they represent the essence of what it means to be a climate hawk. We all start with the end in mind — avoiding catastrophic global warming. The only way to avoid catastrophic warming is to act proactively, before it happens. And that means we need to prioritize aka deploy, deploy, deploy.
The best climate solutions are win-win, particularly energy efficiency, which is the only reason there’s any chance we might actually avert catastrophe: They have myriad co-benefits. Habit 5 is about the best kind of communication, and Habit 6 defines the kind of political action that is needed.
Since none of us is doing a good enough job now, we all need to continuously improve, but also, as Covey noted, we need “a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual.” Thinking about climate change 24/7 is not a sustainable strategy, I can assure you from personal experience!
Indeed, the whole raison d’être of climate hawks is to avoid a future where everybody is forced to think about climate change 24/7 because it has ruined a livable climate, forcing everyone into a “scarcity mentality,” which Covey hated because it represents a “zero-sum paradigm of life.”
Stephen Covey will be missed.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
KillingMother has a different view:
http://killingmother.blogspot.com/2012/07/steven-covey-seven-habits-of-highly.html
excerpt:
Ultimately, our goal-oriented culture has been a disastrous “habit” for the earth. As Westerners clamor to grow their economies, the actual substance of those economies, living and non-living entities (capitalists call them “resources”), are being churned into oblivion. The 1,000 year-old redwood that gave its life to be toilet paper or siding on your latest construction is not impressed by your bottom line, nor are the spotted owls that once resided in its majestic branches. If Western humans weren’t so focused on achieving a desired number on a balance sheet, perhaps instead of cramming ourselves into inanimate cubicles and “working,” we would take a walk in the woods and come to realize that the redwood and the owl are infinitely more valuable than siding and toilet paper, never mind their right to simply exist. The “progress” that renders the earth into “goals” is no progress at all. It is a process of mass-murder. Self-mastery, self-awareness, self-control. These values are not based on achieving theoretical goals. They are based on an awareness of one’s place in the world, the acceptance of the inter-connectedness of that existence, and respect for the other entities that also inhabit that space.
The post was about using Covey’s “habits” to be a more effective climate hawk. That they can be used by a business person to further destroy the planet doesn’t make the “habits” themselves evil. They are a tool for getting things done effectively.
I see it frequently on this blog and my daughter saw it frequently working for a senator – progressives destroying any chance of progress by getting locked into “my way or the highway” fights.
What Joe is saying is that if, instead, we all employed some of the “habits”, far more would be accomplished for the environment and fighting AGW caused climate change.
There’s a great way to beat back the urge to deploy, deploy, deploy. It’s called, see no solar, hear no solar, speak no solar. As long as the ostriches among you don’t know what’s out here sitting in front of you, you won’t have to deploy it.
Here’s what you must never, ever see or it will ruin your beautiful whimpering in a corner:
1. Solar heat retrofits can be affordable, with low maintenance. Really? You can always prove any idea wrong if you dig deep enough. My current target is to compete with natural gas, but I see a way to be half of natural gas’s price in the future.
2. Easy to assemble, no heat solar greenhouses, with double the sunlight for good winter growth and profitability. These get diesel produce trucks off the road.
3. A variant of this should get the cost of algae biodiesel down to (best estimate) $1.50/gallon. The algal waste is great raw material for sequestering gigatons of carbon.
4. Solar thermal electricity is better than photovoltaics because the storage of heat means nighttime generation.
5. Don’t forget a daylighting revolution. Heat and light anywhere, in the basement for growing food, under big trees, in blast furnaces for industry.
6. Then we need a transit revolution. I have 100 innovations now.
7. Then we need to restore the Arctic Ocean’s ice pack.
On three. HUP!
So — thinking win-win . . .
Conserving is conservative.
Efficiency is profitable. Always. For individuals, it’s tax-free.
Clean energy, and clean healthy air are goods worth preserving. We can celebrate them and compete to get there fastest.
Conservatives generally don’t recommend uncontrolled experiments that threaten prosperity and security.
We want to aim for the ultimate goal. Getting back to 350 ppm of carbon dioxide is better than we have now, but we really want to stop at 300 ppm or better, that’s the goal, and on the way we want to inhibit or prevent the permanent effects of climate change, such as extinction which is forever. We may not be around by the time the next generations win, but that’s ok.
Energy efficiency is nice. It has its place. However, at some point you need stored energy for cold winters.
Also, we need stored energy (or electric wires overhead) for transit in weather too cold for seniors to bicycle in. Stanley Steamer wood-burning automobiles are another fallback sustainable option, but we can do much better.
Pretend we were stable at 300ppm right now and had all the clean tech you could ask for.
How long until capitalism’s demand for nonstop economic growth brings us right back to the ecological brink?
Global warming is just one head of the Hydra. IMO, the “end” we must start with is not just clean tech but a steady-state-economy powered by clean tech. Nothing else will slay the beast’s heart.
Absolutely! Anthropogenic climate destabilisation and every other ecological disaster are simply symptoms of the underlying disease you correctly, I would say, identified. Endless economic growth, the raison d’etre of cancer. And growth is required by capitalism, to pay interest on debt and because the pleonexia, the greed and lust for that which belongs to others, of the psychopathic Rightwing global elites is infinite. These are creatures whose inner emptiness, moral, spiritual and ethical, is as bottomless as a black-hole, and their vain attempts to fill that void are sucking everything across the ecological event horizon and into the inky darkness.
Mr Romm
If you own the rights to your book, perhaps you could sell a pdf for a 99 cent donation to your favorite charity instead of a dime to a used book dealer.
Just a thought.
Interesting thought. I’ll look into it. I could make it a Kindle, yes.
In general i do not read books at all. I instead read wiki’s or watch tutorials/lessons on youTube.
Just a thought as i like where this is going, why not start a video series on climate action and the first episode is about approach and mental organization.
Btw. i read a couple of books from Dale Carnegie, which seems not so far fetched from Covey.
Dale Carnegie is great.
Habit 5 – OK we can understand that nobody WANTS global warming, and nobody WANTS to adapt, and certainly not spend the money and effort to mitigate.
How might a climate hawk deal with the inaction and denial in others?
Just how do we seek to be understood? Because climate change will be understood whether we want it or not.