Stephen covey mormon
His grandfather, a shepherd, had founded the business in the late 19th century after almost freezing to death one night for lack of shelter.īut then he travelled to Britain on a two-year Mormon mission trip, tasked with training the presidents of new Mormon congregations. His Mormon faith was a crucial influence on his later work.Ĭovey received a BA in business administration from Utah University in 1952 and planned to join Covey's Little America, his family's chain of hotels, restaurants and other properties. He had to use crutches for several years, an experience that forced him away from athletics and towards study and debating. Covey responded that ''what's common sense just isn't common practice''.Ĭovey was born in Salt Lake City, and as a young man suffered from an ailment that caused his thigh bones to deteriorate. Reviewing his writing in the London Observer, British journalist Francis Wheen (author of an acclaimed biography of Karl Marx) charged that Covey was ''peddling banal truisms to ambitious but doomed middle-managers who dream of becoming chief executives''. Mostly his detractors charged him with offering nothing new. Overarching societal ills such as racism and poverty, they argued, could scarcely be overcome simply by putting first things first.
In 2004, as self-help books occupied ever more real estate in bookstores, he amended his 1989 book with The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness.Īs Americans found their lives increasingly busy and cluttered, Covey emphasised the differences between tasks that are urgent but unimportant, important but not urgent, and every other permutation.Ĭritics charged that Covey was capitalising on the anxieties created by a fast-changing global economy and that he erred in placing all responsibility on the individual.