Anyone who thinks the audiocassette adaptation of Stephen Covey’s bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,
is a shortcut to reading the book has another thing coming. As a
preview, the cassette is worth every one of its 90 minutes; as a
substitute for the original, it will only leave you wishing for the
rest. There’s a reason 7 Habits has sold more than 5 million
copies and been translated into 32 languages. Serious work has
obviously gone into it, and serious change can likely come out of
it–but only with constant discipline and steadfast commitment. As the
densely packed tape makes immediately clear, this is no quick fix for
what’s ailing us in our personal and professional lives.
The
tape opens to the silky-smooth, overtrained voice of the female
narrator, who’s responsible for tying together audio clips from actual
Covey seminars. Leaving aside the occasional attempts at promoting
Covey and his institute, her script does a first-rate job of making
sense of Covey’s own intense, analogy-rich style of explaining his
habits. There’s nothing simple about his approach to becoming an
effective person. The first three habits alone–which have to do with
personal responsibility, leadership, and self-management–could take
years to master. Yet the last four are unattainable, the narrator
insists, if you can’t acquire the personal security–the “inner core,”
says Covey–that presumably comes from a mastery of the foundation.
Throughout our lessons, Covey’s presence is both learned and thoroughly
appealing. He drops references to the likes of Socrates, T.S. Eliot,
and Robert Frost with the aplomb of an English professor. And his knack
for mixing everyday stories with abstract concepts manages to clarify
difficult issues while respecting our intelligence. You could argue
that the cassette is nothing more than a clever marketing tool for
selling another few million copies of the book. But, even at that, it’s
worth the investment in time and concentration: in the end, we’re moved
to learn more about integrating all seven habits in our struggle to
become better and, yes, more effective people.
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