7 Habits' author Stephen Covey dead at 79

By the CNN Wire Staff

July 16, 2012 -- Updated 2221 GMT (0621 HKT)

 
(CNN) -- Author Stephen Covey, whose "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" sold more than 20 million copies, died Monday at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center, a hospital spokeswoman said. He was 79.

Covey's family issued a statement, reported by CNN affiliate KSL, saying he died from residual effects of an April bicycle accident.

"In his final hours, he was surrounded by his loving wife and each one (of) his children and their spouses, just as he always wanted," the statement said, according to KSL.

Covey was "one of the world's foremost leadership authorities, organizational experts and thought leaders," according to a biography posted on the website of his 2011 book, "The 3rd Alternative."

Other best-sellers by Covey include "First Things First," "Principle-Centered Leadership," and "The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness," according to the biography.

"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" has been named one of the most influential management books by several organizations, including Time and Forbes magazines. The audio book is the best-selling nonfiction audio in history, according to the website.

Named in 1996 as one of Time magazine's 25 most influential Americans, according to the biography, Covey "made teaching principle-centered living and principle-centered leadership his life's work."

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert released a statement saying he was "saddened" to hear of the death of Covey, a "good friend."

"His combination of intellect and empathy made him a truly unique and visionary individual," Herbert said. "The skills he taught, and importantly, the personal example provided by the life he led, will continue to bless the lives of many. Our hearts go out to his beloved wife Sandra and the entire Covey family."

Covey held a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Utah, a master's in business administration from Harvard and a doctorate from Brigham Young University. He also received 10 honorary doctorate degrees, his biography said.

He founded Covey Leadership Center, which in 1997 merged with Franklin Quest to create FranklinCovey Co. The company is a "global consulting and training leader in the areas of strategy execution, leadership, customer loyalty, sales performance, school transformation and individual effectiveness," with 44 offices in 147 countries, according to the website.

"From the time of the merger to his retirement from the board last year, Dr. Covey devoted essentially all of his time and effort to writing and teaching," FranklinCovey said in a news release.

"We lost a dear friend today," Bob Whitman, chairman and CEO of FranklinCovey, said in the news release. "Stephen was one of the world's great human beings. His impact is incalculable and his influence will continue to inspire generations to come."

In 2010, Covey joined Utah State University's Jon M. Huntsman School of Business faculty as a tenured full professor, the biography said.

Covey and his wife, Sandra, lived in Provo, Utah. He was a father of nine, a grandfather of 52 and a great-grandfather of two, according to the website.

"Stephen frequently referred to them as his greatest joy, inspiration, and most significant contribution and legacy to the world," Whitman said in the news release.

Among the honors he received, the release said, were the Fatherhood Award from the National Fatherhood Initiative, the Sikh's International Man of Peace Award, and The National Entrepreneur of the Year Lifetime Award for Entrepreneurial Leadership.

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/16/us/obit-stephen-covey/

Why HR Still Isn't a Strategic Partner

by J. Craig Mundy  |   9:22 AM July 5, 2012

For two decades we have been hearing that HR must become a strategic partner to the business. And the fact that we're still hearing it suggests that in many organizations it hasn't happened.
The need to align HR with the business has become more urgent than ever. Financial markets exert relentless pressure for growth, especially in emerging markets. Customers demand more and better service at lower cost. And cost-efficiency, resource conservation and regulatory compliance have become issues for almost every organization. Turnover among top talent is expected to increase in 2012; globalization is requiring stronger regional HR capabilities; and demographic shifts across the world are dramatically affecting availability of qualified people.

Yet, all too often, business leaders still wonder aloud why their organizations even have HR departments. For their part, many HR leaders are willing to partner with the business, but given the unique situation of each individual company, they have little in the way of concrete guidance about how to fulfill that role.

Let me suggest a way to start. Of every action you take as an HR leader, ask this simple question: does it cause friction in the business or does it create flow? Friction is anything that makes it more difficult for people in critical roles to win with the customer. Flow, on the other hand, is doing everything possible to remove barriers and promote better performance. The question applies to virtually any company in any business and it will take you farther down the road faster than the hazy, abstract injunction to become a strategic partner. Even in what appear to be routine HR responsibilities, you can inject the business perspective simply by asking whether what you are doing is going to enhance the flow of the business or impede it with friction.
Why is it so difficult to inject that business perspective? Because as HR leaders we feel ourselves to be near the pinnacle of the organization. The organization reports to us. It must meet our demands for information, documents, numbers.

In fact, that's backwards. We are far removed from the points and people that make a difference with customers and a difference to the business. Our perspective should be that of seeing to it that the people at those points can perform as smoothly, productively, and frictionlessly as possible.
Think, for example, of your talent strategy. Do you simply manage talent, or do you provide talent solutions that reduce friction and enhance the flow of the business? Often we pride ourselves on trying to recruit the best talent we can find and consistently and fairly spending our resources and focusing our attention equally on everyone. But does that really enhance the flow of the business?

To truly be partners to the business we must identify those critical points of the business where the strategy succeeds or fails, and provide relevant talent solutions. In other words, we must think in terms of what Brian E. Becker, Mark A. Huselid, and Richard W. Beatty call "the differentiated workforce," in their book of the same name. That means managing talent as a portfolio of investments, some of which will pay a much higher return than others. Instead of spending an equal amount of time, attention and resources on everyone equally, you make disproportionate investments in the most critical roles and critical people — not just in terms of compensation, but in terms of development, opportunities, retention, engagement, and human capital planning. All jobs in a business unit are important, but not all are strategic and have maximum impact on the economic value of the business.

Many business units spend time each year identifying talent and competency needs, but few get real about it by developing plans around winning in their critical talent spaces. Let's say you have, in your opinion, spent the appropriate amount of time identifying your strategic talent needs — the difference-making roles. Then ask yourself how much time you and your HR team and line leaders spend focusing on solutions for acquiring, developing, engaging and retaining the talent to fill those needs? Or do you have the "equality" mentality — devoting the same amount of attention to everyone? It's shocking how many HR leaders say that their business has a strategic priority such as accelerating growth in emerging markets, but they and their teams spend little time in emerging markets. Does your investment of time and resources match your business strategy? If not, you are creating friction in the business that diminishes strategic impact.

 

J. Craig Mundy

J. Craig Mundy is vice president of human resources and communications for the Climate Solutions sector of Ingersoll Rand. In this position, he leads the human capital and engagement strategies for the Thermo King and Trane brands, and has implemented a global talent solutions approach for the sector’s business operations around the world.

 http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/why_hr_still_isnt_a_strategic_partner.html

What Millennials Want Most: A Career That Actually Matters

Leadership

7/03/2012 @ 3:21PM |8,932 views

This article is by Barry Salzberg, the global chief executive officer of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited.
 
The Occupy Wall Street movement may have faded in the past few months, but its core beliefs have stuck with tomorrow’s talent.
It’s tempting to think that these grass-roots sentiments will run their course, but my interactions with young professionals around the globe, as well as our own research, tell me there is something larger at work, and that business leaders need to pay attention.

Occupy’s core issue, damaged trust in business, remains strong with millennials—strong in interviews, strong on college message boards, and strong on social networking sites. This fundamentally different recession has created a potentially fundamentally different generation.

As digital natives and emissaries from the future, the millennials hold the keys to unlocking the secrets of tomorrow. Researchers predict that this year there will come to be more mobile devices than humans on the planet. We need this digital generation to join us in unleashing the potential of all that mobility and access to information. And they will, but only if they believe our organizations can offer them careers that, well, actually matter. Given that Deloitte’s member firms will recruit 250,000 people around the world over the next five years, this obviously resonates with me. And I believe it matters to any leader thinking about the future.

The good news is that business as a whole has a good record to point to, an all-true story about the many things we do to make the world a better place. Jobs and homes. Opportunity and security. Breakthrough new ideas like the iPad. The works.

Never mind the still sluggish job market. In their insistence on social principle, many millennials are not driven by money or success in quite the way their parents were. This generation wants to know what your organization stands for in improving society, what it stands for in action, as opposed to blowing smoke. Millennials want to know how they will make a positive difference in the world if they join your business, not by wearing a colorful T-shirt on a special project once a year but in their actual work.

Did I mention that this media-savvy generation is also jaded and suspicious? Unimpressed by title, well-traveled, and immune to P.R. in the old sense?  To anyone who imagines their heartstrings can be nimbly plucked, good luck.

In August 2011, for example, students at top American schools—Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Stanford—were complaining about their peers going into finance and consulting, professions in which 25% of Yale grads launch their careers. They called such choices a “brain drain,” or “a tragedy of wasted minds,” as one Dartmouth undergrad put it. Deloitte signed up some 49,000 minds last year, so naturally this got my attention.

We did some original research and discovered that these attitudes, conflicted as they can be, also reflect remarkable optimism and resilience, including an admirable willingness to tackle, head-on, society’s biggest issues. A slacker generation this is not.

My organization examined the opinions of 1,000 millennials at Deloitte member firms regarding the impact of business on society. We found that more than half of them believe that in the future business will have a greater impact than anyone else in solving society’s biggest challenges. And 86% of them believe business will have at least as much potential as government to meet society’s challenges. Clearly, taken as a whole, millennials do not see business as a waste.

Yes, employment remains a challenge, in the U.S. and especially in parts of Europe suffering from double-digit unemployment, such as Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece. True, more needs to be done to align education and training with today’s jobs, and my organization, among many, is striving to do just that. But to be realistic, it will take the bulldozer of business, going at full throttle, to get us out of the ditch. To do that effectively, business needs to move past the denial stage and get everyone on board, including the new generation of workers, with all their energy, curiosity, new skills, and passion.

Indeed, if you heed the details of this research, tomorrow’s leaders are telling us that they believe they can actually change the world, fiscally and socially—operating within the system. They want to play a part personally, not just in pro bono work but through the work they do every day.

In an effort to do just that, our member firms’ professionals are fully engaged. For example, in Korea they are creating new efficiencies in the nation’s IT infrastructure and thereby helping a developing country use inexpensive technology to create micro-businesses. In South Sudan, after a long civil war, we are helping create social structures from taxation to governance that support peace and stability.

Another part of the picture is the large number of women now in the global workforce: fully half, driven by better education and aided by the steady wind of social forces. Businesses are hungry for this talent.

In turn, greater economic equality between men and women has been shown to reduce poverty rates, boost GDP, and lead to better governance. That kind of social change, driven as much by business as by government or nongovernmental organizations, is bringing major benefits to the next wave of emerging economies in the Middle East, Africa, India, and elsewhere.

In short, we need to do more to connect the dots for millennials, showing them the deeper global dynamics of the business enterprise. Damaged trust in business is one side effect of the events of recent years. Like all our stakeholders, our digital natives need to know that they can trust us with their future, and that, like them, we’re ready to keep changing the world.



http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2012/07/03/what-millennials-want-most-a-career-that-actually-matters/