First Things First: My Summary

Building on Covey's international fame through 7 Habits, he teamed up with the Merrills. Roger and Rebecca Merrill are married and are the "real" authors of First Things First.

Building on the habits Covey wrote about in 7 Habits, First Things First is all about how to prioritize and plan your life.

Providing actionable insights for daily, weekly, and annual use, First Things First is a personal management book.

If you struggle with accomplishing your to-do list, finishing tasks, or reaching goals, this is a terrific book to help you out. This summary was longer than most. The book really gets into the weeds, so I did my best to get the gist of every part of the book from personal statements, the four quadrants, weekly planning, leading, aligning incentives, and creating win-win agreements.

Here's my summary:

The Old Way

Traditional time management focuses on achieving, accomplishing, getting what you want, and not letting anything get in your way. But the reality is that most of the greatest achievements and the greatest joys in life come from relationships.

Time management deals with Chronos, the Greek word for chronological time. Chronos time is linear and sequential. No second is worth any more than the next.

Kairos, the Greek word for quality time, is something to be experienced. It’s exponential, existential. The essence of Kairos time is how much value you get out of it rather than how much Chronos time you put into it.

First Things First puts the emphasis on Kairos instead of Chronos. It helps you answer the question:

• Am I doing the right things?

Not the question:

• Am I doing things right?

First Things

What is the one activity that you know if you did superbly well and consistently would have significant positive results in your personal life?

What is the one activity that you know if you did superbly well and consistently would have significant positive results in your professional life?

If you know these things would make a significant difference, why are you not doing them now?

These are the "First Things" that you should be putting first. Knowing and doing what’s important rather than simply responding to what’s urgent is foundational to putting first things first.

This is the opposite of the “urgency” paradigm. Urgency brings instant results and instant gratification, but not long term success or growth.

People expect us to be busy, overworked. It’s become a status symbol in our society. If we’re busy, we’re important. Urgency itself is not the problem. The problem is that when urgency is the dominant factor in our lives, importance isn’t.

The Four Quadrants

We need to spend time in Quadrant 1. This is where we manage, where we produce, where we bring our experience and judgment to bear in responding to the needs and challenges. If we ignore it, we become buried alive. We also need to realize that many important activities become urgent through procrastination.

Quadrant 2 is the quality quadrant. Here’s where we do our long-range planning, anticipate and prevent problems, empower others, broaden our minds and increase our skills through reading and continuous development, envision how we’re going to help a son/daughter, prepare for meetings, or invest in relationships. Ignoring quadrant 2 will enlarge quadrant 1, creating stress, burnout, and deeper crises for the person consumed by it. On the other hand, planning and preparation in quadrant 2 shrinks quadrant 1.

Quadrant 3 is bad. We spend a lot of time in quadrant 3 meeting other people’s priorities and expectations, thinking we are in quadrant 1.

Quadrant 4 is the quadrant of waste. True relaxation is a quadrant 2 activity. Quadrant 4 is not necessary for survival or improvement.

Focusing On Quadrant 2

The majority of times, the most important activity is a quadrant 2 activity:

• Improving communication with people
• Better preparation
• Better planning and organizing
• Taking better care of self
• Seizing new opportunities
• Personal development
• Empowerment

The degree to which urgency is dominant is the degree to which importance is not. If you focus on Quadrant 2, you will put the important before the urgent.

Finding Your First Things

What are your first things and how do you put them first? Three fundamental ideas empower us to answer that question:

• The fulfillment of the four human needs and capacities
• The reality of “true north” principles
• The potentiality of the four human endowments

The Four Human Needs

The essence of these needs is the phrase: “to live, to love, to learn, and to leave a legacy”. If these basic needs aren’t met, we feel empty, incomplete.

The need to live is our physical need for food, clothing, shelter, and health.

The need to love is our social need to relate to other people, to belong, to love, to be loved.

The need to learn is our mental need to develop and to grow.

The need to leave a legacy is our spiritual need to have a sense of meaning, purpose, personal congruence, and contribution.

Some of us recognize that we have these needs, but we tend to see them as separate compartments of life. We think of balance between the needs as separate identical time spent in each area.

This is wrong.

It’s where these four needs overlap that we find true inner balance, deep fulfillment, and joy. By seeing the interrelatedness of these needs, we realize that the key to meeting an unmet need is in addressing, not ignoring the other needs. Instead of seeing a problem as segmented and mechanical, a broken part to be fixed, it’s seeing it as part of a living, synergistic whole. It’s looking at what’s around a problem, what’s connected to it, what can influence it, as well as the problem itself.

True North Principles

How we fulfill our needs is just as important as fulfilling them.

Think of life like a farm. Cramming doesn’t work on a farm.

You can go for the quick fixes and techniques with some success, but eventually, the law of the farm governs all. Not taking the time to nurture seeds will only result in harvesting weeds.

The law of the farm governs in all areas of life. The problem is we’re sowing one thing and expecting to reap something different.

Health is based on natural principles. It grows over time out of regular exercise, proper nutrition, adequate rest, a healthy mindset, and avoiding harmful substances. Economic well-being is based on the principles of thrift, industry, saving for the future, and earning interest, not paying it.

The reality is that quality relationships are built on principles, especially trust. Mental needs should be focused on learning instead of accomplishing. Spiritual needs come from the principle of empowering others and helping.

Four Human Endowments

Between stimulus and response, humans have the endowments that distinguish us from the animal world. Self-awareness, conscience, creative imagination, and independent-will. These endowments allow us to change.

Self-awareness is our capacity to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, and our habits and tendencies.

Conscience is our internal guidance system which allows us to sense when we act or even contemplate acting in a way that’s contrary to principle.

Independent will is that fact that we’re not victims. We’re not the product of our past. We are the product of our choices.

Creative imagination enables us to see ourselves and others differently and better than we are today.

Each of these gifts is necessary to create quality of life. It's not enough to be one or the other. “I can examine my views and beliefs. I can examine the results they’re producing. I can use my conscience to determine new paths that are in harmony with principles and with my own unique ability to contribute. I can use my independent will to make choices to create change. I can use my creative imagination to create beyond my present reality to find new alternatives."

How To Develop These Endowments

Keeping a personal journal significantly increases self-awareness. If you don’t like a result you’re getting in your life, write about it. If you’re not sure why you still do something that you know is harmful or self-defeating, analyze it, process it, write it down. If you learn something, write about it (or summarize it). If you make a commitment to yourself, write it down. Envision possibilities and write them down. Write down your goals and dreams. Keeping a personal journal empowers you to see and improve, on a day-to-day basis, the way you’re developing and using your endowments.

We can educate our conscience by reading and pondering wisdom literature, standing apart from and learning from our own experience, carefully observing the experience of others, taking time to be still and listen to the deep inner voice, and responding to that voice.

One of the best ways to strengthen our independent will is to make and keep promises. Our lives are the results of our choices. By making and keeping promises to ourselves and to others, little by little we increase our strength until our ability to act is more powerful than any of the forces that act upon us.

The MacGyver factor is the embodiment of the power of creative imagination. It’s understanding and being able to apply principles in a wide variety of situations. The process we suggest to help develop creative imagination is visualization. In your mind’s eye, instead of seeing yourself react as you might normally do, see yourself act based on the principles you are convinced will create a better quality of life.

Overall, when we fail or make a mistake or hit a principle head-on, we say, “What can I learn from this?”

Organizing Your Life

Daily planning provides us with a limited view. It’s so close-up that we’re often kept focused on what’s right in front of us. Urgency and efficiency take the place of importance and effectiveness.

Weekly planning provides a broader context to what we have to do. It takes a bigger picture and lets us see the mountains for what they really are. The activities of the day begin to take on more appropriate dimensions when viewed in the context of the week.

These are the steps Covey/Merrill suggest following when planning your week:

First, connect with your vision and mission. Context gives meaning.

What’s most important? What gives your life meaning? What do you want to be and to do in your life?

Clarity on these issues is critical because it affects everything else.

If you don't have a personal mission statement, you may get some feeling for what’s important to you by doing one of the following:

• List the three of four things you consider “first things” in your life
• Consider any long-range goals you might have set
• Think about the most important relationships in your life
• Think about any contributions you’d like to make
• Think about how you might live this week if you knew you only had six months to live

Second, identify your roles

Roles represent responsibilities, relationships, and areas of contribution. Balance among roles does not simply mean that you’re spending equal time in each role, but that these roles work together for the accomplishment of your mission. Your roles will change throughout the years (such as student, employee, manager, owner).

Since studies show that it’s less effective to attempt to mentally manage more than seven categories, Covey recommends that you try to combine functions, to keep your total number of roles to seven. Don’t feel like you have to come up with seven roles, just think of it as a max.

Include a “sharpen the saw” or “future you” as a role. We often get too busy working that we forget to improve ourselves. We may neglect exercise, relationships, or development. This role may overlap with a personal development role you already defined. That’s not a problem. The important thing is that none of the four areas are neglected.

It’s also important to realize that all of these roles are not distinct “compartments” of life. They form a highly interrelated whole.

Third, select Quadrant 2 goals for each role

What is the most important thing I could do in each role this week to have the greatest positive impact?

The key is to consistently do whatever builds your strength in these areas and increase your capacity to live, to love, to learn, and to leave a legacy.

Fourth, create a decision-making framework for the week

What’s the most important?

The object of Quadrant 2 organizing is not to set a schedule in cement. It’s to create a framework in which quality decisions based on importance can be made on a day-by-day basis

Fifth, exercise integrity in the moment

Preview the day. Spend a few moments at the beginning of the day to revisit your schedule, check your compass, and look at the day in the context of the week.

Prioritize, highlight, circle, or mark the most important activity. Things can come up that are genuinely more important than what you have planned. Keep connected with your inner compass so that you can act with integrity to what’s important.

Last, evaluate.

Unless we learn from living, how are we going to keep from doing the same things, making the same mistakes, and struggling with the same problems?

At the end of the week, pause to ask questions:

·        What goals did I achieve?

·        What challenges did I encounter?

·        What decisions did I make?

·        Did I put first things first?

Determining Your Future

Research indicates that children with “future-focused role images” perform far better scholastically and are significantly more competent in handling the challenges of life. According to Dutch sociologist Fred Polak, a primary factor influencing the success of civilizations is the “collective vision” people have of their future.

You need to determine what your future will look like now. Create a vision. We call it passion because vision can become a motivation force so powerful it becomes the DNA of our lives.

An excellent way to start creating a vision for the future is by writing a personal mission statement. Here is mine:

I will be a man who smiles and conducts his life in a cheerful manner to the highest level of integrity, causing no harm.

I will forgive those who wrong me.

I will repent my wrongs to all partiest as quickly as possible.

I will take intelligent risks to improve my health, wealth, and wisdom.

I will help those in need and support those I know when possible.

People attempting to write a mission statement for the first time often write to please or impress somebody else. An easy way to combat this is by visualizing your 80th birthday or your 50th wedding anniversary. Try to imagine a wonderful celebration where friends, loved ones, and associates from all walks of your life come to honor you. Imagine it in as much detail as you can – the place, the people, the decorations.

See these individuals in your mind’s eye as they stand, one by one, to pay tribute to you. Assume they represent roles you are now fulfilling in life – as a parent, teacher, manager, servant. Also, assume you have fulfilled these roles to the utmost of your potential. What would these people say? What qualities of character would you be remembered for? What outstanding contributions would they mention?

As you ponder, try writing down your roles, and beside each, the tribute statement you would like to be said of you on this occasion. This quick exercise will give you some insight into the potential power and passion of vision.

The key to motivation is the motive, the why, the passion. Create a motive for yourself.

An empowering mission statement:

1.      Represents the deepest and best of you.

2.      Is the fulfillment of your own unique gifts.

3.      Is based on principles of contribution and purpose higher than self.

4.      Addresses and integrates all four fundamental human needs and capacities (physical, social, mental, and spiritual)

5.      Is based on principles that produce quality of life results

6.      Deals with both vision and principle-based values, be good and act good.

7.      Deals with all significant roles in your life

8.      Is written to inspire you, not to impress someone else

Set Quadrant II time each week to cultivate a rich inner life, schedule a personal retreat, write a personal mission statement, schedule time to evaluate and revise your current mission statement, commit your mission statement to memory, set a daily “sharpen the saw” goal, review your mission statement each week, keep a daily journal, read other people’s mission statements, nurture vision in others.

Determining Your Roles

Balance isn’t either/or, it’s and.

Our roles are like the branches of a living tree. They grow naturally out of a common trunk, our mission, and common roots, aka our principles. Our roles become the channels through which we live, love, learn, and leave a legacy.

My roles are: husband, salesman, student, son, brother, friend, and future Layton.

Sometimes short-term imbalances create long-term balance. Such as the involvement in a meaningful project of contribution, caring for an elderly parent, or starting a new business. During times of chosen imbalance, we may feel more comfortable listing only one or two roles during weekly organizing (founder and husband or provider and employee for example).

A steward is “one called to exercise responsible care over possessions entrusted to him or her.”

We’re stewards of our time, talents, and resources. Stewardship involves a sense of being accountable to someone or something higher than self. We can pass on a healthy environment, well-cared for possessions, a sense of responsibility, a heritage of principle-based values, and the vision of contribution By doing so, we improve the quality of life both now and in the future.

Look at your own roles in terms of stewardships and identify to whom you feel a sense of accountability in each role.

Four Dimensions Of A Role

Each role in our lives has a physical dimension, a spiritual dimension, a social dimension, and a mental dimension. Natural balance between all your roles is a dynamic equilibrium in three important ways:

1.      Primary balance is the inner balance between our physical, social, emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Without synergy created when living, loving, learning, and leaving a legacy, there’s no other balance (being a Husband means I get to enjoy life with my wife aka Living and Loving while also improving our relationship aka Learning and eventually raising a family aka Leaving A Legacy).

2.      Secondary balance is balance in our roles. The parts work together to create a greater whole (being a good Husband allows me to be a good employee).

3.      The P/PC balance is the balance between developing and doing that empowers us to do more effectively by increasing our capacity to do (being a good Husband isn't just about getting my wife to do things for me, but also supporting and providing for her so that she can be her best self which means together we can do more in the future than we can now).

Here are the quadrant 2 goals you can set in order to cultivate a better balance of your roles:

• Evaluate your mission statement and your roles to make sure that your roles grow out of your mission and that your mission includes all the important roles in your life.
• Analyze each of your roles in terms of relationships and stewardships.
• Organize your planner around your roles.
• Organize your files around your roles.
• Work on mission statements or stewardship agreements for each of your roles.

The Power of Goals

In all our experience around goal setting, there seem to be two major areas of pain:

1.      The blow to our integrity and courage when we don’t achieve our goals

2.      The sometimes devastating results when we do.

When we set a goal, we’re saying, “I can envision something different from what is, and I choose to focus my efforts to create it.”

What’s often missing from the goal-setting process is conscience (the deep connection of goals to missions and principles) and self-awareness (the accurate assessment of our capacity). One of the best ways to create a goal is to ask yourself what, why, and how.

What: What do I desire to accomplish? What is the contribution I want to make? What is the end I have in mind?

Why: Why do I want to do it? Does my goal grow out of a mission, need, and princple? Does it empower me to contribute through my roles? If your goal isn’t connected to a deeper why, it may be good, but it usually isn’t best.

How: How am I going to do it? What are the key principles that will empower me to achieve my purpose? What strategies can I use to implement these principles?

Much of our frustration in life comes as a result of unmet expectations. To have the self-awareness to know the difference between the good and the best and to act based on mission, conscience, and principles is to make the most significant deposits in our personal integrity account.

A principle-based goal is the right thing, for the right reason, in the right way.

To create a principle-based goal, set context goals, keep a perhaps list, and set weekly goals in the What, Why, How fashion.

A perhaps list is a “we’re not ready to set a goal, but we don’t want to lose the idea” list. Whenever an idea occurs to you, write it on the perhaps list under the appropriate role (one of mine is a beach house in the Bahamas).

Weekly goals are the one or two most important things you could do in this role for this week that would have the greatest positive impact. These are things we’re concerned about, that are within our ability to influence, that are aligned with our mission and are timely.

Goals can be either determinations (things you are determined to do) or concentrations (areas of pursuit to focus your efforts around). A determination would be to visit a third-world country. A concentration would be to improve your understanding of third-world countries.

Weekly Planning

The objective is not to cram as many activities as possible into our schedule or to try to do everything at once. We’re not trying to be Superman or Superwoman.

The objective is to use our creative imagination to come up with synergistic, principle-based ways to accomplish goals that create even greater results than would be achieved if the goals were accomplished separately.

One of the essential elements of the wisdom literature is the idea that an individual’s life is part of a greater whole. Whether people see this greater whole in terms of life after death, reoccurring cycles of life, or intergenerational legacy, this bigger picture orientation puts the challenges of daily living in a contextual framework of meaning.

If we don’t have a sense of mission and principles to measure ourselves against, we benchmark against other people instead of our own potential. In your deep inner life, you know what you ought to be doing. You know it would improve your quality of life. The challenge is to develop the character and competence to listen to it and live by it.

Quadrant II organizing is not prioritizing what’s on the schedule, it’s scheduling priorities.

It’s not filling every time slot with activity, it’s putting the “big rocks” in first and filling in with whatever sand, gravel, and water we need to add. Any week or day or moment in life is uncharted territory. That’s why the purpose of Quadrant II organizing is to empower us to live with integrity in the moment of choice.

The goal of the Quadrant II process is to increase the space between stimulus and response.

Instead of reacting based on your own needs and what you feel are pressures, you’re pausing to think about principles and connect with your conscience in a way that empowers you to put first things first in the moment of choice.

Genuine guilt becomes our teacher. Like a homing device that signals when an airplane gets off course, it warns us when our lives are out of alignment with the true north principles.

By planning in weekly context, you gain perspective to set aside the time necessary to prepare for future events better than you would in a daily context.

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed, but that our ability to do has increased.” Emerson

The end of education is to see men made whole, both in competence and in conscience.

Learning From Living

What can I learn from this week that will keep next week from essentially being a repeat of the same?

Evaluation is the final step in a living and learning cycle that creates growth. You may find it helpful to create a checklist of questions to carry with you, such as:

• Which goals did I achieve?
• What challenges did I encounter?
• How did I overcome them?
• Was accomplishing these goals the best use of my time?
• Did meeting these goals add to my personal integrity account?
• Which goals did I not achieve?
• What kept me from accomplishing these goals?
• What unmet goals should I carry into the coming week?
• Did I take time for renewal, reflection, and recommitment?
• Did I take time to sharpen the saw on a daily basis?
• In what ways was I able to create synergy between roles?
• What can I learn from this week as a whole?

You may want to do a monthly or quarterly evaluation and ask questions such as these:

• What patterns of success or failure do I see in setting and achieving goals?
• What keeps getting in the way of accomplishing my goals?
• What patterns or processes can be improved?

Creating a weekly process can not only help create efficiencies in your life, but also help you learn more each week.

To plan your week, do the following:

1.      Connect to your mission. Why are you here?

2.      Review your roles. What are your roles?

3.      Identify your goals. What are your roles' goals?

4.      Organize the week. What's the #1 thing you can do this week to get closer to a role's goal. Plan time to do that thing.

5.      Exercise integrity. Do that thing, but don't be afraid to push it back if something legitimately more important pops up.

6.      Evaluate. What did you do this week?

Interdependent Reality

Everything people identify as really important has to do with others.

Humility comes as we realize that “no man is an island”, that no one individual has all the talents, all the ideas, all the capacity to perform the functions of the whole.

Ultimately, there’s no such thing as “organizational behavior”, it’s all behavior of the people of the organization.

“A person cannot do right in one department of life whilst attempting to do wrong in another department. Life is one indivisible whole.”

Trust is the glue of life. Trust is something you can’t fake or quick-fix. It’s a fundamental function of the character of personal trustworthiness.

Is it more important to get the job done efficiently or to take the time to empower an employee or a child to do it?

Is it more important to spend time supervising and controlling others, or to release the tremendous creative potential in others so that they govern themselves?

Is it more important to schedule your time to efficiently solve the problems created by conflicting expectations or to take the time to work with others and clarify expectations up front?

Is it more important to spend time trying to solve problems created by lack of communication or to build the relationships that make effective communication possible?

First Things First Together: Planning With An Organization

This is the essence of win-win: in almost all situations, cooperation is far more productive than competition.

The lesson isn’t that we take turns losing. It’s that between us is the ability to work together to achieve far more than either of us could on our own.

We look at life through the glasses of win-lose, and if we fail to develop self-awareness, we spend our lives competing for “dimes” instead of cooperating for “dollars”. Contrary to our scripting, “to win” does not mean someone else has to lose, it means we accomplish our objectives.

When planning your organization's goals or negotiating with someone else follow the win-win process:

1.      Think win-win. Start thinking in terms of other people, of society as a whole.

2.      Seek first to understand, then to be understood. When we see things differently, we seek first to understand. Before we speak, we listen. Leave your own autobiography and invest deeply in genuinely understanding their point of view. Real listening shows respect. It creates trust. As we listen, we not only gain understanding, we also create the environment to be understood.

3.      Synergize. It’s the creation of third alternatives that are genuinely better than solutions individuals could ever come up with on their own.

Ask people you work with if they know what “true north” is for your organization? What is its essential purpose for being? What is the purpose?

Most organizations core problem is a lack of shared vision.

People scurry around being incredibly busy, wanting to create the feeling that they’re indispensable. Busyness (not to be confused with business) on the job becomes their primary source of justification and security – regardless of the fact that what they’re doing is essentially in Quadrant III.

High performance companies spend significantly more time doing things that are important, but not urgent.

Shared vision becomes the constitution, the criterion for decision making in the group. It bonds people together. It gives them a sense of unity and purpose that provides great strength in times of challenge. The most empowering organizational mission statements are in harmony with what we’ve come to call the universal mission – “to improve the economic well-being and quality of life of all stakeholders”.

Creating Synergistic Roles And Goals

As people work together on any task, sooner or later they have to deal with five elements:

1.      Desired results: What are we trying to do? By when?

2.      Guidelines: What are the parameters we are working with?

3.      Resources: What do we have to work with? Budget, people, assets?

4.      Accountability: How do we measure what we’re doing? What criteria will indicate the accomplishment? When will accountability take place?

5.      Consequences: Why are we doing this? What happens if we fail?

Creating win-win stewardship agreements is the key to motivating and organizing people. The stewardship agreement creates a synergistic partnership to accomplish first things first together.

1.      Specify desired results: It’s vital to make sure that the desired results are results, not methods.

2.      Set guidelines: Adapted from William Oncken’s work are the following six levels of initiative:

i.     Wait until told

ii.     Ask

iii.     Recommend

iv.     Act and report immediately

v.     Act and report periodically

vi.     Act on your own

The important thing is to match the level of initiative with the capacity of the individual.

3.      Identify available resources: How to access them, how to work with others who use the same resources, and what the limits are.

4.      Define accountability: In the process of accountability, the individual evaluates himself or herself against the desired results specified in the agreement. 360-degree feedback is helpful (from boss and subordinate).

5.      Determine the consequences: Two types of consequences

i.     Natural consequences deal with what will naturally happen if we do or do not achieve the goal

ii.     Logical consequences include things like compensation, advancement, training, and enlarged or diminished responsibility

Frustration is essentially a function of expectation. Clarifying up front does a great deal to contribute to the quality of life. Chances are good you’ll often see things differently when you begin to create stewardship agreements.

The key issue becomes the quality of the relationship between the people involved and their ability to communicate and synergize with each other in seeking third-alternative solutions.

Empowerment

Anytime we think the problem is “out there” that thought is the problem. We may not be the leader, but we’re a leader.

To empower others you must first cultivate the conditions of empowerment. Empowerment must be grown. We don’t really empower other people, but by nurturing these conditions, we create the environment in which they can empower themselves through the use of their endowments.

At the heart of empowerment is trustworthiness, which is a function of character and competence. Character includes: Integrity (ability to walk your talk), Maturity (say what needs to be said), Abundance mentality (infinite number of third alternatives). Competence includes: Technical skills, Conceptual ability, Ability to interact effectively with others. To nurture character and competence is the most high-leverage thing we can do to create empowerment.

An organization is only as trustworthy as the individuals in the organization. In a high-trust culture, the agreements previously made supervises the employees. If we can do what we’ve agreed to do, without someone having to check up on us we have become trustworthy.

An easy way to ignite a culture of trust is to align structures and systems correctly. Management works IN the system, Leadership works ON the system. As we build criteria into the agreement, we create a standard against which we can measure our own performance. It is important to accept the responsibility for our own performance. Sometimes that means you need to have the humility to recognize that we have blind spots, that getting other perspectives will help us improve the quality of our own.

An easy way to get outside perspectives is to ask questions:

“What are the three things you would like to continue to do?”

“What are the three things you would like me to stop doing?”

“What would you like me to start doing?

As soon as you receive feedback, it’s good to analyze it and then go back to those who gave it to you and say, “Thank you. I appreciate this feedback. Let me share it with you. This is what you’re saying to me.....”

A CEO of one organization asked people to give feedback based on two questions:

1.      Indicate by the size of the letters P(producer), M(manager), and L(leader) where they felt he spent most of his time?

2.      Indicate by the size of the letters PML, where they felt he SHOULD be spending his time?

Another example would be the Stakeholder Information System (SIS)

Everyone gets an annual printout of the perceptions of all those he or she interfaces with, and the strength of those perceptions. They use it as the basis for their personal and professional development, and no one gets promoted unless they have high marks, including those from their subordinates.

Your organization’s culture is the one competitive advantage that cannot be duplicated. A quality culture must be nourished over time.

Going Forward

If our expectation is that there will be challenges, then challenges will not create frustration. Unmet expectations create frustration, but our expectations are within our control. Whenever we feel frustrated, we can go back to the root of the problem:

·        What expectation did I have that’s been violated?

·        Was that expectation based on true north?

·        What should I do to change the expectation?

·        What can I learn from this that will affect my expectations in the future?

The best way to develop courage is to set a goal and achieve it, make a promise and keep it.

Conclusion

Is there something I feel I could do to make a difference? If there is, then do it.

That is the entire book summed up in a sentence. I have adapted the weekly planning (if you want my template excel workbook, just ask) and it does seem to be an easier way for me to accomplish my to-do list. However, building the to-do list has now become one of the largest tasks for each week.

Overall, a much more "hands-on" book than 7 Habits or the 8th Habit. I think it is a good book, but maybe not a read every year kind of book. Once or twice will be plenty.