The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Stephen M.R. Covey, Stephen R. Covey, and Rebecca R. Merrill

It’s been a thought-provoking and interesting book so far. It asks a lot of questions of me that dig pretty deep into my thoughts and feelings – and motivations.

Am I trustworthy? Do I have true, real honesty? Can I be relied upon? Do I surround myself with others who are trustworthy? Am I working on my ethics and honesty to be a better and happier person?

Lots of things about ourselves totally hinge on trust. I had never looked at it from these points of view before. It’s an interesting subject and one that I hope will help me get more out of life.

I spend lot of time thinking about integrity and I don’t think I do enough work to improve it in myself.

Perhaps now is as good a time to do so as ever!

First Things First by Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill

I give this book five stars as it really helped me organise and prioritise my life.
I develped a great mission statement, I review my roles weekly, and I am so happy with all the things I am achieving.
I am also developing Integrity, really! Rather than just talking the talk I am walking the talk. I have had a few friends recently comment on my input into their lives.
I now can schedule, my personal goals weekly, my family goals with my two young children, making my husband happy, doing commmunity work and looking out for my friends. Whilst I am still a work in progress, this book together with the 7 habits, have made a huge impact in my world.
I have read SO many self help books, but in the end they just made me feel bad that I wasnt achieving all these things. But FTF, really makes you think about whats important to you, there is no use in following someone elses plan if those values dont resonate within your own world or heart.
Go ahead and get this, read it and apply it. Slowly you will see how putting FTF can rock your little world.

Stephen R. Covey on Leadership: Great Leaders, Great Team, Great Results by Stephen R. Covey

Leadership: Great Leaders, Great Team, Great Results. This is an audio only presentation that is a sample introduction to a 20 hour three or five day training session that Franklin Covey does throughout the country. This may be meant as a promotional piece for the trainings, but is a very interesting and usable stand alone collection of Leadership development lessons.

The theme of this Audio presentation is to introduce a whole person leadership approach to leading. The presentation is a call to great leadership, leadership that inspires people in organization to become great organization with winning streaks. It is meant to take a tool set approach to have a participant develop a vision for great leadership and a paradigm for leadership in a knowledge centered world with a framework of systems and processes by explaining the skills and tools to enable great leadership. This is a modern view of leadership that gives you examples of how it works and dispels the old school methods of command, control, power of using only a couple of strong individuals to lead.

This is very informative and packed with a lot of leadership principles and examples. The part I took to heart is the journey to execution. The journey of execution starts with developing meaningful goals or WIGS as it calls them, wildly important goals. The second step in this execution is to have lead measures for actions. It gives examples of keeping a compelling scoreboard. Once you have those in place it all creates a cadence of accountability in a way that is engaging of the team. All of this execution is done with a synergy of engaging the team. The 80/20 rule is explained, which is something that I have applied in other disciplines (like software development), 20 percent of the effort will produce 80 percent of the results. It challenges to ask, what 20 percent of things or tasks should your team be focusing on to achieve your WIGS.

If you are not a normal listener to audio books or presentations, do not worry, this is one you can listen to. This presentation has more that seven presenters. It is filled with many dramas, examples and readers. This is a first rate production with drama, background music, sports examples, real life stories, not just a reading.

Definitely an encouraging and personally challenging collection of examples and stories of how big and little things (being a trim tab in your organization is one example) can make an impact.

I strongly recommend this for anyone in business or in an organization that has the desire to make a difference in the organization that they serve (oops work) in. I listened to it twice, because I liked it, but also to get as much out of it and have the ability to apply it, really apply and implement it.

Principle Centered Leadership by Stephen R. Covey

This is an amazing attempt to significantly address the root cause of the problems of this world – the undersupply of quality leadership with principles. As the book stresses, it is imperative that political, business and organizational leaders understand and embrace fairness, commonsense, quality, ethical and dedicated leadership to drive positive political, economic, and social change across the world. This books shows how World citizens can be empowered and how the vast natural resources of the planet can be most effectively deployed. This was obviously a very inspiring book. The only problem is that I don’t know how many leaders would dare to read it?

Focus Audio Workshop by Stephen R. Covey and Steve Jones

During my initial first few minutes of listening I realized that Stephen Covey wasn’t the main speaker on this tape (he narrates some sections). Suddenly I thought maybe the quality would be mediocre. That this would be some cranked out product just to make a buck. I was wrong. I listened to all 3 CD’s (the 4th is a computer demo) and enjoyed the presentation highly.

Steve Jones is the person who gives presentation. I believe it is a recorded live process. What I liked about this alot is it covered all of the Franklin Covey time management principles in a very focussed manner (hence the title…??).

This CD series serves as an excellent refresher or introduction to the principles of managing your time. They introduce the time quadrants and explain in pretty good detail how to use paper, PDA or computer planners to manage your time. The sessions never bog down in any one area and they move from topic to topic at just about the right pace.

Obviously this CD set has some ties to the services and courses offered by Franklin Covey. They’d love it if you registered for the full course or bought a $200 planner/binder. However the course on tape/CD will standalone quite well. The speaker is clear and has a good delivery. I enjoyed this and found the time passed quickly (which doesn’t always happen) as I was listening. Buy this – you won’t be sorry!