Book Review: Principle Centered Leadership

May 28, 2008
Add Comment

Principle Centered Leadership, by Steven Covey

4172k6q3y7l_sl500_aa240_.jpg

For the most part, this is a rehash of most of the concepts found in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If you have read that book already then you already know most of what you will learn in Principle Centered Leadership. However there are a couple new/newly spun things, most notable of which is the abundance mentality. This is the concept that there are two types of people in this world: abundance thinkers and scarcity thinkers. Scarcity thinkers are always competing for limited resources and approach everything with a win/lose mentality. Abundance thinkers understand that resources, positions, and opportunities are not really scarce but are abundant and approach everything with a win/win mentality.

If you haven’t read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People then Principle Centered Leadership is a decent read and will help give a different perspective on the business world and life in general. However, if you have already read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People I would recommend foregoing the reading of this book and instead reading up on the abundance mentality theory.

I’m not a huge fan of Covey’s writing style. I can’t pin it down but there is something about it that makes it hard for me to stay focused on the book. If you have read Covey before and have had trouble staying engaged, this book will be no exception. If you read Covey before and loved it, this book will likely be right up your alley.


Useless Comments

May 27, 2008
Add Comment

I ran across a rather cryptic piece of code today but luckily it was commented:

// This cause me 2+ days of debugging work

Seriously though, this is less than useless – it is counterproductive. The comment does nothing but state an irrelevant fact that has nothing to do with the code. Instead, a useful line or two explaining what the code did and, more importantly, why it did it, would save me the same two days of debugging work that are likely to follow.

If you write a comment anywhere, anytime make sure that it:

1. Is relevant

2.  Explains WHY

3. Possibly explains what is happening – this won’t be needed in most cases if the WHY is explained well enough


Culture Kick

May 23, 2008
Add Comment

I’ve been on somewhat of a culture kick lately. I have always known the importance of corporate culture but for some reason my various observations have come to the forefront in recent weeks. I have recently posted about turning the opinion of a customer, core values, employee-management relations, and the public face of the company. All of these things have at least one thing in common: they are all an integral part of corporate culture.

When companies are small it is easy to convey culture. Less people means communication is easier and it is thus a simpler process to convey expectations. Likewise, when a company is small the individuals who do not fit into the corporate culture stick out and become rather apparent. However, as a company grows we often see that the communication becomes muddled and it is easier for anomalies to find their way in. If you study many successful large companies you will see that most of them are able to translate small company success into large company success through the proper maintenance of their corporate culture.

For a while now I have been watching my company grow and have been lucky enough to witness it shift from a small/medium to a large company mentality. My focus in school was on small business so I studied plenty of cases where small companies rapidly grew and how they handled the process. I have been very interested in seeing how upper management handled the process here. I am happy to say that we are doing a great job, at least from my vantage point.

We have had a few meetings lately where the CEO spent a few hours with a large group of people going over different aspects of our own corporate culture. We used to achieve this process through what we term “patio meetings”. In these patio meetings the entire staff would come to an open space, where ever one was available, and the CEO or someone else would talk to us. Many times the meeting was called to announce a new client or milestone but we rarely walked away from any meeting without first having a lesson in corporate culture instilled in us. As the company continues to grow it will inevitably become harder to maintain a strong culture through patio meetings alone. Recognizing this, the company created a “Management Development Program” geared towards teaching our culture through a series of seminars.

The road from a small company to a large company is difficult and fraught with perils. It is arguably more difficult than the road from nothingness to a small company. If history paints an accurate depiction of how to make this transition smoother, it will inevitably have to be tightly coupled with a strong corporate culture.