Stephen Covey: How a Failing Hip Led to The 7 Habits' Character Ethic

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Stephen R. Covey grew up in Utah in the 1940s as a fiercely athletic teenager until a slipped capital femoral epiphysis, a failing hip joint, ended his sports. He redirected that drive into academics and the debate team and graduated high school early. He went on to earn a business degree from the University of Utah, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a Doctor of Religious Education from Brigham Young University. Born into a prominent Salt Lake City family, he served a two-year mission in England, preached on the Boston Common while at Harvard, and in 1962 became the first president of the Irish mission. Clayton Christensen later called his work a secular distillation of Latter-day Saint values, shaped also by Carl Rogers and Peter Drucker.

For his dissertation Covey studied American success literature back to 1776 and argued it shifted after World War I from a character ethic of integrity and humility to a personality ethic of image and technique. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, published in 1989, framed the habits as a maturity continuum from dependence to independence to interdependence and sold 65 million copies. He followed it with The 8th Habit in 2004 and The Leader in Me in 2008. In 2012, at 79, he lost control of his bicycle on a hill in Rock Canyon Park in Provo; his helmet slipped and he died months later in Idaho Falls.

• Habit five, seek first to understand, then to be understood, draws on Rogers' client-centered therapy.
• Covey separated values, which govern behavior, from principles, which govern consequences.
• The 7 Habits was the first nonfiction audiobook in U.S. publishing history to sell over a million copies.
• At A.B. Combs Elementary in Raleigh, students greeted visitors, ran assemblies and tracked their own progress in data notebooks.
• He and Sandra Merrill had nine children and 55 grandchildren, including NFL player Britain Covey.