Stephen Covey Education

[Etienne Levic]

Thesummit will introduce hundreds of educators at all grade levels to a new paradigm of 21st century leadership where every student is a leader and educators are equipped with proven leadership methodologies and tools to instill a deep sense of responsibility and personal leadership accountability in their students. Schools who have adopted this paradigm, which is the foundation of Franklin Covey's The Leader in Me education process, are experiencing results as follows:

The summit is being underwritten by California University of Pennsylvania, AVI Foodsystems, Inc. and Franklin Covey Co. Admission is complimentary for all attendees, including school superintendents, administrators, principals, teachers, other educators and attendees from the fields of business, government and the community. Registration is required and seating is limited.

Franklin Covey Co. (NYSE: FC) is the global consulting and training leader in the areas of strategy execution, leadership, customer loyalty, sales performance, and individual effectiveness. Over the Company's history, Franklin Covey clients have included 90 percent of the Fortune 100, more than 75 percent of the Fortune 500, thousands of small- and mid-sized businesses, as well as numerous government entities and educational institutions. Franklin Covey has 42 direct and licensee offices providing professional services in 155 countries. For more information, please visit www.franklincovey.com.

California University of Pennsylvania, founded in 1852, serves 9,000 graduate and undergraduate students. Cal U offers 150 undergraduate majors/concentrations and 50 graduate programs in liberal arts, science and technology, education and human services, and professional studies. A proud member of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, Cal U is dedicated to building character and careers. For more information, please visit www.calu.edu.

"Dr. Stephen R. Covey - one of the world'sleading management consultants and author of the best selling book The Seven Habits OfHighly Effective People - is co-chairman of Franklin Covey located in Salt Lake City,Utah in the U.S.A. Franklin Covey provides consultancy services to Fortune 500 companiesas well as thousand of small and mid-size companies, educational institutions, governmentand other organisations world-wide. Their work in Principle Centered Leadership isconsidered to be an instrumental foundation to the effectiveness of quality, leadership,service, team building, organisational alignment and other strategic corporate initiatives.

Mahatma Gandhi said that seven things will destroy us. Notice thatall of them have to do with social and political conditions. Note also that the antidoteof each of these "deadly sins" is an explicit external standard or somethingthat is based on natural principles and laws, not on social values.

The Seven Habits and Principle-Centered Leadership are registered trademarks of FranklinCovey and are used with permission. To learn more about Franklin Covey, visit theirweb-site at www.franklincovey.com

This refers to the practice of getting something for nothing -manipulating markets and assets so you don't have to work or produce added value, justmanipulate people and things. Today there are professions built around making wealthwithout working, making much money without paying taxes, benefiting from free governmentprograms without carrying a fair share of the financial burdens, and enjoying all theperks of citizenship of country and membership of corporation without assuming any of therisk or responsibility.

How many of the fraudulent schemes that went on in the 1980s, oftencalled the decade of greed, were basically get-rich-quick schemes or speculationspromising practitioners, "You don't even have to work for it"? That is why Iwould be very concerned if one of my children went into speculative enterprises or if theylearned how to make a lot of money fast without having to pay the price by adding value ona day-to-day basis.

Some network marketing and pyramidal organizations worry me becausemany people get rich quick by building a structure under them that feeds them withoutwork. They are rationalized to the hilt; nevertheless the overwhelming emotional motive isoften greed: "You can get rich without much work. You may have to work initially, butsoon you can have wealth without work." New social mores and norms are cultivatedthat cause distortions in their judgement.

Justice and judgement are inevitably inseparable, suggesting that tothe degree you move away from the laws of nature, your judgement will be adverselyaffected. You get distorted notions. You start telling rational lies to explain why thingswork or why they don't. You move away from the law of "the farm" into social /political environments.

When we read of organisations in trouble, we often hear the sad confessions of executives who tell of moving away from natural laws and principles for a period of time and begin overbuilding, over borrowing, and over speculating, not really reading the stream or getting objective feedback, just hearing a lot of self-talk internally. Now they have a high debt to pay. They may have to work hard just to survive - without hope of being healthy for five years or more. It's back to the basics, hand to the plow. And many of these executives, in earlier days, were critical of the conservative founders of the corporations who stayed close to the fundamentals and preferred to stay small and free of debt.

The chief query of the immature, greedy, selfish, and sensuous hasalways been, "What's in it for me? Will this please me? Will it ease me?" Latelymany people seem to want these pleasures without conscience or sense of responsibility,even abandoning or utterly neglecting spouses and children in the name of doing theirthing. But independence is not the most mature state of being - it's only a middleposition on the way to interdependence, the most advanced and mature state. To learn togive and take, to live selflessly, to be sensitive, to be considerate, is our challenge.Otherwise there is no sense of social responsibility or accountability in our pleasurableactivities.

The ultimate costs of pleasures without conscience are high asmeasured in terms of time and money, in terms of reputation and in terms of wounding thehearts and minds of other people who are adversely affected by those who just want toindulge and gratify themselves in the short term. It's dangerous to be pulled or lulledaway from natural law without conscience. Conscience is essentially the repository oftimeless truths and principles - the internal monitor of natural law.

A prominent, widely published psychologist worked to align peoplewith their moral conscience in what was called "integrity therapy." He once toldme that he was a manic-depressive. "I knew I was getting suicidal," he said."Therefore, I committed myself to a mental institution. I tried to work out of it,neutralize it, until I reached the point where I could leave the hospital. I don't doclinical work now because it is too stressful. I mostly do research. And through my ownstruggle, I discovered that integrity therapy was the only way to go. I gave up mymistress, confessed to my wife, and had peace for the first time in my life. ""

Pleasure without conscience is one of the key temptations for today's executives. Sometimes on airplanes I'll scan the magazines directed at executives, noting the advertisements. Many of these ads, perhaps two-thirds of them, invite executives to indulge themselves without conscience because they "deserve it" or have "earned it" or "want it," and why not "give in" and "let it all hang out"? The seductive message is, "You've arrived. You are now a law unto yourself. You don't need a conscience to govern you anymore." And in some ads you see sixty-year-old men with attractive thirty-year old women, the "significant others" who accompany some executives to conventions. Whatever happened to spouses? What happened to the social mores that make cheating on spouses illegitimate behaviour?

As dangerous as a little knowledge is, even more dangerous is muchknowledge without a strong, principled character. Purely intellectual development withoutcommensurate internal character development makes as much sense as putting a high-poweredsports car in the hands of a teenager who is high on drugs. Yet all too often in theacademic world, that's exactly what we do by not focusing on the character development of young people.

One of the reasons I'm excited about taking the Seven Habits intothe schools is that it is character education. Some people don't like character educationbecause, they say, "that's your value system." But you can get a common set ofvalues that everyone agrees on. It is not that difficult to decide, for example, thatkindness, fairness, dignity, contribution, and integrity are worth keeping. No one willfight you on those. So let's start with values that are unarguable and infuse them in oureducation system and in our corporate training and development programs. Let's achieve abetter balance between the development of character and intellect.

The people who are transforming education today are doing it by building consensus around a common set of principles, values, and priorities and debunking the high degree of specialization, departmentalization, and partisan politics.

In his book Moral Sentiment, which preceded Wealth of Nations, AdamSmith explained how foundational to the success of our systems is the moral foundation :how we treat each other, the spirit of benevolence, of service, of contribution. If weignore the moral foundation and allow economic systems to operate without moral foundationand without continued education, we will soon create an amoral, if not immoral, societyand business. Economic and political systems are ultimately based on a moral foundation.

To Adam Smith, every business transaction is a moral challenge tosee that both parties come out fairly. Fairness and benevolence in business are theunderpinnings of the free enterprise system called capitalism. Our economic system comesout of a constitutional democracy where minority rights are to be attended to as well. Thespirit of the Golden Rule or of win-win is a spirit of morality, of mutual benefit, offairness for all concerned. Paraphrasing one of the mottos of the Rotary Club, "Is itfair and does it serve the interests of all the stakeholders?" That's just a moralsense of stewardship toward all of the stakeholders.

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