Franklin Covey Quotes

Character is who you are under pressure, not when everything is fine.” —RITU GHATOURY

Are You Paying Trust Taxes, or Earning Trust Dividends?

People naturally want to matter—and they want to make a contribution that matters.

Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time left to change anything.

Thinking & Wisdom: Peter Bevelin, Edward de Bono, Benjamin Franklin, Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Kahneman, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Steven Pinker, Tania Singer, Amos Tversky.   Philosophy & Effective Living: James Allen, Stephen Covey, Viktor Frankl, Tamar Gendler’s Open Yale philosophy lectures, Daniel Gilbert, Khalil Gibran, A.C.

Is it logical that two people can disagree and both can be right? It's not logical: it's psychological. And it's very real. You see the young lady; I see the old woman. We're both looking at the same picture, and both of us are right. We see the same black lines, the same white spaces. But we interpret them differently because we've been conditioned to interpret them differently. And unless we value the differences in our perceptions, unless we value each other and give credence to the possibility that we're both right. . .we will never be able to transcend the limits of that conditioning. . .I value you. I value your perception. I want to understand.

The goal in your interviews with key stakeholders is to decipher or decode the pictures in their minds.

Words are only code for the pictures in our minds.

When trust goes down, speed goes down and costs go up. Distrust slows everything. Sales decelerate, customers grow cold, and team members get discouraged or drop out entirely. Distrust has hard costs. If you’re distrusted, people will actively refuse to do business with you, your pipeline of revenue freezes, and in extreme cases you shut down.

Business confidence is one of the top concerns of CEOs in the latest Conference Board Report of 2009—earlier in the decade, it didn’t even show up.

The leader’s task in a crisis is to create a “contribution-focused” workplace. Tell prospective new hires, “Don’t ask me for a job—bring me a solution.

There might be exceptions—and if so, you might rethink their employment—but few people really want to be mediocre. Most of your team members want to make a valued contribution—to find purpose in their work.

Here are some examples of where you might be paying Trust Taxes or earning Trust Dividends:

A Harris Interactive/FranklinCovey poll of over 23,000 employees in key industries and employed in key functional areas sheds a sharp light on this issue. The poll revealed that 37 percent of employees didn’t understand their companies’ priorities. Only one in five was enthusiastic about their organization’s goals, and only one in five saw a clear connection between their tasks and their organization’s goals.

a smart project leader starts with the assumption that nothing is clear.

Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography

Your job as leader is not to manage them but to help them manage themselves. That means “clearing the path” for them, making it possible for them to keep their commitments. You engage people through consistent and shared accountability.

There is no such thing as an ongoing project—that would be an oxymoron.

Here’s what I’ve observed: Successful projects are transparent. Everyone knows what’s working well and what isn’t. Information is broadly shared and there’s no guessing, enabling people to make small adjustments that keep the project in alignment. In unsuccessful projects, information is doled out on an ‘as-needed’ basis. People are expected to work in silos, keep their heads down, stay focused on their own part of the project, and are discouraged from asking questions.

share your vision with your employees. The number one reason employees don’t share a company vision is that they don’t know what it is. The only way you can determine if your vision is shared by all is simply to tell them. A Harris Interactive/FranklinCovey poll of over 23,000 employees in key industries and employed in key functional areas sheds a sharp light on this issue. The poll revealed that 37 percent of employees didn’t understand their companies’ priorities. Only one in five was enthusiastic about their organization’s goals, and only one in five saw a clear connection between their tasks and their organization’s goals.

a critical principle of project management: Words are only code for the pictures in our minds.

Character Ethic as the foundation of success—things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the Golden Rule. Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is representative of that literature. It is, basically, the story of one man’s effort to integrate certain principles and habits deep within his nature.

Project management is as much about effectively leading people as it is about skillfully managing a process. You’ve heard the fable of the goose and the golden eggs—you’ll recall that the impatient farmer killed the goose to get at all the eggs and ended up with nothing. In project management terms, the outcome is the golden egg, but the project team is the goose. The true formula for winning at projects is PEOPLE + PROCESS = SUCCESS.

In stark contrast, almost all the literature in the first 150 years or so focused on what could be called the Character Ethic as the foundation of success—things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the Golden Rule. Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is representative of that literature. It is, basically, the story of one man’s effort to integrate certain principles and habits deep within his nature.

Character Ethic as the foundation of success - things like integrity, humility, fidelity, temperance, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the Golden Rule. Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography is representative of that literature. It is, basically, the story of one man’s effort to integrate certain principles and habits deep within his character.

Widespread distrust in a society…imposes a kind of tax on all forms of economic activity, a tax that high-trust societies do not have to pay.