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84 of 109 people found the following review helpful:
15 million sales - but how many readers?, 8 Mar 2001
By A Customer
Let me be quite blunt - this is probably one of the five worst books I've ever read. Last time I looked, sales figures on this book stood at 15 million plus. But just because you buy a book doesn't mean you read it, at least not all the way through. And it is my belief that very few of those 15 million buyers will have read this turgid nonsense from cover to cover. The first red light came on as I read, in the Acknowledgement section, that Covey had based the book on work done as part of "a doctoral program" in the mid seventies. The work in question was a review of "the success literature published in the United States since 1776". Red light number 2 appeared when Covey went on to say that he doesn't think much of "the success literature of the past 50 years" which he regards as "superficial ... social band-aids and aspirin".
If we believed this claim, we would haqve to suppose that this is actually just a warmed over summary of American success literature from 1776 to 1926.
But hang on a minute, if the good stuff all happened before 1926, what are all these references to Peter Drucker, Marilyn Ferguson, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow, Alvin Toffler, etc., etc? And what is the justification for the half-baked guide to left brain and right brain thinking? Red light number 3 flashed on as I began to realise that I never was going to find out who these allegedly "highly effective people" are.
Which means that I have no way of finding out whether they are actually effective in any way I'd want to emulate. Actually I guess that's not entirely accurate.
Whilst we are never given the names of any of these "highly effective" individuals, we can at least get a fairly clear idea as to what sort of people they are. On pages 86-88, for example, we are told that being proactive is better than anything. Particularly if your boss is an ignorant tyrant, in which case you should proactively start sucking up to him before anyone else gets in as No. 1 yes man. You should also learn to practise emotional blackmail wherever you can. Treat other people nicely, so that they always "owe you one", especially your friends and relations (Covey calls this creating an "emotional bank account"!) (pp.188-202). Is that *really* what it takes to be a "highly effective person"?
Personally I think this book should have a warning: "This book can seriously damage your mental health" stamped on every page.
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