How to create meaning and engage employees: what Covey, Christensen and the Marriotts said, and what the numbers say

Stephen Covey published The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989. By 2012 it had sold more than 20 million copies, and Time had named its author one of the 25 most influential Americans of 1996. The habits are a ladder: be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, think win-win, seek first to understand, synergize, sharpen the saw. The first three build what Covey called independence, the next three interdependence, and the seventh keeps the other six running. Underneath sits his argument against what he called the personality ethic, the self-help tradition of techniques and impressions, in favour of a character ethic built on principles he treated as natural law.

The admission came from a colleague. Clayton Christensen, according to Covey's Wikipedia entry, described the Seven Habits as a secular distillation of Latter-day Saint values, and Covey's own bibliography supports him. His first book, Spiritual Roots of Human Relations, was published by Deseret Book in 1970, nineteen years before the secular version; he held a doctorate in religious education from BYU, had served as the first president of the Church's Irish Mission from July 1962, and taught at BYU's business school, where he helped set up its organizational behaviour master's programme. The manager reading the 7 Habits in an airport lounge in 1995 was reading a devotional book with the devotion filed off. Whether that makes the advice better or worse is a separate question; the point here is that Covey did not hide the source, and neither should anyone quoting him.

Christensen's contribution is narrower and, for a manager, more useful, because it is about resource allocation. In the July-August 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review he published How Will You Measure Your Life?, grown out of remarks the Harvard Business School class of 2010 had asked him to give on applying his theories to their own lives; the book version with James Allworth and Karen Dillon followed in 2012. The article's spine is Frederick Herzberg's old finding that "the most powerful motivator isn't money" but learning, growth, responsibility, contribution and recognition, which Christensen turns into a rule for designing jobs: if the work offers none of those, no bonus scheme will make up the difference. Its second argument is the one executives quote. Companies drift, he wrote, because the resource allocation process rewards what pays off in the short term over what matters, and people drift the same way, giving their hours to the projects with visible returns and starving the relationships that only pay off in decades. His third argument is about marginal cost. The rationalisation "just this once" always looks cheap at the margin, and the full price only shows later, which is why he told his students to decide their principles before they were tested rather than during. The evidence for all this is the article's own material, his classmates' lives at successive reunions, and Christensen was candid that the sample was his friends. He was also candid about where the ideas came from. He was a bishop, a counselor in the Boston mission presidency and, from 2002 to 2009, an area seventy, and he wrote a book for members on everyday missionary work in 2013. Managers who use his yardstick without noticing that it ends with an account rendered to God are using half of it, which is fine, but they should know they have made a choice.

The Marriotts never wrote a theory. They wrote a sentence and then built systems around it, which is the version of meaning most employees can use.

• The sentence, from J. Willard Marriott on tape and now on the company's core values page: "Take care of associates and they will take care of the customers."
• The founder's practice, per his son Bill: when hourly workers were sick he visited them; when they were in trouble he got them out of it.
• The system, per a 1997 Deseret News profile: an 800-number associate resource line in 15 languages covering childcare, elder care, spousal abuse and addiction, credited with lower turnover and absenteeism.
• The test, per the Salt Lake Tribune's 2013 profile: during a 1980s layoff of 1,000 workers the company paid for resume help and placement, and 90 percent found new jobs.
• The scale, per Wikipedia: 418,000 employees in 2024 across 9,361 properties, so a rule written for a root beer stand in 1927 now governs a workforce the size of a mid-sized city.

David Neeleman ran a smaller version at JetBlue: his 2002 salary of $200,000 and $90,000 bonus went in full to the Crewmember Crisis Fund for employees in trouble. Kevin Rollins, at Dell, oversaw plans to spend more on staff training and customer service during his years as president and chief executive, and told the Deseret News in March 2006 that "most corporations lose their way when they become unfocused." These are gestures with numbers on them. None is a theory of meaning, which may be why they worked.

Gallup has asked the same engagement questions across countries for more than a decade, and the trend is down. The figures below come from the firm's State of the Global Workplace reports and its April 2025 release.

Gallup put the cost of the 2024 decline at $438 billion in lost productivity worldwide, and its chief workplace scientist, Jim Harter, located the cause in the middle: "Manager engagement affects team engagement, which affects productivity." That is a finding Covey and Christensen would recognise, since both wrote for the manager rather than the board. It is also the limit of what the data can say about them. Gallup does not ask respondents whether their boss has read the 7 Habits, and no study we could find compares engagement at companies run by members of the Church with anyone else's. The books sold; the claim that they moved the needle is unmeasured.

Meaning is a management outcome. Nobody in this essay proved they could manufacture it.

Ed Catmull's Creativity, Inc., written with Amy Wallace and published in April 2014, is the one book in this set built around a mechanism rather than a maxim. Its argument, in Wikipedia's summary, is for a culture in which "candid criticism is delivered sensitively" while autonomy survives, and its instrument was Pixar's Braintrust, a room where directors heard hard notes from peers with no power to enforce them. The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs shortlisted it for their 2014 business book award. Catmull grew up in Salt Lake City and is in our profiles for that reason, though the book itself does not lean on his upbringing.

The same author supplies the counter-case. Catmull was implicated in the Silicon Valley no-poaching arrangements, in which Bay Area firms agreed not to cold-call each other's staff, and defended himself in a deposition by saying he had responsibility for the long term as well as the payroll. Disney and its subsidiaries, Pixar among them, paid $100 million in settlement. An employee's engagement, it turns out, can be raised by candour in the review room and lowered by a quiet agreement about his market value, and the same executive can preside over both. That is the honest lesson of the whole shelf. The advice is sound. The proof is in the payroll, and the payroll does not always agree with the book.