Stephen R. Covey

The best-selling business book of its generation started as a doctoral dissertation. Stephen R. Covey's Doctor of Religious Education at Brigham Young University was built on a study of American self-help literature, and the division he drew there, between what he called the personality ethic of most of that literature and a character ethic grounded in principles, became the frame of The 7 Habits two decades later. He had already published the argument once, for a smaller audience: Spiritual Roots of Human Relations came out from Deseret Book in 1970, and Wikipedia's editors, with unusual candor, say that reading it shows how his later work was a secular development of the same ideas. Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor and a fellow member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, put it more bluntly: the 7 Habits were a secular distillation of Latter-day Saint values.

The rest of the credentials were conventional for a Utah executive of his era. Born in Salt Lake City on October 24, 1932, grandson on his mother's side of Stephen L Richards, an apostle and counselor in the Church's First Presidency, and on his father's side of the Stephen Mack Covey who founded the original Little America stop in Wyoming. A hip condition in junior high ended his athletics and moved him to debate. Then a business degree at the University of Utah, an MBA at Harvard Business School, where he sometimes preached on Boston Common, and two years as a missionary in England. In July 1962, at 29, he became the first president of the Church's Irish Mission, and from 1973 he trained missionaries across the eastern United States as a mission representative of the Quorum of the Twelve.

Covey taught at BYU's business school for years, helped set up its Master of Organizational Behavior program, since folded into the MBA, and served as an assistant to the university president. In 1980 he set up Stephen R. Covey & Associates in Provo; in 1989, the year the book came out, it became the Covey Leadership Center. The Salt Lake Tribune counted 40 offices worldwide and $19 million in combined profit over 1992 to 1996. The audio edition of The 7 Habits became the first nonfiction audiobook in U.S. publishing history to sell a million copies. Time put him on its 1996 list of the 25 most influential Americans.

Franklin Quest, Hyrum W. Smith's Salt Lake company, sold the Franklin Day Planner, a paper time-management system with a following that bordered on devotional, and the two companies announced their combination on January 22, 1997. The deal closed on May 30 of that year at a value Wikipedia puts at $160 million; SEC filings before the merger showed Covey, or a trust he had set up, receiving $27 million in cash or stock, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. FranklinCovey, headquartered in Salt Lake City, kept his 7 Habits course as a core training product alongside The 4 Disciplines of Execution and Leading at the Speed of Trust, the last built on a book by his son Stephen M. R. Covey. Covey was co-founder, vice chairman and a director. The stock told a different story. From $28.25 a share in July 1997, the price slid to 66 cents in April 2003 before recovering to $9.81 the week he died in July 2012; the Tribune's verdict was that the combined company did not perform as either side had hoped. Reports at his death said FranklinCovey had worked with three-quarters of the Fortune 500, a claim I could not check against a client list. The company's revenue in fiscal 2023 was $280.5 million, which for a firm 26 years past a $160 million merger is neither a disaster nor a triumph. Covey kept writing through all of it: Principle-Centered Leadership, First Things First (1994, with Roger and Rebecca Merrill), The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families (1997), The 8th Habit (2004, from Free Press), and The Leader in Me (2008), the last built on A.B. Combs Elementary in Raleigh, North Carolina, where principal Muriel Summers had put the habits into a grade-school curriculum; by 2012 the program was in more than 600 schools. The 3rd Alternative came in 2011. In 2010 he went back to a campus, taking the Huntsman Presidential Chair at Utah State University's Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, endowed by the chemical executive whose name it carries. He held it at his death. One controversy sits on the record: a 1997 speech in Hawaii supporting the campaign there against same-sex marriage, which the Salt Lake Tribune revisited in its 2012 obituary.

"I want to release human potential," he told his brother.

In April 2012 Covey lost control of a bicycle on a downhill in Rock Canyon Park in Provo. The helmet slipped, his daughter said, and his head hit the pavement; he also cracked ribs and partly collapsed a lung. He died of complications on July 16, 2012, at 2:15 a.m. at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center in Idaho Falls, at 79. The funeral filled the UCCU Center at Utah Valley University. He left Sandra, his wife of nearly 56 years, nine children and 52 grandchildren, and a line his brother recalled for the Deseret News as the whole of his ambition: "I want to release human potential." The honors list runs to ten honorary doctorates, the 1994 International Entrepreneur of the Year award, Toastmasters' Golden Gavel (2004) and a Fatherhood Award from the National Fatherhood Initiative (2003). The sales figure, meanwhile, keeps moving: 20 million in the 2012 obituaries, more than 65 million in Wikipedia today, with no date on the larger number.