Page 28 - stephen covey The seven habits of highly effective people

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart

When people fail to respect the P/PC Balance in their use of physical assets in organizations, they
decrease organizational effectiveness and often leave others with dying geese.
For example, a person in charge of a physical asset, such as a machine, may be eager to make a good
impression on his superiors. Perhaps the company is in a rapid growth stage and promotions are
coming fast. So he produces at optimum levels -- no downtime, no maintenance. He runs the
machine day and night. The production is phenomenal, costs are down, and profits skyrocket.
Within a short time, he's promoted. Golden eggs.
But suppose you are his successor on the job. You inherit a very sick goose, a machine that, by this
time, is rusted and starts to break down. You have to invest heavily in downtime and maintenance.
Costs skyrocket; profits nose-dive. And who gets blamed for the loss of golden eggs? You do. Your
predecessor liquidated the asset, but the accounting system only reported unit production, costs, and
profit.
The P/PC Balance is particularly important as it applies to the human assets of an organization -- the
customers and the employees.
I know of a restaurant that served a fantastic clam chowder and was packed with customers every
day at lunchtime. Then the business was sold, and the new owner focused on golden eggs -- he
decided to water down the chowder. For about a month, with costs down and revenues constant,
profits zoomed. But little by little, the customers began to disappear. Trust was gone, and business
dwindled to almost nothing. The new owner tried desperately to reclaim it, but he had neglected the
customers, violated their trust, and lost the asset of customer loyalty. There was no more goose to
produce the golden egg.
There are organizations that talk a lot about the customer and then completely neglect the people
that deal with the customer -- the employees. The PC principle is to always treat your employees
exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.
You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy his heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his
loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain. That's where his creativity is, his
ingenuity, his resourcefulness.
PC work is treating employees as volunteers just as you treat customers as volunteers, because that's
what they are. They volunteer the best part -- their hearts and minds.
I was in a group once where someone asked, "How do you shape up lazy and incompetent
employees?" One man responded, "Drop hand grenades!" Several others cheered that kind of macho
management talk, that "shape up or ship out" supervision approach.
But another person in the group asked, "Who picks up the pieces?"
"No pieces."
"Well, why don't you do that to your customers?" the other man replied. "Just say, 'Listen, if you're
not interested in buying, you can just ship out of this place.'"
He said, "You can't do that to customers."
"Well, how come you can do it to employees?"
"Because they're in your employ."
"I see. Are your employees devoted to you? Do they work hard? How's the turnover?"
"Are you kidding? You can't find good people these days. There's too much turnover, absenteeism,
moonlighting. People just don't care anymore."
That focus on golden eggs -- that attitude, that paradigm -- is totally inadequate to tap into the
powerful energies of the mind and heart of another person. A short-term bottom line is important, but
it isn't all-important.
Effectiveness lies in the balance. Excessive focus on P results in ruined health, worn-out machines,
depleted bank accounts, and broken relationships. Too much focus on PC is like a person who runs
for three or four hours a day, bragging about the extra 10 years of life it creates, unaware he's spending