Sharpen the Saw

As the cover of the 25^th anniversary edition says, “25 million copies sold.”  It shows up repeatedly on lists found if you do a Google Search for “Great Books on Leadership.”  At the front of the book, there are some blurbs of praise for the book—17, (yes seventeen!) pages of praise.  Then there are 13 pages of forward matter written by people other than the author telling you how amazing the book is.  The back cover proclaims the book is “A Timeless Bestseller.”

It was a very dull book.  Very dull.

Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is full of advice on how to make your life better.  Be Proactive!  Begin With the End in Mind!  Put First Things First!  Think Win/Win!  Seek First To Understand, Then Be Understood! Synergize! Sharpen the Saw! 

Yawn.

It’s not that any of the things in this book are bad advice.  All in all, it’s good advice.  If the whole thing was a 21 page pamphlet, it would be a good thing to hand out to first year college students to tell them how to run their lives effectively.  But, 371 pages of it?  Really?

The good thing about a book like this for a class on “Leadership and the Liberal Arts” is that it completely removed my latent guilt feeling that I was depriving the students of one of the modern textbooks on leadership.  By reading this book, they read the equivalent of one of the leadership textbooks.  It is the same insipid content blown up into gargantuan proportions to make it seem that something Deep, really Deep, is being said.  Win/Win is a good strategy—way better than Lose/Win or Lose/Lose.  Indeed, let me explain to you why Lose/Lose is a bad strategy.  Let me also explain why Lose/Win is a Bad strategy.  At length.  With examples.  Oh, and here are some more examples on why Win/Win is so good. And I’ll throw in a few more examples.  And talk some more about Frankl. And that picture of the women who looks young or old depending on how you look at it.  And P/PC.

Before this semester, I thought that Dale Carnegie and Stephen Covey would be much the same.  They aren’t.  Carnegie’s book was not nearly as painful to read—more chapters, shorter anecdotes.  Covey went to the Belabor the Point to Death school of writing.  Carnegie wanted to be my friend so he kept it snappy.  Covey’s advice is better than Carnegie’s, to be sure, but nonetheless, reading Covey’s book was not fun.  At all.  Too many buzzwords masquerading as content.  And did I mention there are a lot of anecdotes?

I did try out some of his techniques on Clara while I was reading the book.  They work.  So there is that.  Like I said, it’s not that the advice is bad.  It’s just the book that is bad.

By the way, Sharpen the Saw is not all about how to do this sort of thing.  It is all about making sure you keep yourself renewed in the Physical, Social/Emotional, Spiritual, and Mental Dimensions.  There is even an circle diagram to show you that there are four dimensions and they are linked by curved lines.  Not sure why it is a circle instead of a diamond, but I suppose that maybe the deeper points have eluded me.