Self-help books, coaching books, management books? They promise so much, yet after reading them, little to nothing changes. Fortunately, that is not always true. I decided to look into which books have strongly influenced me. Here is my fourth book that gave me direction: it is still a must-read for every leader, for every human being.

THE SEVEN HABITS OF EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP

During Christmas 2019, I picked up *The Seven Habits of Effective Leadership* once again from a dusty bookshelf full of old textbooks from a distant past. Some books are simply worth rereading. And my intuition told me that this was one of them. I had read Covey’s book before, in the nineties, in preparation for a course at INSEAD in Fontainebleau. That course was quite tough, and ambitious as I was, I wanted to be well-prepared. And so I read Covey’s leadership book.

He showed me how to take control of your own life. That is quite handy as a leader (and as a human being). Still, somehow, the book didn’t really resonate with me at the time. Perhaps I found it too American back then, or I didn’t yet know how to put his advice into practice. It felt like a distant, abstract concept.
By Christmas 2019, my perspective had changed, and I soon discovered between the lines why Stephen Covey’s philosophy seemed so familiar to me: it bore a strong resemblance to the Transactional Analysis in which I had been trained for quite a few years. When I read Stephen’s chapter on ‘Win-win-or-no-deal,’ I immediately think of Eric Berne’s OK quadrant, the founder of Transactional Analysis. It was good to read again how we often misinterpret the ‘win-win’ adage. As a result, it becomes more of an ‘I win, you lose’ strategy. That is not what Covey wanted, that is not what Berne wanted, and it is certainly not what I want. I decided to put his ‘Win-win-or-no-deal’ adage to full use in 2020. That turned out to be a huge gift. I said ‘no’ more often in a way that was respectful to myself and to the other person. And increasingly often, my ‘no’ eventually became a ‘yes’ after all, because the conversations led to a true win-win situation for both parties. Covey’s book helped me overcome my fear—that you mustn’t say no because then you’ll lose a client. I wasn’t ready for it in the nineties. Covey was way ahead of his time (or I just learn a bit slower, which is okay too, by the way).