Edward W. Jones, The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Va., presiding: We want to welcome you to the 75th annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. I’m Ed Jones, the managing editor of the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va., and your convention program chair.

As I was telling our board earlier in the day, I may be the first program chair to be allergic to cherry blossoms. But I found out this week that I am allergic. As most of you know, the cherry blossoms are in full bloom. So when you see those tears streaming down my face this week, you’ll know it’s not because of some crisis in the program, it’s because of the cherry blossoms. Or, I should say, it’s not necessarily because of some crisis in the program.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, over the next three days we will be focusing on leadership for editors during critical times for newspapers and on media credibility as ASNE launches major multiyear initiatives to address this most fundamental of issues. Along the way, we will also be celebrating great writing. And there’s much more to our program. I hope you’ve noticed it already. I’ll be telling you about it a bit later this afternoon.

But now, befitting our first guest — who is perhaps the world’s pre-eminent authority on time management — we must get going because we have time constraints. Stephen Covey, the author of "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" and more recently, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families," is a best-selling author and leadership consultant who has become a true phenomenon.

Father of nine, grandfather of 27 and counting, this is a man who plans quality time with his family two years in advance. Many of us are lucky even to know who are families are going to be two years in advance. Indeed, Mr. Covey has to rush out of here in about 50 minutes to catch a flight to Salt Lake City for one of those appointed times with children.

Now, you know his track record. "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" has sold more than 12 million copies in 28 languages and in 40 countries. A recent survey by Chief Executive magazine named the book one of the two most influential business books of the 20th century. Apparently, there is no truth, by the way, to the rumor that the other book was "50 Ways to Improve Your Golf Game."

When he’s not conducting seminars for AT&T, Coca-Cola and General Motors, Dr. Covey is talking to groups like ours about being proactive, beginning with the end in mind, putting first things first, thinking win-win, seeking first to understand then to be understood, my favorite — synergizing — and refreshing yourself physically and mentally.

Dr. Covey has been well briefed by ASNE member Wendy Zomparelli of the Roanoke (Va.) Times about the leadership stresses and challenges facing editors these days. How do you set aside time for long-range planning? How do you plan a workday around the truly important? The answers may lie within ourselves, but we could sure use some help from the world’s pre-eminent expert.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Stephen Covey.

Remarks by Stephen Covey

Let me first of all practice habit two — begin with the end in mind. I have two purposes. One to communicate the power of leadership over management. Most people are literally buried in management. I am persuaded that the more leadership they provide, the less management they need to give. The second point is to try to show that leadership saves time. It takes some time initially up front, but once you get the whole spirit and concept of leadership going, it saves time.

You almost have to have experience — and I’m sure many of you do as leaders of your newspapers — before you come to realize this. I’ll also show that all over the world the leaders of great organizations spend their time basically doing leadership work, not management work. Now, it took a period of time to make the transition from operational management more and more toward leadership, but they have paid that price, and now they are reaping the rewards that come from creating that culture.

Let me begin by asking you to join in a little exercise for a second. Just close your eyes, and without any peeking at all, everybody point north, but do not peek. Make your own best guess and point north. Keep pointing. Open your eyes and see where people are pointing. I haven’t the foggiest notion myself which way is north.

Let’s go to the experts — those who are absolutely convinced which way is north. All those who are that convinced, raise your hands for a second. Only two people in the room? Only two? Three? Four? OK, would you stand up, you people with your hands up for a second? We want to watch you! You four people close your eyes. Point north. OK, look where people are pointing. If you’re only off one degree between here and Jerusalem, you’ll end up in Moscow.

But basically, they are in agreement. You can usually go with the majority of the experts. Oftentimes, there is profound disagreement between so-called experts who are absolutely convinced they know.

Now, if you want to have another interesting experience, after you finish your convention, go to maybe 10, 20 people and just say to them, "In a word, what is the purpose of our newspaper? What is the central strategy in accomplishing that purpose?" Just ask the people that question. If you really have courage, go home and ask your spouse and your kids what the purpose of the family is, and just see what they say. I do this all the time, and I’ve done it with the executive cabinets of the Fortune 100. It’s very, very much like this experience in pointing north. Literally. People are shocked by it. You think that is our central purpose? That’s our mission? How could you possibly? I mean, look at the mission statement! Boy, we all know what that is. It’s a PR statement. Just see what they say the real mission is. I’m telling you, it will be a shocking experience.

I suggest leadership, the essence of it, is to get a culture behind a common direction. That is, so that everyone, in a sense, has the same purpose or mission and has a similar vision and a similar set of values. Purpose is what you are. Vision is what you want to become — how you see yourself in the future in a few years. Values represent your behavior — how you want to behave to accomplish that. I’m convinced that if people and organizations will pay the price to develop such a mission statement, and if it comes out of the bowels where everyone is involved — they feel ownership in this thing — so that there is a sense of criteria in people’s heads that is the same everywhere — that essentially represents what leadership is.

That doesn’t mean that it’s done, because it takes constant attention. But you will find that the management function becomes altogether changed and transformed. It becomes significantly reduced. The focus shifts to people managing themselves within that larger framework more and more and more.

The culture begins to develop mores or norms within itself surrounding those values. The culture begins to become its own disciplinary force. The great sociologist, Durkheim, put it, "When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable."

To create that kind of culture behind a common vision, I suggest, is the essence of leadership.

Now, there’s one other dimension on this compass business — and by the way, under my watch is a compass. The experts were correct: It’s this direction. Every compass has an indicator pointing north. There’s also another indicator. It’s called the direction of travel arrow. So if you want to go east, you would first of all find where north is and then go 90 degrees east, south, and west, and so forth.

We have done this in every conceivable kind of organization in 40 different countries. If enough people interact freely and synergistically, and people are informed in an environment of high trust, they almost always come up with the same value system. That value system usually involves the economic side because people need to survive. You feel the commercial pressure of the bottom line, the pressure of your publisher, and all the demands that are placed upon you. But that isn’t necessarily the central purpose. If you’re really becoming a watchdog in the community and you help institutions become responsible and people be responsible, informing the community becomes another very central value. When people interact back and forth in discussing their values, they fall into the economic; the social, how people treat each other — with respect, with kindness, and so forth; the mental, how people are developed and used or empowered; and the spiritual side, which has to do with purpose — what contribution, what value and integrity you add to society.

What we find, regardless of the organization — regardless of the level in the organization, whether you’re dealing with an executive cabinet or a crew of janitors, and regardless of the country they are in (different ethnicities, religions, cultures, and so forth) is that they almost always come up with the same underlying value system in these four areas: To live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy. These are the four areas — I’m just giving words to these areas — but they almost inevitably describe them.

To live is the physical, economic. It deals with the whole value of fairness, of security. To love has to do with relationships — kindness, respect. To learn is the development and use of talent. To leave a legacy is to develop meaning and integrity. The fire within happens when you have all four overlapping. The more people feel involved in the process, the more all four will be expressed — inevitably they’ll be expressed. It begins to develop inside that culture — the mores and the norms focused on principles.

As this happens, slowly — and the process is as important as the product — you begin to see the focus of management responsibility turning more and more to people. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for management. There is. But more and more that is taken over by other people, and by people themselves exercising simple, more responsible behavior within the context of these criteria.

Then you have to set up a system to monitor it. You set the example as the editor, but everyone is responsible and accountable for this. You know how vital your function is in society, and you want to make that function even more attractive, effective and desirable.

Do you have in your organization your function? It’s a good question to ask yourself. I’ve worked with many different newspaper organizations and find very few have this defined, so there is an enormous amount of independency, not interdependency, and a lot of dependency and blaming and victimism. To move from dependency, which is the lowest level where there’s a lot of blaming and victimism and so forth, to independency and then to interdependency is a process that takes time and patience and persistence.

To be proactive means basically to take responsibility, to get out of victimism. "Begin with the end in mind" is developing a vision and a value system. Living by it means you hold yourself accountable and responsible and that there’s an information system set up so that all stakeholders share information with the group. So everyone is accountable.

You will find that people who are really flaky and irresponsible and are not really pulling their own oar, will not feel comfortable in this situation. They’ll turn negative, they’ll try to create some form of collective resistance for a period of time, but eventually the mores and the norms will make it so uncomfortable that they will leave.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t have diversity. You’ll have a lot of differences and diversity because when you have a principle-centered kind of culture based on fundamental principles like the ones we’ve mentioned, it allows much more diversity. And synergy, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, is the fruit of that diversity.

Putting first things first basically means that you organize in such a way as to accomplish that mission. You don’t just say, "We value interdependence." You gather information to demonstrate that you have interdependence and particularly try to create the team spirit among your own staff and that everyone has feedback from everyone who surrounds them.

Let me just give an illustration. To some degree, this is like your function in society. Everybody is accountable 360 degrees to the boss (if your boss is the publisher, you would receive feedback from that source), peers, self, and direct reports. On the left, this is essentially the level of perceived satisfaction — this stands for the emotional bank account — EBA. In other words, it’s like a financial bank account into which you make deposits and can take withdrawals. PPC balance stands for performance and performance capability. In other words, you don’t just want a short-term golden egg. You want to keep the health and welfare of the goose strong. Then the seven habits.

But this is an illustration of a feedback mechanism. The editor could do it on himself or herself as an example. The first step of leadership is that no one is exempt from this. Just as you hold the president of the United States accountable to his tasks and to the Constitution, no one is exempt. I could take you to many organizations where CEOs do this on themselves. For all of us to take that responsibility so that we look at ourselves, genuinely, using the insights of other people, respect for other people would be useful. It stirs up the desire for other people to do the same thing. Gradually, little by little, you create this kind of culture that is really nurtured through norms and mores around principles.

Now, I want to give a little illustration of what I’m talking about here. This is a company in South Africa that has cultivated this kind of leadership. It’s a multibillion dollar organization. The chairman and CEO is one of our facilitators in South Africa. He actually facilitates this in many organizations as well as his own. His feeling about the role of leadership and teaching in that role is so strong that he spends several days a month teaching this material. He’s the third person who speaks here in this little video.

Here’s the situation: They’re opening up a brand-new store called Number One. It’s a new brand. The day they open, with all the hoopla of a big opening, come the fruit and vegetable sellers right in front of the store selling their wares, blocking the street, messing up the street, and so forth. And it’s on the store’s property. What would you do?

You see, legally you could throw them off. Yet some of them have been a lot longer than you upon that property. They feel like they own it. What would you do? Are they stakeholders? Would you normally consider them stakeholders? Usually, we think the stakeholders are shareholders, and your customers are your readers. Then your staff, your journalists, your reporters, your suppliers. Who would you consider to be the stakeholders of a retail store? Would you consider the street people to be stakeholders? One of the problems in South Africa in retailing is thievery. Sometimes it’s very, very high, like 8 percent. Well, those who know retailing know that net is usually about 1 or 2 percent.

What if you could get the mores and norms inside your culture and inside the stakeholders? Who knows the thieves better than the street people? You know, what if you could get them behind you? What could happen? This is an illustration of leadership where management gets taken over by other people who begin to live by those mores and those norms. It’s a very interesting story. Let’s watch this for a minute.

Video presentation

He was describing this leadership thing that I’m talking about. He had just never taken the role of a leader. And they kept pushing him. "But what did you do personally?" He basically said, "I had to get apartheid out of my heart." He had deep within him the sense of what people can and cannot do. He had labels on them. He didn’t involve them in the processes. Once he started involving them sincerely, he started to discover this tremendous wealth of resourcefulness and initiative and capability that he had not realized before. Apartheid there is on the basis of race, but it could be on the basis of position or educational attainment, economic standing, whatever. There are so many criteria people can use to create this feeling.

Now, where did he get the time for this kind of leadership? We studied the top organizations in the world that have won the Deming prize — one of the most coveted, prestigious prizes — to see where their executives are spending their time. There are four basic quadrants. Quadrant 1 is important and urgent. Quadrant 2 is important, but not urgent. That’s where they were spending their time. This is the leadership quadrant. The other organizations were spending time in quadrant 3, that which is urgent but not important. Fifty-five to 60 percent of their time. In comparison, Deming prize winners were spending 15 percent of their time in quadrant 3. Quadrant 4 are essentially washes — unimportant and not urgent.

The critical thing is defining urgency and importance. Until you have a common criterion in people’s minds and hearts, you cannot differentiate between the two. And you will gradually be driven by quadrant 3. When I work directly with people, they identify about half of their activities as urgent. But when really put to the test against their own criteria, they are not important.

Someone just commented that because of the nature of the newspaper business, you often neglect quadrant 2.

I agree with that. And once you’re aware of that tendency, you have to take steps to compensate for it. I would discuss exactly what you just said with your own staff, and see if they can identify what things you’re doing now that are urgent but not important, because little by little people get addicted to the urgent. They really do.

Charles Hummel said, "The important task rarely must be done today or even this week. The urgent task calls for instant action. The momentary appeal of these tasks seems irresistible and important, and they devour our energy." You live in a world of constant deadlines, 24-hour, minute-by-minute deadlines. But "in the light of time’s perspective their deceptive prominence fades. With a sense of loss we recall the vital task we’ve pushed aside. We realize we have become slaves to the tyranny of the urgent."

Many will behave that way. The question is, "What is your role?" You’re the editor. Should you get caught up in that culture of urgency to the point that you neglect leadership, and therefore have to spend more and more time doing management? If so, you will have a very difficult time managing the struggle between your commercial role as a business person and your professional role as a journalist. Someone has to step aside and say, "I’m going to provide leadership." In fact, one man told me that he started providing leadership because he was in an oil company in the Northwest. He said, "It was the hardest thing! I went through withdrawal pains because I was so addicted to the urgent. And everyone around me did, too, because I wasn’t as accessible — and I thought accessibility was key. But I said to myself, ‘If I don’t do it, who will?’ And I concluded, ‘No one would.’"

This takes real courage and persistence. He said, "Over a period of many months, I started providing leadership. Today, our business is totally different. Our quality has gone up in very significant ways. We’re selecting more of what we want to focus on. The criteria are built more and more into people’s hearts and minds."

Now, you may be deep into leadership, so you may already know this. But you could be buried by management, quadrants 1 and 3.

Other questions?

That’s a great question to raise to your staff. How would you handle that? What do you do to reserve time for quadrant 2?

You know the particular realities of your situation. They do too. They’ll come up with answers. They are very creative. I don’t deny the fact that you live in a deadline encased environment, and the pressures that you’re under. I know that! But they know that, too! In the long run, you’ll save time by focusing on leadership. It takes more time initially. I acknowledge that.

It’s like a family where both parents are working, and they never develop a family mission statement, which really would mean they are really still present in the hearts and minds of their children. But they never did the leadership work. Then they have to do the management work or get someone else to do the management work. Then when the teen-age period comes along, they often have very unhappy comeuppances because they never paid the price of developing a mission statement. They never got their priorities straight. This takes a lot of private work inside one’s own heart to cultivate. In fact, the private victory always precedes this public victory.

Other questions?

Is a leader a group person or a solitary individual? I find it so different in different environments — in different cultures. But I’ve come to believe that vision is usually more of a solitary thing, but values are more group oriented. It’s usually just two or three people who have a particular vision. If they are identified with because of their example and the quality of the relationship they have with other people, then people will go along with the vision. If they participate in developing the values and there’s a system that holds people accountable to those values, including the chief person, then they see integrity in the system.

So there can be very individualistic personality expressions in these different modes. Let me just give this as an illustration. Take your glasses for a second, Mike. Tom, Mike’s really enjoyed these. We’re sure you will. Want to try those? Do you like them?

Tom: I can almost see you.

Covey: You can almost see me? Try harder, Tom. Yeah. Wipe them off. Clean up those lenses a little. Think positively, Tom. There’s nothing wrong with this program that a positive attitude can’t correct. A little better now?

Tom: Much better. Yeah.

Covey: That’s good. I understand your resume is also very current. So we’re glad to know you’re going to come along with us, Tom.

You see, the problem is I never diagnosed Tom’s eyes. The optometrist diagnosed Mike’s eyes before he wore the glasses, or he wouldn’t have worn them. The whole key to human influence is first be influenced. So when you get into involvement activity with other people, be very sincere and just say, "These are our issues or our problems. Let’s discuss these." And if you’re interrupted by a crisis, you may have to handle the crisis. I don’t deny that quadrant 1 comes on you constantly. You have to deal with quadrant 1. That’s where survival is. What I’m suggesting is that in all my years working with this material I have hardly ever found a person who does not have a lot of quadrant 3 and acknowledge it. I’m suggesting that quadrant could be neglected and time put into quadrant 2, into the leadership quadrant, and that could make all of the difference.

All it takes is one person to think win-win. If you’re with some dissident or some negative individual, don’t worry about it. If that person is deep into win-lose, stay with it. Think win-win. Seek first the interest of the other. Always understand the other. Then once you get their confidence, then seek to be understood.

I did arm wrestling on "Oprah" one time, and she held me here. I said, "Oprah, why don’t we both win?" And she said, "No way!" I said, "Well, let’s let you win again." You have to get their confidence. They have to know that you are trustworthy. This is leadership. It’s the building of the relationship of trustworthiness so that we can get into the spirit of win-win. This is the spirit of abundance, see? The pie gets larger. It’s not the spirit of competition and pushing against each other. That’s so vital to the leadership function.

Yes, sir.

Michael R. Fancher, The Seattle Times: Our organization has used the seven habits program for many years now — quite successfully. Something like a thousand of our employees have been through the program. However, we’re deeply troubled by the comments that you made in Honolulu. In the spirit of seeking first to understand, could you help us understand that better? Could you clarify your comments?

Covey: What I said in Honolulu was basically representing the support of a traditional marriage. I wasn’t — as it was reported — against gays or anyone else. It was totally in support of the traditional marriage, which was the law of the land, and that’s what I gave my speech on.

Fancher: Can you place that in the context of habit 6 — synergize? Because I know one of the things that you talk about in the program is value and differences and so forth.

Covey: That’s right. I do value the differences. I have a gay person in my own family. I love him. He’s my nephew. So it wasn’t against that. I was totally in support of the traditional marriage of the mother and the father raising the child, and I had just finished the family book, and that’s what I was talking about.

Fancher: If I might follow up with one more question or observation. One of the things that disturbed our organization is that since those comments were reported, the response has come from your organization but not from you personally — and I guess this helps to clarify what your intentions were — but something more from you publicly might be very helpful for those of us who would like to sustain …

Covey: All we are trying to say in our organization is that we are an equal opportunity employment company and that we are trying to be fair toward everybody. But some people are not happy with the idea of supporting traditional marriage. I would say they should value the difference in my opinion and other people’s opinion on that issue.

Tom Koenninger, The Columbian, Vancouver, Wash.: This is not piling on, but this is a question I wanted to ask you ever since I was in the audience in Portland, Ore., in November 1996, when you spoke of being burned by the media. It goes back to the first habit — seek first to understand and to be understood. It really goes to the heart of why we are gathered here today, which is to rebuild trust and credibility with our readership. But on that day, you said you had been burned by the media. You told your audience of being in a gathering with newspaper editors and publishers and likened it to being in a swamp. You said, "A good day for the media is a bad day for everyone else." My question, sir, is has your perspective changed since that day?

Covey: Let me ask you, Tom, to tell them what I said after you mentioned that up there.

Koenninger: Let me follow through, yes. Thank you. To your credit, you apologized for your hasty generalization and you came down from the podium after I challenged you and talked to me personally and apologized to me personally.

Covey: That’s right. I was overreacting and I apologized for it in front of that entire group. So that is a full and fair representation.

Koenninger: Let me say we’ve used your programs for about 10 years, and as Mike Fancher has indicated, used them successfully.

Covey: Thank you. OK, now. I have one other film I want to show. And this one really illustrates what happens when you do not do leadership work and have institutionalized dependency. This is called "Max and Max." One Max is a person. The other one is a dog. Both of them are treated the same way by Mr. Harold, who is the boss of them both. I wanted to show this to just try to stir up the desire to create a common vision and a common value system inside the culture of an organization so you can empower people more and more to take responsibility.

Now, I’m going to run out to catch a flight to see my daughter who is just coming home. She’s been away for a year and a half.

But I wanted to show a positive example of leadership and then another example, which is so common. You have to decide to which it is common inside your own organization — the degree to which your own organization is dependent upon you and the degree to which you have really empowered people and involved them significantly and built relationships of respect and trust so that you can create this kind of leadership culture.

Please watch this.

Thank you very much for the invitation.

Video presentation

(Video is interrupted.)

Jones: We’ll leave to your imagination the rest of that story of a man and his dog. We will have some Cliff’s Notes for you, however, as to how it ends.

You know, Dr. Covey asked me before his session, "What kind of questions do you think I might get?" And I said, "I don’t know. ‘How to organize your day?’ ‘How to rev up your staff in your staff meeting?’" I think that was a fair representation!

But there are some handouts that will be available from his lecture. I do appreciate Dr. Covey coming here and getting us started on these topics involving leadership.