Finding Africa's Business Voice: A Commentary The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness

The 8th Habit and business leadership

Stephen Covey is one of the world's greatest authorities on leadership. With his seminal piece, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey, 1989), Covey made a landmark contribution to the phenomena of leadership and people management. Of all the works written by Stephen Covey – about a dozen books as well as tens of article pieces, seminar papers and conference presentations – it was The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that brought his leadership expertise and insights to limelight. Before the publication of this book, Covey's initial book publications included: Spiritual Roots of Human Relations (1970) and The Divine Centre (1982). The message of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is focused on seven factors that when appropriately applied can make an effective leader of people or manager of organisations for competitive edge, productivity and above all innovation. Covey's thematic preoccupation in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is anchored in these factors:

1. 1.

   proactivity;

2. 2.

   beginning with the end in mind;

3. 3.

   putting first things first;

4. 4.

   thinking win/win;

5. 5.

   synergising efforts;

6. 6.

   seeking to understand before being understood; and

7. 7.

   sharpening the saw.

By extending the confines of the debate in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, The 8th Habit was conceptualised. As Covey observes in his “maturity continuum schema”, a three‐layered growth process that articulates three phases of his patent internalised principles and patterns of behaviour – dependence, independence and interdependence – for unusual success as well as leadership skills, the harnessing of the third dimension, which is sharpening of saw, is the hallmark of “the 8th habit”, a harbinger of renewal: the voice. As Covey indicates, the voice is “the exponential, revolutionary explosion of” (p. 5) the inner desire to be different in such a manner that will bring unusual success and innovation in the face of competition as well as business frustration. It is about the urge to be different for a purpose: success. Thus:

[T]he 8th Habit represents the pathway to the enormously promising side of today's reality. It stands in stark contrast to the pain and frustration I've been describing, In fact, it is the timeless reality. It is the voice of the human spirit – full of hope and intelligence, resilient by nature, boundless in its potential to serve the common good. This voice also encompasses the soul of organisations that will survive, thrive and profoundly impact the future of the world (p. 5).

Deductively, The 8th Habit is about creative and innovative organisational management and leadership model that is in sync with breaking from the norm in the face of business realities in order to be afloat. This debate also finds resonance in the modern organisational transition from Taylorist management model that was mechanical and routine‐based to fluid, creative and adaptive approach, as contemporary business heartbeat indicates.

Beyond this, The 8th Habit resides essentially in creating personal business model that meets the challenges of the present. This reality also finds accommodation in the knowledge worker era, a period that breaks from rigid, change‐averse organisational norm to situate itself in line with present business as well as organisational realities. The reality here is the era of knowledge worker, when organisations rely heavily on talents, skills and knowledge management to excel. Thus, following Covey's hypothesis, at the heart of talent, passion, need and conscience – that is the quadrants – is the voice, which is a personal attribute that inheres in core leadership competence, which galvanises other facets (the quadrants) in the Coveyian “maturity continuum” for competitive edge in the global marketplace. To this end, as Covey contends, the 8th Habit is therefore thus:

It's about seeing and harnessing the power of a third dimension to The 7th Habit that meets the central challenge of the Knowledge Worker Age. The 8th Habit is to Find Your Voice and Inspire Others to Find Theirs (Covey's emphasis, p. 5).

In the main, The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (2004) resonates with harnessing as well as nurturing Peter Drucker's knowledge worker hypothesis, which is the most valuable asset for organisations to remain relevant in the contemporary marketplace of ideas, innovation and competitiveness. This approach is in sync with nurturing what Sternberg (1997) considers to be “tacit knowledge”, the knowledge that takes time to build, which is the foundation of organisations' stock value. Building here connotes harnessing as well as developing knowledge workers that bring about innovation and competitive advantage particularly in the era of knowledge management and talent war when businesses all over the world rely heavily on knowledge to survive.

Finding Africa's business voice in the “knowledge worker” age – reaching out for the “voice”

The Kuhnian paradigm shift in strategic human resource management and knowledge management (KM) is what Michaels, Handfield‐Jones and Axelrod in their stimulating book, The War for Talent (2001) see as “irreversible shift from industrial age to information age” (p. 3). As Michaels et al. (2001) stated, knowledge management as well as talent harnessing is “a critical driver of corporate performance” (p. 2). This shift has been considered as an inflection point in business strategy that is a marker for organisational success in the era of knowledge economy. Woodruffe (1999) in his bestselling book, Winning the Talent War characterised this process as businesses' “winning resource” (p. 25). Similarly, the nucleus of the new knowledge worker age schema resides in embracing the “talent mind‐set”. This process deals with African businesses' firm and passionate belief that to achieve their aspirations in order to be recognised in the comity of nations, they ought to have great talent, knowledge workers and leadership skills that enable them to harness resources available on the continent for business bliss. In order to do this, knowledge management as well as talent war is a sine qua non. Thus, Africa's rise from business ashes to place of economic prosperity and organisational renewal should take the route of discovering its own voice via nurturing talent as well as taking the knowledge workers as their most valued asset that need to be developed, harnessed and given priority.

Finding one's own voice in entrepreneurship and human resource development and management is what Evans (2003) referred to as knowledge architecture. The concept of “knowledge architecture” looks at harnessing the inputs from well‐informed and creative employees as well as nurturing rare talents and skills. It concentrates on the intellectual health of organisations in order to drive change and corporate competitiveness. It also has a lot in common with the ascendancy of human capital development. In the age Drucker (1969) identified as “knowledge‐based economy” in his celebrated book, The Age of Discontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society, the need to reconceptualise the activities of knowledge architects, facilitators or knowledge aware employees (Evans, 2003) so as to drive change in the right perspective is very essential.

The 8th Habit is a theoretical shift in strategic human resource management that reverberates with what McGehee (2001, p. 16) refers to as “the creation company”. This is equated with perceiving organisations as a place of creativity and talent harnessing rather than a place of control and compliance. This business strategy is essential for Africa's organisational re‐invention and competitiveness. Within this frame, in her “Knowledge management: what makes complex implementations successful?”, Plessis (2007, pp. 97‐98) highlighted what African business should do if they are able to find their own voice as Covey endorses:

• •

  positioning knowledge management as a strategic initiative;

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  co‐creation of KM strategy;

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  clearly defined knowledge ownership;

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  enterprise‐wide and business unit specific needs;

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  creating a shared understanding for leadership;

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  impact of communication as well as incentives and reward;

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  performance management;

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  business case and value proposition;

• •

  linking KM to business strategy;

• •

  knowledge creation and culture sharing;

• •

  change management and KM as strategy;

• •

  managing explicit and tacit knowledge;

• •

  managing knowledge life cycle;

• •

  training and development;

• •

  aligning business with technology; and

• •

  KM as critical success factor business success.

[…] where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together (cited in Armstrong, 2009, p. 657).

So, a learning organisation adjusts itself to understanding prevailing business circumstances, attitudes, culture and learning in order to position itself strategically in innovative knowledge management for organisational growth and competitiveness. This is critical in the development and nurturing of organisations' prime asset, talent and knowledge, for Africa's business rise.

Although The 8th Habit is a fascinating and powerfully written book, however, it suffers from a lack of detail on how to consolidate “voice”, renewal, the essential for strategic success. Apart from sharpening the saw for talent war as well as knowledge farming, Covey is short on detail regarding how to continually renew this breeze of change. Rather than offer pragmatic, hands‐on approach to building the new‐fangled voice as a consequence of harnessing and managing knowledge and talent, too much emphasis is rather placed on using story‐telling to advance arguments in support of the hypothesis given. In getting material for his syndicated column on leadership, Covey had to relay the story narrated to him by Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank (p. 6) as a way of substantiating the energy of locating or finding one's own voice. This same practice percolates the entire length and breadth of the book.