Well, I am thrilled to be here with you this morning. And I'm especially grateful to have this chance to represent my father, who has had some health challenges just in this last little bit. And he sends his regrets and his love and his gratitude.
and me to be here with you. And so I bring you his message and I'll give you this from a perspective of one who's been involved with him from the beginning in this process and try to get to add some insight and perspective of seeing what of observing not only a person that He is a profound business thinker, but also a person who is an amazing individual. And to give you the perspective of both, as we go through these seven habits of highly effective people. So I'm thrilled to be here, delighted to have this opportunity. love being in London.
It is truly one of my very favorite places in the world to visit. And we will make this interesting and engaging and fun for all of us with the seven habits. So let me begin, if I could, by... Just stating this, we're going to be talking about the seven habits of highly effective people.
And this is what my father has been best known for. And let me begin, if I could, by defining effective. Because if we're going to be effective, we need to understand what we mean by highly effective. It could be efficient people or it could be even successful.
people, but the term is effective. And I use the story of Aesop in the fable of the farmer who is down on his luck and is terribly poor, and then he finds a goose. And to his delight, this goose the next morning has laid a golden egg, and he's thrilled because it's truly an egg of gold.
He's able to sell it, gain value. And then the next day, he lays another golden egg. He's thrilled again.
And the next day, another golden egg. And the goose is continually laying his golden eggs, and the farmer is absolutely delighted and thrilled. And then after several days, he becomes increasingly greedy, and he wants all of the gold all at once. And so in his effort to get more gold faster, he kills the goose, reaches inside to get all the gold, and realizes there's nothing there but a dead goose. So he's...
He just killed the goose that lays the golden egg. We use this fable as a metaphor, and we hear it all the time. The goose that lays the golden egg.
That's what we mean, really, by effectiveness. It's really a combination of both those things. The goose and the golden eggs. The golden eggs is our performance, our production. When we produce and perform, then we're being effective.
But it's not enough just to produce and perform if we don't have a healthy... goose that will lay these golden eggs. And so it's always then also, in addition to the performance, the production, it is the health, the maintenance, and the well-being of the goose.
And there's many organizations that sometimes can drive for results and get the production, get the golden eggs, but they do it in a way that diminishes, and in some cases even destroys the health of the goose. And over time, the goose gets sick or even dies. Sometimes the same thing happens.
with us as individuals, we might drive hard for results, get them again and again and again, but do it in a way that destroys the health and the welfare of our groups, so to speak, where we become less effective and over time lose our effectiveness or die altogether in our ability to produce. Now, clearly the other side is true as well. If someone only has a healthy goose and never delivers the golden eggs, that's just potential. We're not delivering.
Real effectiveness is that balance of production and production capabilities. The golden eggs as well as the goose. So that's our basic understanding as we dive into this of what it means to be effective, an effective person, an effective team, an effective organization.