J. Bevan

Sadly this book is contrarian to a lot of what goes on in our society. Thus I constantly have to "try" to practice these principles. But the trying is worth it. I have used this book as a standard for turning around the cultures of two manufacturing plants after I was hired from the outside. Those turn-arounds were only accomplished because the principles in this book work and because, if patiently applied, they give a management team a common vocabularly for they way they treat each other and their associates. My only function was to act as catalyst and insist that these principles be practiced. After a couple of years, in both cases the stress levels were way down, the morale was way up, and the performance was beyond anything known before and certainly beyond expectation. In my current assisgnment we're saving over $3M per year (450 people) and the roots of that accomplishment are in this book. It's a book to listen to, to absorb, and to go back to over and over again. An annual tuneup by listening to this program, is typical of those who REALLY try to adopt the 7 Habits (and model them). It's tough to be a perfect practitioner. One can only read and try...

Taken by itself and without the "lens" of pre-conception, this is fairly fascinating stuff. It is this work that contains the basis of much that is in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code ... but this is the real deal. It is unconventional research by people who write documentaries for British Television. The big problem is that Pierre Plantard, the source of Priory of Sion lore, has, since the publication of this book, been proven to be a hoax and a forger. That discovery almost completely takes the wind out of the sails of the hypotheses presented by these authors. It reduces this work to a curiosity rather than the "big deal" it was 25 years ago (when published).