Stephen Covey - Put First Things First Together With Doing Things Right The First Time

Stephen Covey Leadership

Communities and schools must simply put it together

To be effective for our most at risk children lets combine Stephen Covey’s suggested first things first together with Philip Crosby doing things right the first time. Such imagination will create a basic cost reduction strategy that works with being proactive and beginning with the end in mind to result in a win win. These paradigms give communities and schools an affordable value creating education gap improvement strategy.

As one digs into Stephen Covey’s book it is clear he believes the most value that can come from production and production capability balancing come out of quadrant II where leadership deals with important but not urgent matters that require collaboration, emotional intelligence and positive expectations. Please read about quadrant II on page 150 of his book. Important but not urgent or Important and urgent. Everything we are being told today is that Early Reading Skills are important and the lack of them put children at risk for the rest of their lives. We know we add the most value to the future, and create the lowest total cost when we do what is important and not urgent for ourselves and others. We just must balance the production and production capability knowing that a lot of future brain capacity is just plain lost without early reading skills creation before kindergarten for children at risk.

In many respects it is like the Gulf Oil Spill and the spill screams for the collection of the oil now before it costs even more to collect. Even while the real solution (quadrant II) is to stop the flow at its source.

Let us reflect on how can we possibly think we are publicly on a win win program when we create such a dysfunction and loss of opportunity for ourselves and those already at risk. We do not do first things first ourselves and then we ourselves complain to ourselves about the results. One might ask where is the at risk responsibility in this rant. Predictably based on the last 50 years results it is outside of our control. So do we just incur the cost anyway?