Todd Davis
speaker
423 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Todd Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So after I recruited for Covey for a while, we merged with Franklin Quest. Franklin Quest in the US here was the time management company. They have the Franklin Day Planner. And everybody over here in the US had these day planners. They were very famous for that. And Covey Leadership Center, as you mentioned, was famous for the seven habits.
And so we merged those companies and I went to work for their innovations department where we developed our training, different training solutions. And I did that for several years. And then the CEO at that time came to me, this would be about 20 years ago now, came to me and said, we would like you to apply for the chief people officer role. The person that was in that role had left.
And I said, that's great, but I don't have any human resource experience. I had recruited, but I didn't know anything about labor laws or employee relations or any of that. And he said, I know that, but you're really good with people. That's what he said. You're really good with people. So I applied for it and along with some other candidates and I was selected.
And so I immediately surrounded myself with really talented people in the human resource area. And so that was about 20 years ago. And I did that. I was the chief people officer for 18 years. And then a couple of years ago, well, about three years ago, we started recruiting for my replacement because I wanted to move into the role that I'm in now.
And so for the last year and a half, almost two years, I've been a full-time consultant where I go out and deliver our training. I do keynotes. I do podcasts, things like we're doing today. So that was probably a long-winded answer to your short question, but that's been my journey.
It'd be amazing. You and I have had a couple of calls now, and I find you so fascinating. You understand human nature so well. You'd be really great at this, Vince. We have international partners. We're a global company. We've been in the leadership space for four decades, 40 years.
And so, as you said, here in the US, we say this with humility, but we're touted as the most trusted leadership organization because we've been in the space for so long. But we have offices all around the world and we have licensee partners that also cover Hong Kong and China. And so anyway, yeah, let's for sure talk about that after.
Thank you. That's a great setup and so many important topics you capture in that. So when Dr. Stephen R. Covey, who is the author of The 7 Habits, when he first wrote The 7 Habits 35 years ago, what he did prior to that is all of his research was around effectiveness, like you said up front. And we define effectiveness.
People think of effectiveness as getting a lot of things done or being successful or whatever. We define effectiveness as getting things done, but not just anything, getting the right things done, the things that move you forward, the things that move your organization forward, your team forward.
And not just once, but how do we get results today in a way that allows us to get even better results over and over again in the future? So that was the organizations and the people he studied, people that seemed to be able to do that. And then he identified the principles that were at work with these people doing that. And he put them into a format.
He calls them the seven habits, put them into a format that we could talk about them, understand them, and most importantly, start to implement them into our lives. And so the reason that I have found that these have been as relevant, more relevant today than they were when Dr. Covey first wrote about them was because they're based on principles, principles of effectiveness.
And principles, as we know, were as true a million years ago as they will be a million years from now. They don't change. Now, the application changes, the way we put them to work changes in this ever-changing world. But the principles themselves don't ever change. And so this book is timeless.
And I have found in my space, in the people space, if I remember these principles and I treat others in a principle-centered way, we can solve things. We can move forward. We can get past issues and help everyone move forward and progress. That's been my experience.
Yeah, great question. So it's been out 35 years. The book has, the book is, there might be a forward that's updated. There might be, but the principles haven't changed. The habits themselves haven't changed. We don't really rewrite the book, but about every eight to 10 years, we have a work session that goes along with the book. We have many work sessions.
We have 29, 30 different work sessions in different areas of business. But the seven habits is our foundational piece. And the work session that is about two full days worth of content. And that can be taught consecutively. That can be taught spread out. There's an on-demand. You can self-paced. That changes.
We update that about every eight to 10 years because the application and how we put these practices or these principles to work change. And so that's what we have just launched. And what has changed in this most recent version? We just continually make them more practical, more applicable, more inclusive.
When I say simplify, anyone who's read The Seven Habits, it is a firehose of powerful information. And sometimes people just don't know where to start. They understand it all, but they don't know how to apply it.
And so this latest version, we've made it very, I don't want to say simplified, but very practical so that I can go through the course and I can start applying these principles tomorrow or tonight in my personal relationships and certainly in my professional relationships. Could you give us one example? You bet.
I'm happy to walk through all the habits, but let me just tell you, habit one is very foundational. It's habit one for a reason. It's called be proactive. And it's based on the principle of choice. The principle being that while there is so much you and I cannot influence or change, we can choose our response to any situation.
In fact, when I have looked at your LinkedIn profile, Vince, and your background and history, And you've had some amazing experiences and some very challenging experiences. And I've thought about the choices that you have made, the way you have chosen to respond to those situations. You know, we can't always create or fix the situation, but we can choose our response.
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