PW: It's been 15 years since The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People was published. When did you realize the need for The Eighth Habit?

Stephen Covey: About six or seven years ago, I started to see a movement from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Worker Age, a shift from a control paradigm to an empowerment paradigm. And I've seen research showing how deeply disempowered and alienated most workers are. People have lost their unique sense of what their talent is, what their passion is, because organizations are not enabling them to find their voices. They just go into the old job description approach where people become simply expenses on the profit-and-loss statement. It's a sick paradigm. You can go through structure after structure, system after system where the leader at the top is lonely while people below him are codependent, developing kiss-up skills and playing political games. Honestly, this is happening everywhere. The scandals are just the tip of the iceberg of what's going on in the wider culture. That's what got me intrigued about adding a third dimension to the Seven Habits diagram: "Find Your Voice and Inspire Others to Find Theirs."

The latter half of this new habit seems crucial, because it creates consequences beyond self-interest.

Exactly. You need to form complementary teams so that what you love doing and what you're good at can be utilized fully and your weaknesses made irrelevant through someone else who has a strength and a passion in those areas. What do you really love doing? What do you really do well, and what does your conscience tell you you should do? If people ask those questions and align the answers towards the needs of a particular job, they don't need to motivate employees through carrot-and-sticking, what I call "the great jackass theory of human motivation." They're already motivated internally.

Your model resonates with the ideal that many dotcom companies tried in the late 1990s.

Anyone who's seen the difference will tell you how exciting it is and how much cost it saves when you don't have to worry about bureaucracy and hierarchy, all the rules and regulations that take the place of human judgment.

For such a system to work, trust needs to become a pervasive value.

You can't produce trust without trustworthiness. You have to have it in your heart. If there isn't deep integrity and trustworthiness in the heart, and the willingness to resolve differences synergistically, you won't create the high-trust cultures we desperately need to compete in the global economy. A flaky person, a deceitful person, someone who steps on others to get ahead, they can't survive two rounds of this system. If they get into the tools we provide, it will tell them exactly why they aren't executing on their promises and their commitments.

Did you plan to include the companion DVD, with films complementing your text, from the beginning?

I had to fight with my own company to do it, because these films are worth thousands of dollars as separate products. But they so make the points I'm trying to make in each chapter, communicating the content visually and emotionally, that I decided to put them in. So if you buy the book, you're literally getting thousands of dollars worth of value from the DVD, and it only adds an additional dollar in cost.