Production and Production Capability

I am reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Steven Covey. I want to touch on something that is the baseline layer to those habits. It’s this thing that he calls the P/PC balance, which stands for Production and Production Capability.

The best example he shares is a story, as the story goes, of a poor farmer has one goose that every day lays a golden egg. The farmer then sells this egg and can provide for his family and everything they need. That egg is his lifeline and escape out of his situation, and he begins to depend on it. But one day, the goose stopped producing the golden egg, likely because the farmer wasn’t taking good enough care of it. This personifies the p/pc balance.

Essentially, it’s a trade-off between the valuable asset (production) and the ability to consistently create the valuable asset (production capability). With too much of a focus on the production, you won’t have sustainable value. With too much of a focus on the production capability, you won’t have enough short-term sustained value to see the long-term payoff.

Covey describes that this precise balance between the two is effectiveness. It’s an ability to not only generate results, but to be able to sustain them, rely on them, and consistently produce them.

We all have something in our lives that hasn’t settled into a good equilibrium, or reached its proper balance. What you need to do is diagnose and see if you’re taking good enough care of the goose, or if you’re not receiving enough golden eggs.