Want to significantly boost your company's profits, eliminate all your industrial relations problems and become a market leader within a few short months? According to Mr Stephen Covey, achieving these kind of results is only seven short steps away.

It doesn't involve much money or much time, but he claims that adopting his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People will guarantee all of these things.

As American self-improvement gurus go, Mr Covey's claims could be regarded as modest. The former academic who lives with his family in Utah is currently riding the crest of a wave with his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People which has sold 3.5 million copies in the United States so far. Recently President Clinton said if the book was read by all American workers it could "dramatically" boost American productivity.

His "seven habits" have made him the most popular self-improvement guru since Mr Dale Carnegie whose book - How to Win Friends and Influence People - became the indispensable handbook for legions of aspiring business people.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, with its simple home-spun philosophy has transcended culture barriers so well that it recently spent seven weeks at the top of the Japanese best-sellers list.

People in the Republic have not been immune to the Covey phenomenon. Last week at his talk, Synergy: How to create unstoppable people, teams and organisations, in O'Reilly Hall at UCD, several hundred people had to be turned away due to a shortage of seats.

Mr Covey told The Irish Times that he has yet to meet a person who disagrees with his seven habits. The habits are to be found inside the wallets and on the desks of some of the most successful chief executives in the United States and companies like Proctor & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard and Federal Express are strong supporters of Mr Covey and say they have implemented the habits throughout their companies.

The seven habits are simple and unlikely to cause offence: be proactive; begin with an end in mind; put first things first; think win-win; seek first to understand, then to be understood; synergise and sharpen the saw.

He says they are not pop psychology, but common sense which has been lost over the last few hundred years. If companies ensure their employees use these seven habits during their working day then the whole organisation will prosper, says Mr Covey, a practising Mormon.

While the habits scarcely seem new, Mr Covey says it took him 20 years to fully develop them, although he adds that they come ultimately from God. Not that everyone has acclaimed Mr Covey's seven habits, which have helped his company Franklin Covey generate more than $50 million (£35 million) in revenue a year.

The influential American magazine, New Republic, recently accused him of practising "white magic" - trying to persuade people that things which are perfectly obvious, even completely known, can nonetheless be revealed to them.

The magazine said that Mr Covey, in his books, "wants to share with us the experiences of real people, but what he shows us instead is the power of cultspeak".

Mr Covey rejects this and says there is no smoke and mirrors involved in his seven habits. He constantly uses what he calls a buzzword - "synergise". "You must synergise and synergise again," he says passionately.

He says they are practical, in the sense that people implement them and they become reality within a company. He says phrases like "sharpen the saw", which translates as exercising and renewing the four elements of yourself, are just a shorthand way to explain deeper principles. "When people first hear this stuff they think its just soft and means nothing in reality, but when they try to live by them, they soon change their mind," he says. As he says himself, who can argue with a point of view which has been accepted by all the world's main religions and most large corporations.

However, whatever about organisations accepting the broad principles, the important test is how they are implemented. Mr Covey's opponents have said the habits only end up producing "obedient automatons". But the Covey Institute, which has a branch in the Republic believes they have an application to almost any organisation.

Mr Covey says that "trust is at the root of the success or failure in relationships and business, industry, education and government." Once trust is maintained, the organisation will grow without a hitch, he adds.

While some of the principles behind the seven habits, like investing in "emotional bank accounts" might seem absurd, his popularity around the world suggests the habits have touched a chord with a sizeable group of people. As Mr Covey likes to say we should all try "to make a difference"!