Success Quote by Stephen Covey

Covey sells trust the way a good management guru sells anything: as infrastructure. Calling it "the glue of life" isn’t poetry for poetry’s sake; it’s a metaphor designed to smuggle an emotional truth into a business setting where feelings are often treated like a liability. Glue is invisible when it works, catastrophic when it fails. That’s the point. You don’t notice trust in a meeting until the email chains get longer, the tone gets legal, and everyone starts “just aligning” instead of deciding.

The line about “effective communication” is doing quiet ideological work. Covey isn’t praising eloquence; he’s reframing communication as a byproduct of safety. In environments where people expect to be punished, misunderstood, or exploited, they don’t share information, they manage risk. Trust becomes the hidden variable behind speed, candor, and creativity - the stuff organizations claim to want while quietly incentivizing the opposite.

The final phrase, “the foundational principle that holds all relationships,” stretches the claim past the workplace into the domestic and civic, a classic Covey move. It’s meant to universalize a corporate lesson so it feels like character, not strategy. Subtext: trust isn’t “soft,” it’s the hardest asset you can build, and the most expensive to lose.

Context matters. Covey emerged in an era obsessed with performance and self-optimization, when businesses wanted moral language without moral discomfort. Trust becomes a clean, portable virtue: measurable in outcomes, marketable as culture, and useful as both personal ethic and managerial tool.