Ken Blanchard

The book is a parable about a young man searching for an effective manager because he wants to work for one and be one. We wrote a parable because Spenser was a children’s book writer. He wrote values-based tales like the value of curiosity – the story of Christopher Columbus, the value of honesty – the story of Abraham Lincoln and a bunch of stuff like that. I am a storybook teller. We met at a cocktail party in 1980. My wife and I said if you two wrote a children’s book for managers, they wouldn’t read anything else. So that was the motivation. But the basic concept is that we believe that the 20% will give you the 80% as a manager.

His three secrets which we talk about in The One Minute Manager; the first one is One Minute goal setting. All good performances start with clear goals. If people don’t know what you want to do, there is little chance of enjoying it. Once you have clear goals, you need to wander around, see if you can catch them doing something right, and give a One Minute praise, which is telling what they did, and how you feel about it, encouraging them that they keep up the excellent work. And then, if they make a mistake or their performance is not at par, to know what they did, you give them a One Minute reprimand, which tells them what they did wrong, how you feel about it, and what they need to do to get back. So those were three secrets. When a man recently came up to me and said, “My dad gave me that book when I was at a college, and his father gave him the book when he was at a college. So we are still working on three or maybe four generations.