The One Minute Manager

The New One Minute Manager

By Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. The 2015 update of the 1982 classic that taught a generation of bosses how to run a team without burning the team out.

Opening hook

A bright young man is on the road, looking for a special kind of manager. Not the autocrat who hits the numbers while his people quietly hate him. Not the nice democrat whose people love him while the numbers rot. Someone different. Someone who treats the people and the results as the same problem.

He has been searching for years. Small towns and capitals, banks and restaurants, factories and government offices. He keeps asking the same question to anyone running anything. What kind of manager are you? The tough ones say bottom-line, hard-nosed, profit-minded. The nice ones say participative, supportive, humanistic. Each group is proud of its half. Each group thinks the other half is the enemy.

The young man is not buying it. He thinks half a manager is just half a manager. The world is moving too fast for that. People want their work to mean something. Companies need to ship faster than ever. Whichever half you pick, you lose the other one, and you end up with people who feel either crushed or coddled, never both useful and respected.

Then he hears about a special manager in a nearby town. People love working for him. The team produces. He gets results without grinding anyone into dust. The young man phones to book a meeting and is shocked when the assistant puts him through right away. The Manager says any day this week works, except Wednesday morning. Pick a time.

The young man arrives confused. What kind of manager has open hours? When he walks in, the Manager is at the window, calm, unhurried, almost suspicious in how relaxed he looks. The young man asks how he runs his team. The Manager says we used to be a top-down company, but that is too slow now. The brain power is not only in the corner office. It is everywhere. And speed is the new currency. So we lead by collaboration. We meet on Wednesday mornings, the team reviews what they did, what is left, what they plan next. The decisions made there are binding on everyone, including me.