The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey

The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey — Ken Blanchard, William Oncken Jr., Hal Burrows

An American manager sits in his office on a Saturday evening at seven. Thirty-five or forty folders are stacked on his desk, each marking a "problem" that his direct reports handed him during the week. Running into one of them in the hallway, he heard eight words — "Boss, we've got a problem" — and the task jumped onto his back. At the coffee machine, another colleague: "Hey, you need this for a minute — I'm not sure how to decide." In the elevator door, a third: "Boss, just quickly, the finance issue..." He answered each of them the way a good boss does: "Let me think about it, I'll get back to you." Now, at seven on a Saturday evening, thirty-five things wait for his response. He looks ahead, tired. At home his wife stopped asking when he'll be back. The two children haven't played with him in weeks. And at seven Monday morning, it all restarts from zero.

This manager is the hero of Ken Blanchard and William Oncken Jr.'s classic *The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey*. The story is simpler than anything you'd expect from a management book, yet for many it triggers a shift in perspective. The whole book is built on a single brilliant idea Oncken developed fifty years ago, and since then no one has found a better metaphor for managerial burnout. That idea is the monkey.

What you'll get from this summary

Over the next forty-five minutes you'll understand why you yourself are the source of your own burnout — not your direct reports, not your boss, not the system. You'll learn the "monkey" concept, the book's central metaphor for task transfer. You'll learn Oncken's four golden rules for handling monkeys. You'll understand why every monkey needs one single identifiable owner. And at the end you'll get concrete, Monday-morning-applicable tools that help you hand responsibility back where it belongs — onto your reports' backs.