The One Minute Manager

Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s One Minute Manager is pretty well-known, and my husband recommended it to me. He reread it recently and has mentioned it several times in connection with various behavioral issues with our children.

It’s certainly not a taxing read, weighing in at around 100 pages with the text generously surrounded by whitespace. But its brevity makes the simple message shine that much more clearly.

One minute management is a style of leadership, and though my mind balks at the idea of parenthood as mere “management,” I have to say that I found the basic tenets of this book to be pretty applicable to my work as a mother. One minute management has, basically, three components:

• One minute goal setting
• One minute praisings
• One minute reprimands

Up front communication is central, along with understanding human motivation.

I really like the book’s emphasis on catching people in the act of doing something right and praising them. Goal setting is harder for me, but it’s an area where I really do need to improve. We make a list on the whiteboard each day of things that need to be done, but to clarify what constitutes good work in the items on our list isn’t something I do well. (It isn’t something I’ve thought much about, to tell the truth, before reading this book.)

This is an extremely practical book with a goodly dose of wisdom. Apparently Ken Blanchard wrote his part of it before he became a Christian, and afterward realized that the reason the book has been so popular and effective is that its principles are biblical. Structured as a dialogue or a series of interviews, The One Minute Manager is readable and straightforward, but it offers plenty of food for thought. It’s been a helpful read for me, one I recommend.