Blanchard, Kenneth H(artley) 1939-

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BLANCHARD, Kenneth H(artley) 1939-

PERSONAL: Born May 6, 1939, in Orange, NJ; son of Theodore (an admiral) and Dorothy (Heidenreich) Blanchard; married Marjorie McKee (a business consultant), June 23, 1962; children: Kenneth Scott, Deborah Kyle. Education: Cornell University, B.A., 1961; Colgate University, M.A., 1963; Cornell University, Ph.D., 1966. Politics: "Good leadership, no matter what party." Religion: Protestant.

ADDRESSES: Home—13044 Polvera Ave., San Diego, CA 92128. office—The Ken Blanchard Companies, 125 State Place, Escondido, CA 92029. Agent—Margret McBride, 212 Rosemont St., La Jolla, CA 92037.

CAREER: Ohio University, Athens, OH, professor of organizational behavior, 1966-70; University of Massachusetts—Amherst, professor of organizational behavior, 1970-76, part-time professor, 1977—; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, visiting professor and trustee emeritus. The Ken Blanchard Companies, San Diego, CA, cofounder and chairman of the board, 1978—.

MEMBER: American Society for Training and Development, National Training Laboratories.

WRITINGS:

(With Paul Hersey and Dewey E. Johnson) Management of Organizational Behavior, Prentice-Hall (New York, NY), 1969, 8th edition, 2001.

(With Paul Hersey and Robert H. Guest) Organizational Change through Effective Leadership, Prentice-Hall (New York, NY), 1977, second edition, 1986.

(With Paul Hersey) The Family Game: A Situational Approach to Effective Parenting, Addison-Wesley (Reading, MA), 1978.

(With Spencer Johnson) The One-Minute Manager, Morrow (New York, NY), 1982.

(With Robert Lorber) Putting the One-Minute Manager to Work, Morrow (New York, NY), 1984.

(With Patricia and Drea Zigarmi) Leadership and the One-Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness through Situational Leadership, Morrow (New York, NY), 1985.

(With D. W. Edington and Marjorie Blanchard) The One-Minute Manager Gets Fit, Morrow (New York, NY), 1986.

(With Norman Vincent Peale) The Power of Ethical Management, Morrow (New York, NY), 1988.

(With William Oncken, Jr. and Hal Burrows) The One-Minute Manager Meets the Monkey, Morrow (New York, NY), 1990.

(With Donald Carew and Eunice Parisi-Carew) The One-Minute Manager Builds High Performing Teams, Morrow (New York, NY), 1990, second edition, 2000.

Playing the Great Game of Golf: Making Every Minute Count, Morrow (New York, NY), 1992.

(With Sheldon M. Bowles) Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service, Morrow (New York, NY), 1993.

We Are the Beloved: A Spiritual Journey, Zondervan (Grand Rapids, MI), 1994.

(With Don Shula) Everyone's a Coach: You Can Inspire Anyone to Be a Winner, Zondervan (Grand Rapids, MI), 1995, published as Everyone's a Coach: Five Business Secrets for High-Performance Coaching, 1996.

(With others) Exploring the World of Business, Worth Publishing (New York, NY), 1996.

(With John P. Carlos and Alan Randolph) Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute, Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco, CA), 1996, second edition, 2001.

(With Michael O'Connor and Jim Ballard) Managing by Values, Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco, CA), 1997.

(With Terry Waghorn) Mission Possible: Becoming a World-Class Organization While There's Still Time, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1997.

(With Sheldon Bowles) Gung Ho!, Morrow (New York, NY), 1998.

The Heart of a Leader, Honor Books (Tulsa, OK), 1999.

(With Bill Hybels and Phil Hodges) Leadership by the Book: Tools to Transform Your Workplace, Morrow (New York, NY), 1999.

The One-Minute Golfer: Enjoying the Great Game More, Morrow (New York, NY), 1999.

(With J. P. Carlos and A. Randolph) The Three Keys to Empowerment: Release the Power within People for Astonishing Results, Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco, CA), 1999.

(With Sheldon Bowles) Big Bucks!, Morrow (New York, NY), 2000.

(With Sheldon Bowles and Don Carew) High Five!: The Magic of Working Together, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2001.

(With Don Shula) The Little Book of Coaching: Motivating People to Be Winners, HarperBusiness (New York, NY), 2001.

(With Jim and Dana Robinson) Zap the Gaps!: Target Higher Performance and Achieve It!, Morrow (New York, NY), 2002.

(With Thad Lacinak, Chuck Tompkins, and Jim Ballard) Whale Done!: The Power of Positive Relationships, Free Press (New York, NY), 2002.

(With S. Truett Cathy) The Generosity Factor: Discover the Joy of Giving Your Time, Talent, and Treasure, Zondervan (Grand Rapids, MI), 2002.

(With Jesse Stoner) Full Steam Ahead!, Berret-Koehler (San Francisco, CA), 2003.

(With Margret McBride) The One-Minute Apology, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2003.

(With Phil Hodges) The Servant Leader, Thomas Nelson (Nashville, TN), 2003.

(With Marc Muchnick) The Leadership Pill, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2003.

WORK IN PROGRESS: (With Steve Jittery) The On Time, On Target Manager, for William Morrow.

SIDELIGHTS: Kenneth Blanchard's The One-Minute Manager, written with Spencer Johnson, reached the 1982 bestsellers list despite a price of fifteen dollars for less than one hundred pages. Marc Shulgold, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, attributed the book's success to both its simplicity and its thoughtful approach to the problem of productivity in organizational behavior. In The One-Minute Manager Blanchard and Johnson contend that most successful means of accomplishing a simple goal in an organization is through skillful use of brief and calculated comments, both positive and negative, to workers in the organization. Shulgold praised the authors' contention as "important and useful in interpersonal dealings."

In a People magazine article Blanchard and Johnson outlined their stratagem in The One-Minute Manager as the reducing of an office manager's options into three one-minute "skills": goal setting, praising, and reprimanding. The authors encourage physical contact during the one-minute praise and emphasize shifting the concern during reprimands from the actor to the act. "The One-Minute Reprimand disciplines the behavior but supports the employee," Blanchard noted. "And of course the reprimand took only one minute." The authors also suggest that their skills are equally useful in family situations.

Blanchard has continued writing and cowriting books for managers and employees since The One-Minute Manager and now has over thirty publications to his credit. In his recent Whale Done!: The Power of Positive Relationships, for example, he partnered with writers from Sea-World to take the unique approach of comparing people's relationships with their coworkers with how wildlife trainers relate to animals, in this case, killer whales. The book tells how Wes Kingsley, a business manager, encounters the trainers at Sea-World and is inspired by the way they can encourage orcas to perform amazing feats. The central message of the book is that positive reinforcement works much better than negative comments in inspiring office employees to do their jobs more productively and enthusiastically.

In High Five!: The Magic of Working Together and The Generosity Factor: Discover the Joy of Giving Your Time, Talent, and Treasure, both of which Blanchard cowrote, fictional stories are presented to teach important lessons about business and life. High Five! is about a struggling boys' hockey team that learns to excel by becoming better team players. The comparison is then naturally extended to working in a business environment. In The Generosity Factor, an apparently successful businessman finds his life to be unfulfilling until he meets another executive who teaches him that true satisfaction in life is only obtained when one shares success, resources, and talent with others.

Blanchard once told CA: " Life is a series of serendipitous events. It is what happens to you when you are planning to do something else. I felt that successful people are people that see an opportunity and know when to move. My life has been a series of such occurrences. I never dreamed of being a writer because most of my professors in graduate school said my writing was not academic enough. I later learned that the problem they had with it was that you could understand it. The reason I really like writing is that you get immediate feedback every day as you make progress on a work.

"The key to the success of The One-Minute Manager was that we used a very different approach to writing. Rather than writing as an art for our own satisfaction or the satisfaction of a few colleagues, we wrote for the satisfaction of the reader—managers all over the country. Four different drafts were written. Each time 250 to 300 people would read it and give us suggestions about what would make this the best book they ever read on management."