Kenneth Blanchard
Title: Dr. Kenneth Hartley Blanchard
Full Name: Kenneth Hartley Blanchard
Birthdate: May 6, 1939
Birthplace: Orange, New Jersey, USA
Occupation: Author and Management Theorist
Profile: Best known as co-author of
The One Minute Manager with Spencer Johnson.
Website: http://www.kenblanchard.com/
Number of Quotes: 60
A good business book teaches simple truths.
Age is rarely a limitation to being a mentor.
All good performance starts with clear goals.
As a leader, you absolutely must expend your energy engaging your frontline employees so that they will take care of
customers, who will tell stories about how great your company is to other people, who will become new customers.
As a manager the important thing is not what happens when you are there, but what happens when you are not there.
At my company, we have 300 employees spread across offices all over the world, and I send them all a voicemail each morning with a message
from me about why our work is important and a reminder about one of our values. I call myself our company's chief spiritual officer.
At Southwest, they're on a mission to democratize air travel. When they first started, the only people who could fly were relatively
wealthy businesspeople, and Herb Kelleher's vision was to
offer everyone the chance to visit a friend or relative during a happy and a sad time. That's a vision employees can get excited about.
Catch people doing something right.
Congratulations offer more potential than cash. The amount of available cash is limited, but managers have an unlimited supply of
congratulations. It's important to pay people fairly, but managers also should heap on congratulations and feed people's souls.
Customer service is not a department, it's everyone's job.
Don't quack like a duck, soar like an eagle.
Effective leaders don't just bark orders; they serve their people.
Effective managers ... manage themselves and the people they work with so that both the organization and the people profit from their presence.
Everyone is a potential winner. Some people are disguised as losers, don't let their appearances fool you.
Feedback is the breakfast of champions.
For a manager to be perceived as a positive manager, they need a four to one positive to negative contact ratio.
Goals begin behaviors, consequences maintain them.
Growing, for leaders, is like oxygen to a deep sea diver. Without learning and growing, leaders die in terms of their effectiveness.
He who gets results is not necessarily a leader. The key is to get results and have followers.
Humility does not mean you think less of yourself. It means you think of yourself less.
I absolutely believe in the power of tithing and giving back. My own experience about all the blessings I've had in my
life is that the more I give away, the more that comes back. That is the way life works, and that is the way energy works.
I never use notes, they interfere with me.
I think a great leader is somebody who realizes it's not about them, it's about the
people that they're serving, that they're really other-directed rather than self- directed.
If people aren't clear on what business you're in, what you're trying to accomplish, your values, your goals, then
shame on you. It doesn't mean you shouldn't involve them. It's just your responsibility to make sure that that's clear.
If your employees are disengaged, and they don't take care of your customers, it
doesn't matter how good your strategy is - your customers will still go somewhere else.
In the journey from good to great, the first thing you must do is get the right people on the bus.
In the past a leader was a boss. Today's leaders must be partners with their people... they no longer can lead solely based on positional power.
It's been true in my life that when I've needed a mentor, the right person shows up.
Knowing where you're going is the first step to get there.
Lead with LUV
is the first book I've ever done that's just a pure conversation between my coauthor and me.
Leadership is not about you; it's about investing in the growth of others.
Leadership is not something you do to people; it's something you do with people.
Management is about arranging and telling. Leadership is about nurturing and enhancing.
Managing by values - not by profits - is a powerful process that will set your business on the path to becoming what I call a Fortunate 500
company.
Many companies claim they have core values, but typically what they're referring to are generic beliefs: having integrity, making a profit,
responding to customers and so on. These values only have meaning when they're defined in terms of how people behave and are ranked to set priorities.
None of us is as smart as all of us.
One Minute Mentoring
is written in the parable style Spencer Johnson and I popularized in The One Minute Manager.
It's an entertaining story
about the mentorship between a young salesperson, Josh, and a seasoned executive named Diane. As the characters learn about mentoring, so does the reader.
One of the topics I'm most passionate about is servant leadership - the greatest leaders recognize that they're here to serve, not to be served.
Patrick Lencioni, Spencer Johnson, and Stephen Covey are
great communicators.
People have trouble admitting there are problems, but everyone has an area he or she would like.
People love to be appreciated.
People who produce good results feel good about themselves.
People will resist change when it's done to them, not with them.
Servant-leadership is all about making the goals clear and then rolling your sleeves up and doing
whatever it takes to help people win. In that situation, they don’t work for you, you work for them.
Some people are really good at the visionary role. They're like third grade teachers who tell people the
vision and values over and over and over until they get it right, right, right. But they're not implementers. If
they're good leaders, they gather people around them who can take the implementation role and move it forward.
Take a minute: look at your goals, look at your performance, see if your behavior matches your goals.
The best minute you spend is the one you invest in people.
The biggest obstacle that stalls leaders' growth is the human ego. When leaders start to think they know it all, they stop growing.
The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.
The more I travel, the more I realize that fear is the universal enemy of learning and productivity. Fear paralyzes us.
The number one motivator of people is feedback on results.
The productivity of a work group seems to depend on how the group members see their own goals in relation to the goals of the organization.
There's a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in something, you do it
only when it's convenient. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.
Too many leaders act as if the sheep... their people... are there for the benefit of the shepherd, not that the shepherd has responsibility for the sheep.
Too often in business, only financial data is gathered - and then it is distributed only to management. Other key indicators that relate to
performance areas also need to be tracked. Information on performance has to be made available to those people who can best use it - those doing the work.
Values-based business behavior is no longer simply an interesting option - it's crucial to your survival. Once you
understand your mission and values, you have a strong basis for evaluating your practices and aligning them accordingly.
Vision is the picture of the future you want to create. It's what you want to be, do, have, and create.
When people are going through a major change, they need three things: direction, support, and a chance to express their feelings.
When you write a business fable, people get caught up in the story and don't get judgmental about what you're teaching them. If you're teaching a bunch of
concepts, people get skeptical and say, Where'd you get that research?
But if you tell them a story, they get caught up in it while they learn.
Your role as a leader is even more important than you might imagine. You have the power to help people become better than they are.
Last on Earth
