The One Minute Manager


The One Minute Manager is a short book by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. The brief volume tells a story, recounting three techniques and of an effective manager: one-minute goals, one-minute praisings and one-minute reprimands. Each of these takes only a minute but is purportedly of lasting benefit.

Sequels

It was followed by a sequel, Leadership and the One Minute Manager, by Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi and Drea Zigarmi, which laid out Blanchard's Situational Leadership II concept.

Criticisms

The concept has been called a management fad, and derivative of management by objectives, itself derived from the business planning literature.
One critic called it "the executive equivalent of paper-training your dog."

Controversies

While the book was becoming a best-seller, the Wall Street Journal ran an article exposing it as a heavily plagiarized document.
The article asserted that almost half of the book was lifted directly from an article previously published by University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor Arthur Elliott Carlisle. Blanchard and Johnson offered conflicting stories on their reasons for not citing the original author, including an insistence, later abandoned, that one of them helped Carlisle write the original article.