One Hour with The One Minute Entrepreneur — Ken Blanchard Comes to Dayton

Ken Blan­chard is one of the most promi­nent thinkers in mod­ern busi­ness. He has writ­ten best sell­ing books like Gung Ho, the One Minute Man­ager, Rav­ing Fans, Whale Done, Know Can Do, Ser­vant Leader and numer­ous other titles. (He was also a pro­fes­sor at Ohio Uni­ver­sity.) He is a firm believer in empow­er­ing employ­ees, the power of pos­i­tive think­ing, prac­tic­ing com­mon sense cus­tomer ser­vice, and the con­cept of ser­vant leadership.

Yes­ter­day, in Day­ton, Ohio he was the fea­tured speaker at an event put on by the Day­ton Busi­ness Jour­nal and Uni­ver­sity of Day­ton Cen­ter for Lead­er­ship & Exec­u­tive Devel­op­ment. The event attracted what I would guess to be about 500 peo­ple, most of whom seemed to enjoy the pre­sen­ta­tion. I left with sev­eral great thoughts jot­ted down in my Mole­sk­ine note­book — some of which I would now like to share with you.

Blanchard’s 4 P’s -
Dif­fer­ent from the famil­iar 4 p’s of mar­ket­ing (prod­uct, price, place, pro­mo­tion) Blan­chard out­lined for P’s nec­es­sary for run­ning a suc­cess­ful business.

1. Pas­sion — If you don’t love what you do, you will never be the best at it. Find your pas­sion and do what you love.

2. Profit — Pas­sion with­out profit is a hobby, not a busi­ness. Mak­ing money is impor­tant. In order to do this it is impor­tant that the peo­ple within an orga­ni­za­tion have a clear finan­cial pic­ture of the firm. If peo­ple know the chal­lenges, and are tasked with cre­at­ing solu­tions, time and time again they will suc­ceed. A great quote was that Blan­chard believes that “none of us is as smart as all of us.” A great take on the Wis­dom of Crowds concept.

3. Peo­ple — Blan­chard sug­gested that lead­ers should adopt the motto of “you can do it, we can help.” This led into a lengthy and mean­ing­ful dis­cus­sion on Ser­vant Lead­er­ship. He stated that a pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tion of Ser­vant Lead­er­ship is the idea of the inmates run­ning the asy­lum. In true Ser­vant Lead­er­ship this is just not the case. There are 2 dis­tinct parts to Ser­vant Lead­er­ship. The Lead­er­ship part of Ser­vant Lead­er­ship involves set­ting the direc­tion and vision for an orga­ni­za­tion. Once this is estab­lished, Blan­chard rec­om­mends flip­ping the orga­ni­za­tion pyra­mid upside down — with lead­ers con­stantly work­ing to empower peo­ple to suc­ceed in real­iz­ing the vision — the Ser­vant part. He also stressed that orga­ni­za­tions should encour­age peo­ple to use their brains instead of rely­ing solely on rules, reg­u­la­tions, and poli­cies for deci­sion making.

4. Pri­or­ity — “At the end of the game it all goes back in the box.” It is impor­tant to keep life in per­spec­tive. Things like fam­ily, friends, and ful­fill­ment should not be sac­ri­ficed for work sake. Blan­chard rec­om­mended a great tech­nique for help­ing to pri­or­i­tize life. When fac­ing deci­sions about what tasks to do, attach one of the fol­low­ing two labels — Impor­tant For­ever / Tem­po­rary Stuff. Impor­tant For­ever trumps Tem­po­rary Stuff every time.

I thought Dr. Blan­chard was fan­tas­tic, and I even got a copy of his most recent book The One Minute Entre­pre­neur. I will let you know what I think of it once I fin­ish it. Not only that, but I ran into an old high school friend from Ken­ton Ridge that I had not seen for at least 10 years. (Great to see you Rick) Thanks to the DBJ and the CLED for putting this event together, and to Dr. Blan­chard for spend­ing some time in Dayton.