The astounding success of The One Minute Manager, by Dr. Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson,* first published in 1980, did not happen because it was written in the stars. Far from it! One Minute Management happened because the authors worked hard to sell it – to the public and to the publishing world. And…it’s success was, in a large part, due to a new era in business management worldwide. The new dynamic demanded an efficient way to manage large numbers of task and people by telling them, not exactly what to do, but that they were capable, resourceful, intelligent beings who could be trusted to act with good judgment. This simple notion led to a revolution whose after shocks still reverberate throughout the management world.

Today, Dr. Blanchard has collaborated on a book that promises to shake the rafters within corporate structures all over the world all over again. He and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, author of the world-renowned book, The Power of Positive Thinking, have written The Power of Ethical Management (William Morrow and Company Inc.), a practical guide for ethical behavior in business. In this exclusive interview, Dr. Blanchard shares his views on inner peace and outer success while he gives guidelines for achieving the potential locked within each one of us.

*See interview with Spencer Johnson, PSP V4N6P12.

PSP: What was it like to coauthor a book with Dr. Peale?

Dr. Blanchard: It was marvelous working with Norman Vincent Peale. He’s going to be 90 this year and he and his wife, Ruth, went on a safari to Africa recently. He told me, “Pray for me there. They are taking me to the bush.” I think that my journey with Norman has been an experience in real humility. We even mention in the book that people with humility don’t think less of themselves, they just think of themselves less. You know that when you’re with Norman Vincent Peale. He models the ultimate example of inner peace. He never acts like he’s supposed to be anywhere else. You never get the feeling that he’s looking over his shoulder trying to see if anybody else more important is around, or looking at his watch to see what’s next or where else he should be. He really centers and focuses in on who has made contact with him. He has such inner peace that he doesn’t have to be important and, as a result, he is.

PSP: Dr. Peale went through terrible doubt and fear and anxiety earlier in his life, and he still fights against those feelings, I believe, and yet he has managed to overcome his inner demons and to have such an important impact on so many people. He also has an incredible storytelling ability.

Dr. Blanchard: Yes, he does. For years he told real stories about people who came to him. That’s why we set up the book, The Power of Ethical Management, so that the first part is really like going to Norman. You get to know how he thinks. And the second part of the book shows what it’s like coming to me for the way I look at organizations and what they’re doing and what they can do.

PSP: When sales managers come to you, what do you suggest that they focus on – the bottom line?

Dr. Blanchard: Sales management has enough pressure for numbers. Because of that, sometimes misrepresentations occur during a sale and the old, old negative image of salespeople crops up. What managers need to do is decide what their purpose is. If their purpose is to satisfy the needs of the customer, and the salespeople concentrate on doing that, then the scoreboard will take care of itself. People who manage only for profits are like tennis players who only watch the scoreboard.

PSP: But the goal of a tennis game is to win.

Dr. Blanchard: We’re all for winning. By satisfying a customer’s need, I think we experience the satisfaction of having helped somebody and that’s a win. But you have to keep your eye on the ball in tennis and stick to the fundamentals.

PSP: In tennis or any other game, there cannot be a win-win. There can only be a tie at best. But with a customer, I can truly create a win-win situation.

Dr. Blanchard: Well, you know it’s interesting about the tennis analogy – unless your whole life is tennis and you’re Borg or Connors or Navratilova…you can play against someone who’s a lot better than you are, lose, and still win by playing better than you ever did before because you were challenged to new heights. If you do your very best and stick to what you’re doing, you have really won in your own mind.

PSP: What is your definition of management?

Dr. Blanchard: That’s changed over time. I’m now saying that management is being a service organization to your people. I think it is really important in sales to view the accepted pyramid organization in a company upside down, so that the president and chief executive officers all are at the bottom. And at the top are the customer service contact people – salespeople, the people who are making the products, the people who are delivering the products. All the people who have direct contact with customers. If you turn it upside down, managers will work for their people rather than the opposite way. One of the reasons why customer service is bad in so many places is that the people dealing with customers are spending all their time looking over their shoulders trying to figure out what their bosses are doing because their bosses are about ready to hit them for not following some rule or regulation. You want to free your customer contact people so all their energy is geared toward your customers.

PSP: You are saying that the customer should be the boss.

Dr. Blanchard: Yes, I am. Salespeople can push and shove and do all kinds of things to make short-term sales, but if the customer leaves thinking he’s been had, he won’t return. So what you’re really after is sales that engender long-term relationships. And that’s where looking at the scoreboard all the time will let you down in the end.

PSP: You can’t keep your eye on a guy’s wallet and, at the same time, look him in the eye to see how he feels.

Dr. Blanchard: That’s true. If you don’t establish a relationship with the customer, your first sale will likely be your last.

PSP: And you are suggesting that a manager has to become more of a human resources service person to the people who are in direct contact with customers.

Dr. Blanchard: Absolutely. Managers used to think that their job was to evaluate, judge and criticize. What’s become clear is that the manager’s main role is to be a cheerleader, facilitator, supporter, encourager.

PSP: Someone who will help the team win.

Dr. Blanchard: The number one management style is that if people do something right, nobody says anything. But if they screw up, you zap them. We’re now calling it Seagull Management. Seagull Management flies in, makes a lot of noise, dumps on everybody and then flies out. There are three parts of good management. They are performance planning, day-to-day coaching, and performance evaluation. I think what we need to do in sales is have salespeople compete against themselves more than against each other. If you are a runner, you can be in a race with 10,000 people, but what you are doing is running against your own personal record. Given your skills and your background, what’s the best that you can do?

PSP: You are suggesting that you want to have your own best performances as the standard or the record which you want to break.

Dr. Blanchard: And if you do that, then good salespeople are willing to help less experienced salespeople because it’s not a loss to them. So what we’re trying to do is get people to keep on stretching themselves, and be the very best that they can be in that particular role. The real sales contest ought to be how can everybody help everybody else stretch to their maximum.

PSP: What do you consider to be the difference between a leader and a manager?

Dr. Blanchard: Well, I think Warren Bennis describes those two well when he writes, “Leaders do the right thing, managers do things right.”

PSP: How would you define leadership?

Dr. Blanchard: I think there are two parts to leadership. One is the visionary: Which wall are we going over? And then the second is the influencer: Now how do we get everybody over it?

PSP: I remember a meeting I attended for a direct selling organization where the president made a speech and he said, “Thank you for making my dream your dream and for making your dream our dream.”

Dr. Blanchard: That’s a nice line. My wife, Margie, has a great definition of leading and managing. She says, “A goal is a dream with a deadline.” I like to tell managers that they’re in charge of their dreams. As a sales manager you are asking, “What do you dream that you can do this quarter?” What’s happened in the past, which causes a lot of problems, is that some managers think that the goal setting and the dreaming is their only job, and after it’s set, they leave their people alone until somebody screws up. So it is important for managers to understand that good performance comes more from managing that journey than it does from announcing the destination.

PSP: That’s well put.

Dr. Blanchard: And so that’s where you skip the two roles. In other words, all good performance starts with a clear goal, a clear dream. But if you stop your role there, then some people might make it who are peak performers but you’re going to have a lot of people falling by the wayside because you haven’t managed the journey.

PSP: Then how do you get that two-way commitment?

Dr. Blanchard: I think one of the ways is to make sure that you’re not asking people to accomplish too many goals. You have to give people a chance to set reasonable goals and one they can focus on where they think they’ve got a chance. When they are not quite sure they can make it anyway, they hold back, they don’t want to commit their whole psychological self into something that might be a loss. And the other thing that helps people keep their two-way commitment is when they realize that their manager is committed to them, too. Many managers are committed to evaluating people, but not necessarily to helping them win.

PSP: Where does good management begin?

Dr. Blanchard: Good leadership, or good management, starts from the inside and moves out. People who feel good about themselves are able to listen to others, support others and encourage others.

PSP: What advice do you have for managing the inner self?

Dr. Blanchard: We have to enter our days more slowly. That implies a thoughtful choice of how fast we want to go and what influences we will allow to permeate our inner space. People who still adhere to the Puritan Ethic do not see that there is a difference between self-indulgence and self-neglect.

PSP: They feel that self-care equals self-indulgence. And if they want to make a mistake, they’d rather err on the side of self-neglect.

Dr. Blanchard: That’s right. That’s an interesting way of putting it.

PSP: I think we could almost draw a bell curve and say the top of the curve is self-care, and if it’s too much, then it’s self-indulgence, and if it’s too little, it’s self-neglect. You’ve achieved a great deal of inner peace and a great deal of outer success. What were some of the significant transformations in your life?

Dr. Blanchard: Well, if I thought about writing my life story, the title would be “Life Is What Happens To You When You’re Planning On Doing Something Else.” Early on, the most significant thing was playing competitive athletics where you had to learn to get up off the ground when you were knocked down. To get up and move on. I’m really thrilled that women have so much more of a chance to participate in athletics now. My own participation in sports gave me the confidence to rally after what seemed like a failure. I learned from other experiences that the way to look at failures is that they are somebody else’s problems. That there is nothing wrong with me. And also to know that successful people move when the door opens. They don’t get locked in.

PSP: I sense that your wife has probably had the most significant influence on the transformations in your life.

Dr. Blanchard: She has. Well, you know it’s been mutual because I’ve helped her transitions and her transformations as well. And I think that’s what Ruth and Norman have done. You know, Psychology Today came out with a study a year or so ago, about marriages that have lasted over 20 years – the biggest study I ever saw on that. They interviewed husband and wives separately, and asked “What has made this thing work?” Both independently said that the other one was his or her best friend.

PSP: I sense that managing the inner self is an unexplored area where there are a lot of theories and very little tactical advice.

Dr. Blanchard: I think that’s true.

PSP: And in the field of selling, there is a lot of tactical advice and very few theories.

Dr. Blanchard: But, you know, managing the inner self is so important in selling because selling is a business where you get turned down all the time. Life is a series of peaks and valleys. It’s all about building character, maybe building inner peace. When I asked Norman why the Lord gave us free will, he said to make us strong. Because how could you become strong if you were a robot? Overcoming resistance by going into the gym and picking up one pound weights isn’t going to do much for you. The real test in life is in dealing with the peaks and valleys in a way that pulls out your strengths. Now in golf, you can hit the ball straight down the middle and hit a rock, and it will go out of bounds. How you deal with those kinds of unexpected sets of circumstances makes the difference in the final outcome. Great golfers spend very little time analyzing how they got there. The minute they get to the ball, their only interest is: “How do I get from here back to where I was heading?” And people who have self-doubts and all kinds of things spend all the time fishing about for what’s happened to them and no time on how to get back on track or deal with the new track.

PSP: That leads back to what you said earlier about Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. When you look at him, you see that he has that inner peace. He is open to the complication at hand. You realize that most people you talk to have an ongoing inner dialogue that shows they have not managed their inner selves. I think we owe it to our customers to be there 100 percent when we communicate with them.

Dr. Blanchard: Absolutely. And salespeople who have inner peace do not have commission breath.

PSP: Commission what?

Dr. Blanchard: Commission breath. Because you somehow sense that they are there for you and not just for the commission and therefore you will likely buy from them because you will feel comfortable and confident in their presence.

PSP: Now I want to ask you a question about an ethical dilemma. Let’s say you’ve sent of proposals, talked to the customer and then you follow up, and the customer says, “I’m about to make a decision between your product and one other company’s.” Then you go to the customer, and as you walk in he says, “Well, Ken, you’re a little bit too late. We signed the order with the other company about a half an hour ago.” What do you do?

Dr. Blanchard: I think you just say, “Well, great. Good luck.”

PSP: Once the customer has a firm order, you stop selling and wish him luck.

Dr. Blanchard: That’s right.

PSP: It’s very simple, but most people don’t do it. What are the reasons you have identified for unethical behavior in sales?

Dr. Blanchard: I think that people who don’t feel good about themselves on the inside are less able to resist external pressures. Then they start looking for short cuts. When Norman and I first started to write this book, our first assumption was that people know right from wrong.

PSP: Yes, but that knowledge doesn’t prevent them from being unethical.

Dr. Blanchard: That’s why we put an ethics check in the book to help people decide right from wrong. But then it became clear to us it’s a tougher job behaving on your good intentions. Therefore, we first address the internal issue of aligning yourself in a way that makes sense for you. And then we show some of the tremendous pressures for performance in organizations and how they create a climate for unethical behavior. Then we show what can be done to align organizations along ethical guidelines. Johnson & Johnson and the Tylenol episode is a beautiful example of the way ethical behavior on the part of a giant corporation can restore customer confidence to a high degree. The way they just took the product right off the market showed they had more concern for the customer than they did for the loss of millions of dollars. And as a result, amazingly, they were able to regain the confidence of the public in a very short time.

PSP: What is your definition of success?

Dr. Blanchard: It’s probably inner peace, where you’re feeling good about yourself, but you’re also making a difference externally. We are all a very small speck in time. I remember one of the people who helped me put things in perspective. On a publicity tour for The One Minute Manager, I met Art Buchwald, and I sat and had a couple of martinis with him. And what a wonderful character he is. And I said, “Art, you’re been a national hero for 25 years. How do you keep things in perspective?” He said, “First of all, you don’t read your own press. And second, you have to realize that life is a real chuckle. It’s just fabulous. But if you walk out of this door and get hit by a car, it’s a real equalizer.” So, you don’t want to get too carried away and take yourself seriously. You just want to enjoy and make a difference but not get out of whack. And then, when we were working together on The One Minute Manager, Spencer Johnson said to me, “There are three things you can have in life – fame, fortune and satisfaction.” To me, satisfaction is the most important.

PSP: Thank you.