The One Minute Manager

I read The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. It’s a classic management book.

Some things I learned:

• Be specific and compact in the goals you set for others.
• Learn how to delegate correctly.
• Take a step back, see if your behavior matches your goals.
• Let people know up front that you are going to evaluate their work.
• If you have to reprimand someone, finish with an encouragement.
• If you have to reprimand someone, reprimand the behavior not the person.
• If someone does something good, praise it, do it soon.

The book is a short story about a man who wants to learn about becoming a manager, you read about how he learns these lessons from a successful manager known as “The One Minute Manager” who does all sorts of things in one minute. It’s easy to look past the story and that’s the point of the way the book is written. The advice the book dispenses is really good. On the back it says …

… a powerful recipe for getting big results from people …

… and that’s true.

There are a lot of good one-liners and lists taking up a full page making the book even shorter than 112 pages, it really takes a very short time to read but it’s powerful stuff.

My score: 8.5/10

Blink, how experts are thinking

This project management related post has been moved to Journeyman PM my project management blog, if you’re reading this my redirection system didn’t work. Sorry about that. Please check out the revised version here.

I just finished the book Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell.

A few important lessons here:

• Truly successful decision making relies on a good balance between deliberate thinking and instinctive thinking.
• Don’t make important decision when you have a high heart rate. Once above a certain point the brain just shuts down the parts that make you smart.
• Prejudice influences the perception of quality more than we might think.
• There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.

This is more than a really clever look on what goes on in the mind when we make decisions. I love it.

The book is very well-wrought, a bit scary in some places and also just a very smooth read. I’m sure everyone can finish this book in a few evenings if they want to.

My Score: 9/10