Review of
Instaread Summary, Analysis & Review of Ken Blanchard’s
and Spencer Johnson's The New One Minute
Manager
Five out of five stars
The original
book, “The One Minute Manager” was justifiably a bestseller as it contained
some of the simplest and most effective advice in managing a team. The messages
are presented in the form of a parable and the base principle is that both
positive and negative messages from managers should be short, effective and
frequent.
From this
summary, it appears that this book is not much of an update. This is explicitly
stated in the first two sentences of the “Author’s Style” section.
“The ‘New One Minute Manager’ is a 2015 update of the
1982 book ‘The One Minute Manager.’ It follows much of the same plot as the
original but updates the principles in unspecified ways.”
Furthermore, the context of the parable has not
shifted much from the original book. This is demonstrated by the following two
additional sentences from the “Author’s style” section.
“While the narrative may be updated from the 1982
version, the technology and workplace of the setting are not noticeably modern.
The characters have screen savers on their computers and mostly communicate
over the phone.”
I consider this
to be a fatal weakness of the book. In the modern world, people use email,
Twitter and other social media outlets to communicate with workers. For some it
is the dominant form of communication. To ignore all of that in the middle of
the second decade of the twenty-first century is foolish. The author of the
summary is to be commended for pointing out this flaw.
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