Foreign welcome, luminaries.

As always, congratulations on your choice to be a Luminaries member with the Consulting for Humans podcast.

Now, in our main episode, we've been talking about the contribution made by people from the baby boomer generation boomers to the life of consulting and vice versa.

So, Mike, what we're going to do today is examine in detail a couple of the books that we mentioned in the main episode.

These came up in our conversation about which ideas were particularly influential at that time and influential for that generation.

Mike, remind us, what are these two books?

Well, we mentioned three in the episode, two of which we're going to talk about today, One Minute manager and the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

And we're going to use the third, as we'll come back to later, to bridge between our Boomers episode and next week's Gen X episode.

Excellent.

Let's get into it.

So, Mike, the One Minute Manager is one of those books that I remember being held up in front of me at many stages in my career right from the very beginning, one that I've seen, and I think we'll come back to this one that I've seen in piles in many airport bookstores as well.

Right.

So tell us about the One Minute Manager, Ian.

The One Minute Manager, Originally published in 1982.

So, right.

The Strike Zone for Boomers by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson, both of whom, you know, I think for boomers, we went, oh, Ken, Ken Blanchard, oh my gosh, Hershey Blanchard, Matrix, and Spencer Johnson as well, who moved my cheese.

So we've got a lot of stuff from them.

One Minute Manager was the first one.

And some people would say that it fundamentally changed how many people viewed management by introducing three practices and anything, this is a truism, I think anything that says you can be a lot more efficient, make a lot more money, spend a lot less time, get greater business with these three simple things.

I mean, that's always a recipe for either clickbait or sometimes some real results here.

And that was kind of the premise here.

Plus, I think we boomers also lived in an era of 200, 300 plus page business books that probably should have been pamphlets.

40 or 50, you know, would have been a lot better.

You know, the One Minute Manager was this thin, easily readable thing that said, I'm just, it's just three things here and it was a fable.

So it wasn't a lot of theory, it wasn't a lot of new terms and everything.

And it also demonstrated, rather than just told you what to do, you Start by this person who wants to be a new manager coming to talk to somebody who's supposed to be a really good manager.

That's how it starts.

So we've got the Padawan learning at the feet of the Jedi Master here.

Exactly.

To use a metaphor that might have become familiar by 1982.

So, Mike, we know that we have access to a pretty decent summary of the whole thing as a YouTube video.

So if you're interested in seeing the YouTube video, go to the show notes and click on the video.

And if you want to share this with anybody, then the YouTube is eminently shareable.

Now, for those of us who would like to savor it more than just clicking on YouTube.

Mike, tell us about One Minute Manager.

What's the central idea here that's unfolding for us in this fable?

Yeah, so in the fable, the guy says, oh, you want to know what my secret to great management is?

Go talk to these three of my employees.

And so, first of all, there's a great secret right there.

It says, I'm not going to spend all my time talking to you about this because my people are already doing this and they can tell you about it as well as I can.

Oh, wait, look at this great delegation and the fact that these things are practiced throughout the company, not just the one guru up here.

So this person does, goes and talks to each person.

Person number one talks about one minute group goals and one minute goals.

This idea that says each team member, every, everybody in the organization should have clear written goals that can be reviewed in one minute or less.

And this is back at a time too, when we were writing lots of mission statements.

And some of them, like at, when I was at IBM, you could put on a small card and carry with you.

And a lot of lifetime, you know, lifelong IBM ers had.

They didn't have to look at their card.

They knew them.

This was the idea that we could actually take all of our goals of our group and do the same thing with those one minute goals.

That has a slightly kind of cultish vibe about it.

The idea that you carry a little card around in your wallet or your purse.

Right?

Yeah.

And again, that was like 70s and 80s business books were sometimes a little bit like that.

They wanted to get you on board and get you indoctrinated and so you can kind of get religion with a small R, if you know what I mean.

Right.

So tell us about the next one minute chunk.

So having understood those goals and clearly they supposedly cast K down for what's our company doing what's our team doing?

What's each individual doing underneath that One Minute Praisings?

And this was in that same era of you as a manager should be wandering around catching your people doing things wrong.

Right.

And so it was about immediate, specific, positive feedback.

And when you see somebody doing something right, you know, boom, catch it right there, acknowledge it and be really specific about what they're doing well, and your authentic appreciation for that person's contributions.

I think a lot of people ended up turning this into walking into a room and always saying, oh, great work, guys.

Oh, team, I really love this.

Or Sarah, you're just doing so much for us.

Thanks, Sarah.

So I think they called them in the book One Minute Praisings.

Nice.

It's.

It's old fashioned in terms of its language, but you can get the idea.

Yeah.

And how to do it specifically and how to do it to make it personal.

That sounds like that's still useful today.

We're training our new puppies.

And this is about.

We're using specifically positive reinforcement, operant conditioning.

And so it resonates all the way from the fable of management down to instead of running around telling your dog, no, don't do that, don't do that.

Being very specific here and essentially rewarding.

Right.

So we've had one minute goals, we've had one minute praisings.

I have a feeling that I know what might be coming next.

Well, I love it because in the original book it was called One minute Reprimands.

And as you can imagine, as this has gone over the decades and been reprinted and updated and had anniversary editions, reprimands have become one minute redirects.

And I love that too.

Nobody reprimands anybody about anything anymore.

God, I sound like a boomer.

And interestingly, again, we're realizing that redirects rather than sometimes reprimands can actually be better.

So the idea is you want to catch them where you can redirect them to do something better, differently in another way.

Yeah, I think the original language is around performance issues.

You address them quickly, immediately, and constructively.

Interestingly, this same formula applied.

So the idea was immediately address the problem behavior and expressing how the manager feels about the mistake, reaffirming the person's value.

So this idea of you are not your behavior, you're not a bad person, you're not a bad dog, you're.

And even me equating it that way by, you know, it's certainly not the way the book would have talked about it, but reaffirming the person's value and then moving Forward positively.

So once it's done, we're not carrying around a store cheat, we're not holding this against them, but it says what's worked well, what you're doing.

Well, even better.

If this is one of those early moments in the evolution of a business idea that we can see had successor ideas all the way down the generations.

So what else causes it to resonate?

Why are we still talking about it now?

How come it's relevant for consultants today?

I think initially we were all really keen about efficiency and results and this was like, ooh, this little simple, structured approach to get there and in a practical, actionable way.

And even today the idea of clarity and conciseness in communication.

So in our fast paced kind of digital environment, this idea of clear written goals and an understanding between us and specific constructive feedback, really important in management, in client relationships.

So fundamentals that are just as true today.

It's great.

As we were changing the world around technology every once in a while I had to tell people who were prognosticating the future that we're still going to have gravity.

There's some things that are not going to change and I think these are some of the things that are not going to change.

The fact efficient management practices that respect everybody's time, mine and yours, and maintain effectiveness as well as efficiency.

So good stuff.

Besides all of this crystallizing and representing the world of efficiency and also human oriented management, why else do you think this was a big hit, Mike?

Well, I would absolutely, I'd love to see somebody test this hypothesis, but I know for me it was like, look, we were on planes all the time.

There were bookshops in airports all the time.

And this one and all of the ones that came after the one minute manager for leadership, they were great because it didn't matter if you were going 30 minutes or you were going overseas, you could stock up on these things and boy, you were there.

You had the ideas.

I remember writing down the key ideas at the front.

Done.

Got it locked and loaded.

Not, oh my God, how many par.

How many chapters are left in this book?

What exactly am I taking away from it?

Yes.

And how long of a conversation am I going to have to have with my inner child to reflect as a result?

None of that.

None of that.

Yeah, nice.

Boiled down insights.

I like the idea of one minute goals.

We might have to branch out into one minute scope.

Like can you do a one minute scope of your consulting?

Yeah, I love it.

Excellent.

Thank you so much, Mike.

Ian.

So we mentioned one minute manager we just talked through that.

The other one that we talked about, really influential to boomers, and I think very much to current day, is Stephen Covey's the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Tell us a little bit about that.

Well, the Seven Habits book was published in 1989, which, by the way, is the year that I started college.

So this was really top of mind for me as I was starting to learn about this world of business and management.

And interestingly, Mike, I would characterize One Minute Manager as definitely a business book, but Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is a person book, how to be an effective person not only in business.

So that already tells me that it's more comprehensive, that it's this combination of professional and personal effectiveness.

And you and I have taught this a lot, Mike.

We know that the number seven has magic power in terms of people's ability to remember it.

I think that the One Minute Manager is a great piece of structured writing.

Seven different habits organized into three little groups.

The structured geek in me really loves it already for that.

Yeah.

So what's the first little group here, Mike?

The first little group has a label that is already exciting.

Personal victory.

That is to say, independence.

It's trying to say, these are the habits that effective people have that allow them to be their own person and to achieve their own goals and to feel rewarded for it.

So let's go through them.

I'll quickly call them out, and then we'll dig into them a little bit.

Nice.

Habit number one, be proactive.

Take responsibility for your life rather than blaming circumstances or blaming others.

Habit number two, begin with the end in mind.

Define clear goals.

Develop a personal mission statement.

Not the first time in management literature that anybody talked about mission statements, but one of the early occasions when this was connected to me as a person.

And then habit three, put first things first.

Prioritize important activities over urgent but less important tasks.

And, Mike, of those three, I think they're all great, but there's some obvious standouts for our work as consultants.

I think there are.

It's funny, I'm trying to think back.

When's the last time I used one of these?

It was last week.

Yeah, that's, I think, how relevant they are.

I was answering a client's question.

I went, have you ever read about Stephen Covey's circle of influence and circle of concern, which is part of being proactive?

And it was like, wow.

Wow, that makes sense.

So these three already have occurred to me, either in my own reflection on how to do stuff on my own Coaching and leadership training for people or just in life, like you say, circle of concern, a circle of responsibility in being proactive.

Figure out what is it that you're in control of.

Answer, not so much what can you influence and what merely concerns you.

And direct your conversation towards the things that you can control.

Beginning with the end in mind says something that all consultants ought to be able to do.

Think ahead of time about the thing that you're undertaking, or even the document that you're about to write, or the analysis that you're about to conduct and conceive what the end is going to look like and work back from there.

That takes you into the idea of formulating a hypothesis.

That takes you into the idea of all kinds of structured approaches to writing and thinking that are absolutely meat and drink to consultants, but.

But that were not so widespread in the world.

I don't think back in 89.

I remember running into this consultant in the UK for the first time and we were chatting after we got past the issue of my bad expense report.

You were giving some advice to a client and said, you need to begin the way you wish to carry on.

Right?

And it so resonated with me.

And then I remember it, I thought back, wait a minute, wait a minute.

I'm thinking back through the generations.

Ah, begin with the end in mind, but begin the way you wish to carry on.

I thought, ah, this is such good stuff.

That sounds like something I would say.

Well, it's coming out of your mouth, right?

So that puts me in the honorary boomer category.

To be honest, if we're all reading and thinking about the seven habits, but we're all honorary boomers and not the worst for that because it's just good stuff and putting first things first.

We all talk a lot when we're thinking about writing to put the lead statement, put the big idea at the beginning to communicate top down.

But he's talking about putting first things first in terms of prioritization as well.

Your, your life is an order of priorities and it's very easy for the priorities get to get shuffled.

All of the stuff about urgent versus important, all of the ideas that we get distracted, lots of the contemporary thinking about managing time and managing your incipient ADHD come back to this.

I think about putting first things first.

That was our first category.

I remember intel was on a big slide, big slide.

And they asked the CEO, what's going on?

What the heck has happened?

What are you going to do to turn this around?

And he said, at that time, I Attribute our downturn to the ubiquitous use of email.

And I thought, email, what do you mean?

And it was exactly this.

The tyranny of the urgent over the important.

He said, I used to spend X number of time of my days thinking about what's next and what's after that and what do we need to do about the important things.

He said, now I'm reacting to this moment to moment stuff and I realized we lost the thread.

Yeah.

And I thought, wow, that was it.

That's great.

It's huge.

Not only for intel then, but for all of us as individuals now.

Wow.

Well, we had the personal victory.

What comes next?

Well, next you might expect.

It was another kind of victory.

Of course, it's public victory.

And here are Stephen Covey's tips for handling yourself and influencing others.

Habit number four is thinking win win, seeking mutual benefit in interactions.

Of course, he's inherited the phrase win win from Fisher and Ury and the whole getting to yes negotiation theory thing, that came even more early in the boomer generation than this.

But still thinking that there's mutually beneficial outcomes in every interaction that you have is a mindset change from thinking I'm going to win and you're going to lose.

That was habit number four.

Habit number five, seek first to understand than to be understood.

Practice empathetic listening before you get into offering solutions.

And habit number six, synergize, which is one of those kind of management cliches we might have spoken about a few episodes ago.

But he has a specific meaning for it in this setting here.

It means value and leverage differences.

Leverage.

Another one of our favorite consulting shibboleths to create better solutions.

He's basically saying, look for what's different because combining things that are different, things that are non overlapping can generate great solutions.

So again, Mike, these are staples of lots of things that we talk about today when it comes to influence and personal effectiveness.

Borrowing from the idea of negotiation is no bad, bad thing at all.

Borrowing from the idea of looking for non overlapping gains and synergizing I think is great.

But my personal favorite of these is seek first to understand.

And it's come up a lot in conversations I've had with my clients and with their teams lately.

It's very easy in the pace of the world and the pace of our problem solving thinking to get straight to solutions.

And that stops us from being open and that stops us from being curious.

So seeking first to understand, to practice this, not only the skill of listening, but the mindset of listening to find out what's going on in the world.

First, I can't think of the number of things that I've screwed up in my life where I should have sought first to understand a little bit.

And I can't think of the number of relationships that I've had.

Would have been better if I'd shown everybody that I was a better listener than a talker.

Amen.

Amen.

I'm with you.

Ian Covey himself talked about.

Look, a lot of this stuff comes out of me looking widely across cultures, across teachings not to overuse leverage, but I think this is the original Archimedes lever thing that says these are the little things that make a huge difference here.

So.

So we've gone from independence in ourselves to interdependence, which I think was great.

I'm trying to, you know, back in my mind, start counting off how many big consulting projects really were resolved by people collaborating more, not fighting and competing with themselves inside their own teams and organizations.

And those difference this interdependence.

But what's next?

How do we start to round these out here so those of us who.

Are naturally list bullet point counters will have remembered that we got to number six.

Exactly.

We only have one left.

And number seven is kind of a meta habit if you like.

It's an uber habit, the one habit to inhabit them all.

Sharpening the saw, he calls it Continuously renew yourself.

That means physically and mentally and spiritually and socially.

And again, this is very prescient.

I think back in the 80s we could all have done with a little bit more renewal and sharpening of the sore.

I think the physical, mental, spiritual and social demands, the reasons why you get fatigued in those dimensions were different in 1989 than they are today.

But the fact that we all need to renew ourselves in all those ways today, that hasn't gone away.

So I think this is great advice.

Plus I make my living from helping people sharpen certain aspects of their own source.

So this would have to be high on my list for that reason.

Well, I'm reminded we developed, as we developed back many years ago, a high potential leadership course, a global one where like 20, 25 people were selected from the top of this organization to come in because they're the next leaders.

So the night before we're delivering there is a tender, an unsolicited tender offer for the company that this is going to be taught to.

And the CEO is supposed to be addressing these next generation leaders.

But you know, with this tender coming in the middle of the night, we're thinking, oh my Gosh, CEO can't be here.

How are we going to do this?

And the CEO said, no, I'm coming and I'm just going to speak to it.

And it was magic.

It was amazing.

We filmed that for years afterwards.

That was the film that we used to talk about the essence of great presentations.

And I knew this CEO from a prior firm and I chatted with him about that afterwards.

And he said, from the very beginning of my career, speaking in public I knew would be an important part of my being successful.

So I started at the very beginning with a coach every year on presenting in public.

And I would keep that coach as long as they had something that I could learn.

And when I couldn't, I found a new coach.

And he said, my coaching session is next week in Atlanta.

So as CEO and one of the best speakers I've seen, a world class speaker, he's.

He was going to coach and talk about sharpening the saw.

That was another big wake up call for me to go back to.

I remember Covey saying this and I took it to heart, but not really, not the way he had.

It's great.

It's such a great example and it's an example of the strength and the power of the Seven Habits thing.

Not only because it's a beautifully structured framework and that makes it memorable and easy to pass things along and you can chunk it down, but because some of the things in it really go deeply to how you stay effective and how you stay learning as a professional in the world.

And that goes double for consultants.

Life is complex.

The world around us is complex.

Thinking about habits in this way helps us take care of all of those things and keep us focused.

And the idea of making it about personal focus and personal habit, I think elevates it even further.

It also I think speaks about authenticity.

One of the themes that I get from all of the Seven Habit stuff is be the person that the world needs you to be.

Be the person that's naturally you.

And, and that is refreshing too in a world where it's quite easy to believe that you have to put on an act or be something else.

I think 7 Habits is talking about understanding your own character and representing that character.

And as one of the early ones of a whole generation of character based self help books, I think it really stands up.

Yeah, I think that's so true, Ian.

It's got all the things of One Minute Managers plus plus plus I think that we can see that.

I think I was looking back one minute manager about 15 million copies, lots of different languages.

So it's made its way around the world.

Any idea about Seven Habits?

Has it got the enduring success that One Minute Manager has?

Well, Mike, we're playing booktop trumps here and I think I'm going to play my winning card.

7 Habits back in 2020 was already documented as having sold over 40 million copies worldwide and been translated into 50.

That's 50 langu, one of the best selling nonfiction books of all time, widely adopted, as you and I have been telling today, in leadership training programs and in personal development programs and coaching conversations.

It's been a classic.

And exactly for those reasons that you said, Mike.

It elevates just simple kind of business practice thinking into personal reflection.

For me in particular, I think the fact not only that it's got this nice universal structure, but the fact that it turns us back onto habits.

It turns us back onto the things that are most challenging about ourselves to change and develop.

And your lesson about the CEO was a really important one there.

We're all a work in progress wherever we are in our careers and 7 Habits is a really, really good basic starter for examining your own habits and seeing where you want to foster the next new habit.

We may yet come back to more recent books about the psychology and the formation of habits because it's a really interesting area for consultants.

But this is the foundation stone, I think.

Absolutely, absolutely foreign.

So, Ian, if you're only going to read one, which is it, our listeners.

Out there, I don't think it's a big surprise to say unless it's a very, very short flight.

And I've only got time for the kind of the potted highlights.

If it's anything other than a very short flight, I'm going to get Seven Habits not only because it's at that higher level and has that greater influence that we've talked about, but also because I think I can probably carry my memory of one Minute Manager around with me exactly because of how simple it is.

Every time I go back into 7 Habits, I get a little extra reminder or something that I can push on.

And I think for that reason it's the winner for me this week.

What do you think?

I couldn't agree with you more for nothing else too, that forget just the business success that it drives, the personal success that it drives, and not even even deeper than that becoming.

I think it's a perhaps an overused phrase, the best version of yourself.

But these are while there are all kinds of gurus and all kinds of things you can go into, boy if you master these habits, I think there's a mighty big difference here.

And we're all just continuing to stair step along.

Excellent.

By the way, Stephen Covey is entitled to be regarded as a teacher of boomers because he himself was born in 1932.

So he's the generation before that, what people sometimes call the Great Gener.

Yeah.

So there you go.

He's right in the demo.

And his book is great as well.

Mike, as you said at the very beginning, we unpacked a little bit.

One Minute manager and seven habits.

There was another one that came high on our list of boomer texts.

Remind us which one that was.

Yeah.

So this was in Church of Excellence, and boy, this was big lights, all singing, all dancing.

I'm going to talk to my clients about what they need to do in business.

I really want to have some answers and I want to have some evidence behind that.

Peters and Waterman.

Here we go.

However, there were some big lessons to be learned, not only from that book, but especially from that book about the fact that book was not all it was cracked up to be, as time told us, and that time is a bridge between boomers and Gen X.

So I think it's a great thing to come back and pair that up with the successive book next week.

All right.

Written by boomers, critiqued and built on by Gen X's, who are going to be the heroes, I hope, of the next chapter of our story.

Excellent, Mike.

Thank you so much.

It's been really fascinating talking about these books together.

That's about our show, speaking of time, and what a great one it's been.

Ian, thanks so much, too.

I've enjoyed this.

It's taken me back, and I hope, in addition to taking us back, it'll bring you back next week for the Consulting for Humans podcast.

Sa.