Dr. Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley | Top 25 Best-Selling Authors of All Time, The One Minute Manager, and Simple Truths of Leadership
Smart Business Revolution

Dr. Ken Blanchard is one of the world’s most influential leadership experts. He is the co-author of more than 65 books including The One Minute Manager with combined sales of over 23 million copies in 47 languages. In 2005, he was inducted into Amazon’s Hall of Fame as one of the top 25 best-selling authors of all time. He is also the Co-founder of The Ken Blanchard Companies, an international training and consulting firm.

Randy Conley is the Vice President and Trust Practice Leader for The Ken Blanchard Companies. Trust Across America recognized him with the Lifetime Achievement Award as a Top Thought Leader in trustworthy business behavior and he is a founding member of the Alliance of Trustworthy Business Experts. Inc.com named Randy a Top 100 Leadership Speaker & Thinker and American Management Association included him in their 2015 Leaders to Watch list. Randy and Dr. Blanchard’s new book is Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways to Be a Servant Leader and Build Trust.

In this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, John Corcoran is joined by Dr. Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley from The Ken Blanchard Companies, to talk about their new book, Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways to Be a Servant Leader and Build Trust. They share strategies for attracting and hiring good employees, building trust in a remote team, and discuss the upcoming movie, The Mulligan. Stay tuned.

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Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:

  • What inspired Dr. Ken Blanchard and Randy Conley to co-write their latest book on servant leadership and trust 
  • Randy’s experience teaming up with his mentor, Dr. Blanchard
  • Did the COVID-19 pandemic influence Dr. Blanchard and Randy’s plans for the book?
  • Dr. Blanchard and Randy’s advice on attracting and hiring good employees
  • How to build trust in a distributed or remote team — and tips for restoring broken trust
  • Dr. Blanchard talks about the new movie, The Mulligan, based on his book with Wally Armstrong

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

Sponsor: Rise25

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:14

Welcome to the revolution, the Smart Business Revolution Podcast where we ask today’s most successful entrepreneurs to share the tools and strategies they use to build relationships and connections to grow their revenue. Now, your host for the revolution, John Corcoran.

John Corcoran 0:40

All right, welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. You know, go check out if you’re new to this, go check out some of our past interviews in the archives. Got all kinds of great episodes with smart CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs of companies and organized organizations ranging from Netflix to Kinkos, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, LendingTree, and many more. I’m also the Co-founder of Rise25 where we help connect b2b business owners with their ideal prospects. And I’m super excited about my guests here today, who I’ll tell you about two incredibly impressive guests. Dr. Ken Blanchard is one of the world’s most influential leadership experts. He’s the co-author of get this more than 65 books including the iconic, the One Minute Manager with combined sales of over 23 million copies in 47 languages. In 2005 he was inducted into Amazon’s Hall of Fame as one of the top 25 best selling authors of all time. He’s also the Co-founder of The Ken Blanchard Companies, an international training and consulting firm.

And Randy Conley is the Vice President and Trust Practice Leader for The Ken Blanchard Companies. Trust Across America has recognized Randy with the Lifetime Achievement Award as a top thought leader in trustworthy business behavior. And he’s a founding member of the alliance of trustworthy business experts inc.com named Randy a top 100 leadership speaker and thinker and American Management Association included him in their leaders to watch their new book is Simple Truths of Leadership: 52 Ways to Be a Servant Leader and Build Trust, Making Common Sense, Common practice. This is the book right here. Super excited to talk to both of them about it. Of course, this episode is brought to you by by company Rise25, where we help b2b businesses to get clients, referrals, and strategic partnerships with done for you podcasts and content marketing. You can go to rise25media.com to learn all about it. All right. I’m super excited to have both of you guys here today to talk about the new book and Dr. Blanchard. I’ll start with you. So first of all, your 60 Books 65 66 Books in at this point, why now? Why this book? What inspired it? And why did you want to write this book?

Dr. Ken Blanchard 2:45

Well, I tell you, John, my mission statement starts with I want to be a loving teacher, an example of simple truths. And so I’ve been trying to look for simple truths all along, the women of manager was a simple truth book and a free little goals. Women have goals that a woman appraising a woman every direction. And so my recently celebrated the 62nd anniversary of my 21st birthday. And so I said, What am I going to leave behind? And I said, I would like to really pull it all together as many of the simple truths I’ve been writing about in one place. And I’ve gotten really excited about servant leadership in recent years and talking with Randy, servant leaders build trust, you know, and trust in servant leader, as Randy says, go like peanut butter and jelly. And so we decided to write this book, in an easy way. So on one side of the page is a simple truth. Like the key to developing people is to catch him doing something right. And then the other side talks first, why people are doing it. I asked people, How do you know whether you’re doing a good job? The number one response I get is, nobody’s yelled at me lately. No news is good news. And, you know, Seagull management is still alive and well. And so, but it’s so it’s really been fun. And so then at the bottom of every page, it says, how to make common sense, common practice. And there’s 26 on servant leadership and 26 on trust. And Randy is the expert on trust. And he he does that area and so, it this was a natural way to go. Don’t you think? Randy?

Randy Conley 4:30

Yeah, sure. Was a we had a blast putting the book together, John. You know, as you can imagine, I’ve worked with Ken for over 25 years. And so he’s been a huge mentor of mine and I share the same philosophy on leadership. No surprise there. We like to make things simple and actionable for people and this was our attempt at making a little dent in that universe of spreading the Good News of servant leadership. Building Trust.

John Corcoran 5:01

Randy, I want to ask from your perspective. You know, many of the guests I’ve interviewed over the years, I love asking people about teaming up with a mentor. And you mentioned that Ken’s been a mentor for you. But this is a new experience, he comes down the hallway or virtual hallway, knocks on your door and says, let’s write a book together. And, and this is like an author who’s kind of well known, well respected. Are you thinking like, geez, I better not screw this one up. I mean, what what was your perspective? Like when he said, let’s write a book together?

Randy Conley 5:34

Yeah, when he first started that, oh, I don’t know, maybe five, six years ago, when we first started tinkering with this idea, I sort of look to my left and look to my right is like, Who’s he talking to? Oh, man. But in all seriousness, I had, I’ve been in the field of trust for a little over 15 years, and I’ve been writing a weekly blog article, on my blog Leading with Trust, it’s had over 4 million views since its inception. And so I had been doing a lot of work in trust. And Ken, and I were chatting one day, and we said, You know what, let’s, we should do something about the combination of servant leadership and trust. And as we started talking more about it, this idea of simple truths, sort of these bite sized nuggets of leadership wisdom, percolated to the top. And if there was a good thing that came out of COVID, in 2020, it was that summer, it sort of gave us a little time and space in our calendars, to really sit down and then put something together and get it over to a publisher. Next thing you know, here we are talking to you, John.

John Corcoran 6:52

Right. Right. And I want to get back to you Dr. Blanchard. Now, the publishing schedule, it takes a long time many years. And you mentioned Randy mentioned that the book was conceived before the pandemic hit. We’re recording this and in 2022. So Dr. Blanchard Did did you did the pandemic caused you to rethink what you wanted to say in this book in any way? Well,

Dr. Ken Blanchard 7:19

It influenced us, you know, because we were kind of finishing up. Because a lot of people said, Wow, this pandemics gonna ruin leadership. No, I think because of zoom and other technology, you can stay in touch with your people now much more than ever before. And this book is a perfect way to keep in touch. You know, we have number managers who are taking one simple truth a week with their people and saying, Okay, here’s the simple truth for this week, let’s talk about this periodically. Or they might even take a section of the book with four or five simple truths in a in a week. And so we just thought, what a what a perfect time and rather than the pandemic being a problem that’s really been become an asset for us and spreading the word.

John Corcoran 8:08

Yeah. Randy, same same question to you. How did the pandemic influence the writing of the book or some of the thoughts that went into it?

Randy Conley 8:17

Yeah, I echo what Ken said. And I would add, in the section on trust, we purposely ended the 52 simple truths with this last one, number 52. is forgiveness is letting go of all hopes for a better past. And we ended with that one, because we know that people have been beat up and battered and bruised through the pandemic, right, just personally, as well as organizationally, the way a lot of folks had been treated by organizations. It’s been a rough go. And so we wanted to address that in our own little way and say, you know, what, folks, we can’t always control what happens to us. But we can control what happens within us. And so pursuing a path of forgiveness in terms of restoring trust, rebuilding trust with others, that’s the way to go. That’s the most healthy and productive way forward. So that that was definitely an influence on the pandemic.

John Corcoran 9:26

Yeah. Dr. Blanchard, one of the things that terms that has come up recently is this great resignation. You know, a lot of people are leaving after two years of pandemic, they’re making different life choices. The war for talent is another term that people have been talking about. It’s been more competitive to get good people to work within your company. A lot of company owners are struggling to get good people. What are some of your thoughts on that approach? And what advice are you giving to companies right now that are experiencing that?

Dr. Ken Blanchard 9:59

Well, I think That’s why the timing of our book is important because people leave, don’t leave organizations, they leave managers. You know, they, they don’t feel value they don’t feel. And so what we really push in this is, you know, Tom Peters, who was a returning brother of mine used to talk about managing by wandering around. But when you wander around, what should you be doing, you ought to be catching people doing things right. And cheering them on. And if they’re having a problem saying, How can I help? And then all, because the big philosophy that we think is so important in this these times, is effective leaders. Leadership is about we not me, and we’re in this thing together. And I and so I think that’s been a positive thing that’s come out of all this.

John Corcoran 10:47

Yeah. And Randy, similar thoughts on the great resignation, and companies that are struggling to attract great talent within their organization.