I met a “rock star of the management world” on Thursday night. At least that’s how a fan of Dr. Ken Blanchard was quoted describing him. At first I had no idea what that meant. To me authors are authors, but by the end of the night I had added him to my list of famous rockers.
For 2 months during my last semester of college I was immersed in the mind of Dr. Ken Blanchard. I quickly read his latest book at the time titled, Lead Like Jesus, and was in the habit of doing daily research on Dr. Blanchard. I was trying to absorb as much as I could about his life and his thinking. I read of his other bestselling books and explored the inner workings of The Ken Blanchard Companies®, which he established in 1979. I was enthralled with his take on the subjects of ethics, management and leadership. He is truly a guru on these topics. What led me to this study of Dr. Blanchard’s work was a competition being held by the W Publishing Group, which is the publisher of Lead Like Jesus.
The competition was opened to universities and colleges around the country in which students were to create and implement a marketing plan for Dr. Blanchard’s book, Lead Like Jesus. The prize for winning the competition was a $5,000 scholarship for the School of Business, and a speaking engagement by Blanchard. I along with two other students, Garret Gronberg and Jay Lunceford, was selected by marketing professor, Dr. Kerianne Roper, to compete in the competition. After two full months of a research, planning, promoting, and working with businesses such as Mardels, Waldenbooks, and Amazon, we submitted our plan. Almost a month later we received word that we had won.
I hoped that I would be able to attend Dr. Blanchard’s speaking engagement with the school, whenever it might be, and a few months ago I received a personal invitation to the OC Associates Dinner, in which Dr. Blanchard was to be the keynote speaker. Thursday night, before leaving my house for the OC Associates Dinner, I started wondering what it would be like to hear Dr. Blanchard speak and to meet him personally. Would he demonstrate the passion for his work, that is so evident in his writings? Would he be, “insightful, and powerful,” as his friends, colleagues, and clients have characterized him? I can truthfully say that Ken Blanchard met and exceeded my expectations. Because of the night’s order of formal presentation, I didn’t get a chance to meet with Dr. Blanchard until the end of the evening, while he was signing books. As soon as he found out that I was one of the students who won the competition, I was greeted with open arms. I didn’t have a book for him to sign, but I told him the story of how during the competition I gave my copy of his book away to a newspaper journalist from one of the local papers so that she would do a writeup on the book and the competition. He quickly motioned for one the people selling books to hand him a copy from the table. (They were out of Lead Like Jesus, so I was given The One Minute Manager instead.) He signed the book and we took some photos together; Dr. Blanchard was looking like a management rock star to me more than ever!

Tonight I am attending a dinner hosted my alma mater, Oklahoma Christian University.
In a recent post entitled, 
In order to become an innovator of fresh ideas, it is necessary to think like an innovator. I believe one of the best ways to develop a mind that thinks innovatively is to study people who are considered true innovators.
My wife grew up in a small town in the Texas panhandle. So it’s needless to say that high school sports were a big deal. She and many of her friends were huge supporters of her high school’s varsity teams merely because there was little else to do, unless you get big thrills out of watching tumbleweeds roll by. They would go all out sponge painting t-shirts, cheering, and making signs to hold up at the games.
Way before the Best Seller List was even in sight, no one wanted to publish Seth Godin’s
Last weekend I visited a Ducati/BMW motorcycle shop with my father-in-law. The Ducatis blew me away! I’ve seen a Ducati bike on the road here or there, but I’ve never been close enough to really take the time to appreciate their exquisite design. Just by looking at the bikes, I could see that there was careful thought and planning behind each every piece. For a moment I had in my head, a picture of an Italian designer/engineer pondering over a tiny screw and it’s impact on the design of the bike.

Seth Godin sent me into a flashback yesterday of a somewhat embarrassing experience I had at a concert last year. He wrote about listening to
If you have traveled on a major airliner any in the past 3 years, then chances are you’ve flown with a flight attendant that thought they would spice up the preflight safety presentation with their own humorous jargon. Karen Wood is recorded as the first flight attendant to put her own spin on educating passengers about flight safety rules and regulations.
I would hate to be the salesperson that helped Seth Godin today at the Westchester Toyota dealership. Little did he know that his poor performance would be known allover blog world in minutes when Seth returned to his computer. With the large audience Seth has, I wouldn’t be surprised if this salesperson was looking for new employment tomorrow. Read about Seth’s experience he titled “


This sparks an interesting question for me. Some of my biggest clients are banks, and in the last few months at least 3 out of 4 of their messages to their customers have been about how they are beefing up security to protect their private information. So is this just a masquerade being put on by the banks? Are they selling the illusion of security to their customers, but secretly scrambling because they have no idea in the world they are going to protect private information from hackers?













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