The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson and Leadership Is an Art by Max DePree. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context for the emergence of each of the works, as well as the pattern of ideas in each of the books, and then to discuss the means by which these ideas develop in both works, as well as the significance and points of key difference in the manner and underlying premises of the presentation of the ideas themselves.
The One Minute Manager appeared in the popular business culture in the early 1980s. This was a time of transition in the American political economy--out of a period of dramatic inflation and economic uncertainty of the late 1970s and into a period of what turned out to be the supposed economic certainties of the 1980s. One could perhaps argue the permanence or significance of such presumed certainties, but there is no doubt that when one Minute Manager appeared, it was intended to respond to the problematic conditions of its time. The early 1980s were developing as a zero-sum game, as far as business and industrial activity was concerned. Indeed, in the background of Blanchard and Johnson's book is a sense that it will guide the reader toward goal-directed insight into methods of addressing specific problems associated with the failure to achieve goals. What Blanchard and Johnson appear to be making a case for is a focus on the goals of the organization for which managers and support staff are working, with the added benefit of allowing support staffers to achieve personal and professional goals as well. It is a curious fact of Leadership Is an Art that it appeared at the end of the 1980s, when, one presumes, some goals of good management philosophy might have been implemented on a large scale. However, the evidence of the books--the persistence of One Minute Manager in the market on one hand and the apparen...