Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute

Book excerpt: In the newly updated edition of this classic empowerment business fable—over 400,000 copies sold—Ken Blanchard and John Carlos show you how to shift to an empowered, employee-driven work environment. Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute tells the story of a young manager whose attempts to turn his troubled company around through traditional top-down, command-and-control management are failing. Reluctantly, he contacts an expert in empowerment, even though he feels like he's already tried that approach. Step by step, the expert helps him understand why his past and present efforts have fallen short and figure out what he needs to do to create an empowered workforce. The process as it unfolds is complex, paradoxical, and counterintuitive—but well worth the effort. This new edition dispels the notion that empowerment is a bygone fad. No matter what its name, the essential concept—that organizations can achieve extraordinary results by recognizing and taking advantage of the skills, experience, and knowledge already existing in the organization—will always be relevant. Although sometimes arduous, the journey to empowerment is well worth embarking on. In fact, unleashing the power of people in an organization may be the only way to continue to do business in a competitive, complicated marketplace.