Ken Blanchard

Blanchard attended New Rochelle High School, and graduated in 1957. He completed a BA degree in government and philosophy at Cornell University in 1961, a MA degree in sociology and counseling at Colgate University in 1963 and a PhD degree in education administration and leadership at Cornell University in 1967. As an undergraduate at Cornell, he joined the fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta (FIJI), and was selected for membership in the Quill and Dagger society.

Blanchard is a Cornell University trustee emeritus and visiting professor at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. He and his wife were named Cornell Entrepreneurs of the Year in 1991.

The Ken Blanchard Companies is an international management training and consulting firm that Ken and his wife Marjorie co-founded in 1979. The company's core mission is to increase organizational performance through leadership consulting. Currently, the company provides leadership training and consulting in coordination with a vast majority companies in many varying industries. The three pillars on which the company stands are Building Leadership Capacity, Cultivating Leadership Bench Strength, and Leading Organizational Change.

Building leadership capacity focuses on increasing employee passion, customer devotion, and organizational vitality through creating effective leaders in the workplace. The implication of this, and the ultimate goal of building leadership capacity, is to allow organizations to create results-oriented, people-focused leaders who improve performance, increase retention and morale, and deliver bottom-line results.

Cultivating leadership strength differs from building leadership capacity insofar as it is an inside-out approach to help individuals understand themselves so they can become effective leaders. The premise of this mission is that by mentoring high-potential talent and giving them the resources to grow into competent and confident managers, firms will seed the pipeline for organizational growth.

The last of the three pillars of his company, leading organizational change, focuses on sharpening the operational strategy, process, and communications of clientele firms. The company handles changes in management due to reorganizations, new executive appointments, mergers, acquisitions, downsizing, and alike. The Ken Blanchard Companies also addresses and consults on critical issues and necessities during each phase of the firm's organization change.

Ken's writing career includes more than 60 books, and hundreds of keynote speeches. Some of his most notable books include:

• The One Minute Manager® (co-authored with Spencer Johnson), which has sold over 13 million copies and has been translated into 37 languages. It has been shown repeatedly to have been plagiarized at length from the original research of a former colleague of Blanchard and Johnson, Arthur Elliott Carlisle, who has never been acknowledged by Blanchard and Johnson as anything more than a subordinate co-author.
• Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service (1993)
• Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership® (1985) (in which he coined the term seagull manager)
• Gung Ho! Turn On the People in Any Organization (1997)
• Whale Done! The Power of Positive Relationships (2002)
• Leading at a Higher Level: Blanchard on Leadership and Creating High Performing Organizations (2006).