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WHAT REALLY MATTERS
By Ken Blanchard with Jeff Hopper
Forgive me,
but I’m a little storyteller. That is, I tell little stories. They’re parables, actually, and they are the gifts God has given me to give to others.
When I wrote The One-Minute Manager, a lot of people couldn’t take it seriously. How could a top manager deal with
tough decisions and troubling situations so rapidly? But this is what I was used to. Get to the point and get the job done.
So if you’re looking for a long-winded lesson from me, I’ll apologize right now. But I’m also going to get
started, and I’d love to have you along for the ride.
Off To School
First, let me say a few things about golf. You may wonder how a business guy like me knows anything about golf.
Actually, I started a golf school in 1987. That was long before all the big hotels and resorts had schools like these. At the time,
there were only about eight golf schools in the entire country.
I wasn’t the world’s greatest golfer, but I had a lot of ideas about transferring information to people and teaching
them to manage themselves. So I found a good professional, Kip Puterbaugh, and we set to work at the Rancho Bernardo Inn near San Diego. Golfers with a desire to learn something new would
come for three days and we would teach them.
But we kept it simple. One bit of instruction at a time, and no more help until you had mastered that first piece of instruction. By
the third day, we had the golfers teaching themselves. They would hit a shot and we would challenge them to tell us what they had done right or wrong. Why not? After all, we weren’t
going home with these people!
I have always said, “It’s easy to get people to do what you want them to do when you are hovering over them. The key to
your effectiveness is how well your followers carry on when you’re not around.” So we wanted to send these golfers home able to manage their own games.
Stop Playing Golf Swing
But golf isn’t just about your golf swing. It’s about learning to get the ball in the hole.
Here’s an idea I learned from Chuck Hogan: You have to stop playing golf swing and start playing golf.
People who play golf swing get to thinking about making the prettiest, most powerful golf swing while they’re out on the
course. That’s fine when you’re on the practice range, but when you get on the course you need to have one thing in mind: get the ball in the hole.
If you’re hooking the ball today, then you need to start lining it up a little right, making an adjustment. You don’t
want to do that in the long run, but you can take care of that on the range after the round. While you’re out on the course, you want to take as few shots as possible, right? So you
have to learn to do whatever it takes in order to make that happen.
A Great Gift
I say that, but I’m not really all that into competition myself anymore on the golf course. My son gets me into competitive
games sometimes, and I can handle that, because I’m an old jock. I like competition.
When I play golf with my wife, we take the NATO approach—Not Attached To Outcome. Why would anyone want to take a great sport
like golf and ruin it by grinding away at it all the time?
My wife has played St. Andrews and Pebble Beach and all these great courses, but she does it her way. If she wants to tee the ball
up in the fairway, she tees the ball up in the fairway. It’s not tour golf, but we’re not tour players!
Go ahead and play competitively if you like, but never forget that being out on the golf course is one of the greatest gifts in life.
Never Alone
Now here’s one more thing with regard to golf: don’t go it alone.
I think one thing that is a shame about golf these days is that it is primarily an individual sport. We’re not going to bring
back caddies to the extent that we had them when there weren’t so many courses and so many players. But if you ever get the chance to hire a caddie, you’ll understand what I mean.
We belong to a course in Scotland called Loch Lomond. We’ve been going over there for about 10 years, and I have had the same
caddie all these years. We figure that over those 10 years, we’ve spent the equivalent of about 20 24-hour days together. That’s a lot of time with someone! So my caddie knows me
as a person. He knows the strengths and weaknesses of my game. It sure helps to have someone like that to check things out with. He can’t swing the club for me, but he can only make me
better.
I have heard people draw an analogy that says that Jesus is our caddie in life. To some that sounds a little sacrilegious, I’m
told, but I don’t think it is. I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t want someone far wiser than we are to walk with us through life and help us make our decisions. If we’ve
ruined golf by making it a one-person sport, we’ve certainly ruined life by doing so.
The Greatest Manager
Let me change direction here and tell you how I came to know Jesus.
Before I really established any kind of faith in Jesus, I was challenged to see Him as an excellent model for leadership. Shortly
after The One-Minute Manager was published in 1982, it became so popular so quickly that I was asked to appear on Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power television program at the Crystal Cathedral. Reverend Schuller asked me, “Do you know who was the greatest one-minute manager of all time? Jesus!”
“Really?” I said.
“Sure,” he answered, “think about it. Jesus practiced the three secrets of the One-Minute Manager—One-Minute
Goal Setting, One-Minute Praisings, and One-Minute Reprimands. After His goals were clear as to why He had come, He managed by wandering around from one little town to the next, catching
people doing things right and then praising or healing them. If they got off base, He wasn’t afraid to redirect and reprimand people. He was a classic One-Minute Manager.”
This was the beginning of my examination of my own faith because the more I became exposed to followers of Jesus, the more I
realized that everything that I had ever taught or written about, Jesus did. The minute I became open to a spiritual awakening, all kinds of people started showing up in my life to help my
journey.
On God’s Team
One of the first spiritual people to come into my life was Norman Vincent Peale, the positive-thinking pastor. He was 86 when I
first met him and still very active. I’ll never forget what Norman said to me at one of our first meetings: “Blanchard, the Lord has always had you on His team—you just
haven’t suited up yet.” That statement stuck with me until several years later when I first met Bill Hybels, senior pastor of the large Willow Creek Community Church in South
Barrington, Illinois, and asked him, “So, how do I suit up?”
“It’s easy for a One-Minute Manager,” Hybels answered. “Whenever you’re ready, just put your head down
and say, ‘Lord, I can’t save myself. I fall short of perfection. I accept Jesus as my Savior and bridge between me and You.’”
Of course, I resisted suiting up for a while because as Norman Vincent Peale had told me, “The toughest test of self-esteem is
to bow your head and turn your life over to the Lord. The human ego doesn’t want to give up that kind of control.” Given that reality, it wasn’t until about nine months
later when we were having a major problem with our company that I “bit the bullet.”
A business executive we had made president was causing a lot of trouble. As I was driving to meet my wife, Margie, to talk about
what we should do, I suddenly realized, “Blanchard, you are so stupid. Why are you trying to figure this all out by yourself?”
Hybels had told me, “The great thing about Christianity is that you get three consultants for the price of one. You should
understand that, Blanchard—you’re a consultant. You get the Lord, who created it all. You get the Son, who lived it, and you get the Holy Spirit, who is your day-to-day operations
manager. Why don’t you take advantage of their expertise?”
So as I drove up the interstate, I simply prayed and turned my life over to the Lord. It became clear to me that I couldn’t
figure this or anything else out by myself. I needed His help. And as I prayed, I could feel a peace come over me. My life has never been the same. One time after I’d taken the Lord
into my life, I asked Dr. Peale, “Should I stop what I’m doing and go back to divinity school?”
He was quick to answer, “Absolutely not. You have a tremendous congregation out there, and we just don’t have enough
preachers in the field.” As a result, my personal mission became to be a loving teacher and example of simple truths that help myself and others awaken the presence of God in our lives.
Scoring 100
I remember that when I was seriously examining my own faith, one of the things that bugged me about Christianity was the concept of
original sin. Why do we have to start off bad? It didn’t make any sense to me. I’m a humanist—why not believe in original potentiality?
Then I ran into Bob Buford, the author of that fabulous book, Halftime.
“Bob, why this original sin stuff?” I asked him.
“Blanchard, do you think you’re as good as God?” he asked.
“No, of course not. If there is a God, that’s perfection,” I answered.
“OK,” he said. “Let’s give God a 100 and ax murderers a 5. We’ll give Mother Teresa a 95—she was
a pretty good person. You’re not bad, Blanchard, because you’re trying to help people, so let’s give you a 75.”
I was able to follow him this far.
“The great thing about Christianity,” he continued, “is that the Lord sent Jesus down to make up the difference
between you and 100.”
That made sense to me. I could more easily except that I’ve fallen short of 100 than someone calling me a sinner.
“Before you get too excited though,” said Buford, “let me tell you something you might not like as much. The ax
murderer has the same shot at the ball as Mother Teresa. Grace is the gift; it depends on your acceptance of Jesus as your Savior, not your performance.”
I remember when I first found out that Peter Drucker, the great management guru, was a believer. I asked him why he was a Christian.
He answered, “There is no better deal. Who else has the gift of grace?”
Hybels told me that the difference between religion and Christianity was in the spelling. Religion is spelled capital D-O. To get
grace, there is a “to do” list of things you have to do to measure up. Christianity, on the other hand, is spelled, D-O-N-E. The Lord sent Jesus down to take care of our sins
because we all fall short of 100.
So what’s the journey in life? It’s to enjoy a relationship with the Lord that operates every single day out of love
rather than false pride. Every morning our ego is there trying to lure us afresh into believing that gaining earthly success is what life is all about; that the meaning of life is found in
trying to meet our ego’s insatiable hunger for praise and acceptance from others. It’s a constant battle.
I have my own definition for ego—Edging God Out. When we do that, when we let our own pursuits take precedence over Him,
we’re in trouble.
Something Left Over
Let me tell you one last little story. It’s about one of the greatest leaders of our lifetimes.
You know that in your life, some days turn out better than others. The secret is to remember our priorities. Tom Landry, the
legendary coach of the Dallas Cowboys, knew that secret. Some days the Cowboys won; other days they lost. Someone once asked him how he remained so calm during a game that’s as
incredibly competitive as professional football.
“It’s easy,” he answered. “My priorities are in order. First comes my Lord, second comes my wife, third
comes my kids, and fourth comes my job. So if I lose on Sunday, I’ve got a lot left over.”
When business people are controlled by their ego, their identity is determined by whether they win or lose. They become their
victories—or their defeats.
But God has never seen us in that way. He really doesn’t care like we do about our egos, power, status, and position. He is
about much greater priorities in life. He wants to know if we want Him.
I’m here to tell you that you do. You do want Him. Because when you lose those ballgames on Sunday, you want to be sure you
have something incredible left over.
This article originally appeared in the 2007 Links Letter.
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