The New One Minute Manager

The New One Minute Manager is a great book if you’re looking for a straightforward guide to leading people without overcomplicating things. What I liked most is how simple the principles are — one-minute goals, one-minute praises, and one-minute redirects. The book breaks each one down in a way that makes it easy to understand and even easier to start using immediately. The story format makes the lessons stick. Instead of feeling like a dense management manual, it reads more like a short parable with clear takeaways. It reminded me that good leadership doesn’t always need big systems or complicated strategies — sometimes the smallest, most consistent habits make the biggest difference. This book also made me reflect on how I communicate. The focus on being clear, direct, positive, and quick with feedback is something I’ve been trying to incorporate more. It also shows you how to reduce stress by setting expectations upfront instead of reacting to problems later. If there’s one drawback, it’s that the book is very short and stays at a high level. If you’re looking for deep explanations or detailed case studies, this isn’t that type of book. But as a leadership refresher or a starting point for someone new to managing people, it’s incredibly effective. Overall, The New One Minute Manager is a simple, practical, timeless guide that helps you lead more clearly and more confidently. A quick read with lessons that stick.

Reading this book was a great experience, from the starting page quote of "Help people reach their full potential. Catch them doing something right!" to the intermittent full-page quotes placed throughout, to the simple concepts conveyed through a fun and relatable story. First time I've read an entire book in one sitting in a while. I like how the story moved quickly enough so I never felt bored. I would highly recommend to anyone who is in leadership especially, but just in general I think everyone could benefit from reading this book.

The three one-minute techniques: one-minute goals, one-minute praises, one-minute reprimands. One-minute goals are explicit goals, written on one sheet of paper, in 250 words or less. And then each worker shares their goals with their manager. These are really "one-page goals", not "one-minute goals". In my experience, it takes tens of minutes to write them, and several iterations to make them good and useful. Also, it helps to share them with more people. One company I worked for had us publish our goals on an internal web page so that everyone could co-ordinate better. Indeed, one-minute goals are strikingly similar to the OKR technique (Objectives and Key Results). However, as this book was first published in 1981, the authors deserve credit for describing this technique so early. The key point of one-minute praises is to give them as soon as the manager notices the praiseworthy behavior, not wait days or weeks or months. This way, the manager shows they are paying attention to the positives (people like to be noticed in a positive way), and the behavior-reward cycle is much tighter. And a key point of one-minute reprimands is: reprimand the behavior, not the person. All of this works much better for some people more than others. Of course, managers exercise choice about whom they hire. This book devotes only half of one page to hiring. My advice is to keep the other tenets of this book in mind when you are interviewing and hiring people, so that you hire people that work well in this framework. This book is short: 112 pages with small pages and a lot of white space. That's fine. However, it is written in the form of a parable. That makes it easy reading, but it means the book just blandly states that the One Minute Manager (who does not have a name) obviously has the most efficient division, the best employees that other divisions are constantly recruiting for their own managers, and so on. So take it with a grain of salt. Still, overall, this much good advice is worth reading. It won't take much time, and the cover price of a good book is negligible compared to the time you put into it and the insight you get out of it.

Read this book in like 5 days, I love it. It’s very informative and helpful for developing leadership skills

A simply story style tool book for reader to easily capture the ideas inside. With no doubt this book is worth to read and keep in the bookshelf

It's a short book but not short enough for the small amount of useful information it contains. The book imparts three core pieces of advice, and its good advice for sure but it's spoon-fed in a painfully slow manner in a short (and yet all too-long) story that is neither believable nor compelling. I could rattle off those three things here and nullify any need to purchase the book, but I would feel pretty rude doing that in addition to leaving a poor review. I want to stress that it is good advice but it's also really basic and self-evident, I kind of worry for the person who genuinely *needs* this book. There is no doubt that if I reflect and focus harder on those three things that I will be a better manager, but it wasn't things I wasn't already aware of or not already trying to do. I would think (hope?) that all managers are in my boat there. When it's on sale you can get your money's worth if you whip through it and then pass it along. Maybe its most useful to someone who has been suddenly blindsided and thrown into management, it will give them three simple things to try to focus on and if you can do those basics you can be a decent manager almost no matter what else is going on.

Great short book to read. Easy to read, and with great examples and summaries. I would share it with my friends and coworkers.

easy to apply principles