In honor of Women’s History Month, I’ve updated this blog post I wrote two years ago about my favorite woman. She is my best friend, my true love, and my brilliant, beautiful wife of nearly 64 years—Margie Blanchard.
The old saying “Behind every successful man is a woman” isn’t true in our case. Margie was never behind me—she has always been right beside me as my partner in life. I wouldn’t be anywhere without Margie. She has been the spark for many of the great events of our lives.
The Beginning
I fell in love with Margie in the summer of 1961. I had just graduated from Cornell and was hanging around town for the summer, mainly to play golf and take a couple of courses to lighten my load for the master’s program I would be starting in the fall. A friend of mine whom we all called “Looper” had been dating Margie, but his father passed away and Looper needed to go home to run the family dairy. He asked me if I would take Margie out once in a while as a favor to him. One day my roommate asked me to have a drink with him and one of Margie’s sorority sisters who was getting married soon. My roommate was going to be best man in their wedding. I said, “Okay, I’ll invite Margie McKee to join us. She’s almost married, too.”
Margie was working that summer as a speech therapist and counselor at a camp for kids with severe speech problems. I picked her up at the camp and we drove eight miles back to town. She spent the entire ride describing her feelings about these special needs children—she was so filled with compassion. She had a real heart for those kids as well as a need to help people. I think I fell in love with Margie on that eight-mile ride. We were married the following June.
My Start as an Author
In the fall of 1966, Margie (pregnant with our daughter, Debbie), our son, Scott, and I arrived at Ohio University. I had landed a job as an assistant to Harry Evarts, dean of the school of business administration. Paul Hersey had just arrived on campus as chairman of the management department, where I began teaching a course at the request of the dean. I discovered that I loved teaching.
I heard Hersey taught a tremendous course on leadership, so in December I went to see him and said, “Paul, I understand you teach a great leadership course. Could I sit in next semester?”
Paul said I was welcome to take his course, but I would have to take it for credit.
I was stunned. I went home and told Margie about the conversation.
“Can you imagine? He won’t let me audit his course. I have a Ph.D. and he doesn’t, and he wants me to take his course for credit!”
Margie said, “That’s all fine, but is he any good?”
“He’s supposed to be fabulous.”
“Then why don’t you get your ego out of the way and take his course?”
After convincing the registrar to let me take Hersey’s undergrad course, I signed up, went to class, wrote all the papers, and found it to be a great experience.
After the course ended, Hersey took me aside and asked me to write a textbook with him, which became the first edition of Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources. It is still in print, now in its tenth edition.
If it weren’t for Margie’s suggestion, Paul Hersey and I would not have coauthored that book, which popularized the Situational Leadership®* model we created together.
The Birth of The One Minute Manager
In 1980, Margie and I went to a cocktail party for San Diego authors. Also at the party was Spencer Johnson, who had coauthored a series of children’s books called Value Tales with his wife, Ann Donegan. He was in the process of coauthoring a parenting book titled The One Minute Scolding. Margie met Spencer first, hand-carried him over to me, and told us she thought we should meet.
Then Margie said something that would change all our lives: “You two need to write a children’s book for managers. They won’t read anything else.”
The following week, Spencer came to see me speak at a seminar I was giving in town. He sat in the back, laughing, apparently enjoying my presentation. At the end, he came up to me and said “The hell with parenting—let’s write The One Minute Manager®!” And we did.
To date, the book has sold more than fifteen million copies. It wouldn’t have happened without Margie.
The Ken Blanchard Companies® and Beyond
During the ten years Margie spent as president of our company, I was sometimes asked why she was president, not me. I thought it was obvious that she was the one who should be president. That held true: when Margie started her term, we were a five million dollar company. When she left that position, we were a thirty million dollar company. (Margie is the first to say that partnering with her brother, Tom McKee, who joined the company as general manager of operations, was what made the difference.) As a lifelong cheerleader, I was just happy to work beside Margie and Tom and cheer them on.
Margie has always been interested in keeping an eye on business trends. She also believes leaders should keep managing the present separate from planning the future. So when she ended her term as company president, she and Blanchard cofounder Eunice Parisi-Carew created a unique, innovative think tank they named Office of the Future (OOF). With help from Margie’s assistant, Lily Guthrie, OOF studied and reported on emerging trends in leadership, technology, and other workplace issues. OOF’s findings and reports were available to clients and other organizations to assist with planning for the future, and to the media for use in advising the public of trends in the workplace. Margie saw their work and research as both a challenge to Blanchard’s status quo and a stimulus for change that would ensure our company’s continued vitality and success.
Today, Margie is as active and interesting as ever. Because Margie is a lifelong teacher, she has a special place in her heart for Blanchard Institute, our 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that offers free Student Self Leadership training programs for students 14 to 18, with several scholarships available each year for higher education. She also loves to teach courses on career planning to young people in our company. And because Margie is a lifelong learner, when the pandemic began she took up a new hobby of watercolor painting. She’s really good!
Thank you, Margie, for being a wonderful woman and the best partner a man could ever hope to have.
*Situational Leadership® is a registered trademark of Leadership Studies, Inc., dba The Center for Leadership Studies.