The One Minute Apology [HarperCollins, 2011]

The One Minute Apology: A Powerful Way to Make Things Better

by

Ken Blanchard & Margret McBride

The One Minute Manager is apparently a series of books teaching management life lessons and this book is part of that series – a book that I was gifted by an acquaintance a couple of years ago but I never read, party because he is prone to reading a lot of self-help books and gifts me one of these slim generic books when he meets me. It is a nice gesture but personally I am not a fan of the genre or the generally overly simplistic and supposedly profound (but almost never is) content.

But this was lying around and my wife flipped through it and told me it had some good bits. Like me, she is a an avid reader so I was curious and given the short size, decided to give it a shot.

I was initially not too taken with it, but a couple of short chapters into it, I found that it was not totally like the usual such book. The content is 100% built around the workplace and professional conduct with the emphasis on mistakes and apoligies – but it carried more to it than that. If I take the lessons within the book out of the written context and as just ideas to be learned from, it is a book that could and should be applied to everyday life for, frankly, almost every person I’ve known. Not because people are bad or because the book is so deeply spiritually brilliant, but because of the nature of the content and the way it is expressed.

For example, the concepts related to the “One Minute Apology” that are talked about go through a journey that includes: Surrender being right, having integrity, self appreciation and apology, self respect and more. It doesn’t just focus on acknowledging wrong and being apologetic, it is a simplistic but effective parable about the journey of thinking a person could benefit from undergoing.

The narrative style is overly simplistic – there are more than a few occassions where I felt like I was reading a childrens book. It was at moments a bit cheesy and a little like the quintessential old feel-good situation-comedy TV shows where it’s not really all that funny but there’s a cutesy moment where the audience goes “aw, haha” and nothing is overly deep. Because the basic covering fiction that tells the story is very much that kind of overly simplistic, feel-good vibe. Once you get past the start however, one can appreciate the ideas and spirit underneath that silly veneer and take away positive lessons that can be applied to almost any relationship in life.



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