Few people have impacted the day-to-day management of people and companies more than Dr. Ken Blanchard. A prominent, gregarious, sought-after author, speaker, and business consultant, Dr. Blanchard is universally characterized by his friends, colleagues, and clients as one of the most insightful, powerful, and compassionate individuals in business today.
From his phenomenal best-selling book The One Minute Manager®, coauthored with Spencer Johnson (which has sold more than 13 million copies and has remained on best-seller lists for 20 years) to the library of books he has coauthored with Sheldon Bowles (including the blockbuster best-sellers Raving Fans and Gung Ho!), Ken’s impact as a writer is far-reaching. In July 2005, he was inducted into the Amazon Hall of Fame as one of the top 25 best-selling authors of all time.
Dr. Blanchard is chief spiritual officer of The Ken Blanchard Companies, an international management training and consulting firm that he and his wife, Dr. Marjorie Blanchard, founded in 1979 in San Diego. He is also a visiting lecturer at his alma mater, Cornell University, where he is a trustee emeritus of the Board of Trustees. Along with his wife, he teaches a course in leadership for the Master of Science in Executive Leadership program at the University of San Diego. He is also cofounder of Lead Like Jesus, a nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring and equipping people to walk their faith in the marketplace.
Dr. Blanchard has received many awards and honors for his contributions in the fields of management, leadership, and speaking. The National Speakers Association awarded him its highest honor, the Council of Peers Award of Excellence, and he received the Golden Gavel Award from Toastmasters International. He was inducted into the HRD Hall of Fame by Training magazine and Lakewood Conferences. He was awarded the Thought Leadership Award for continued support of work-related learning and performance by ISA—The Association of Learning Providers. The College of Business at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona bears his name.
Dr. Marjorie Blanchard has earned a reputation worldwide as a compelling motivational speaker, an accomplished management consultant and trainer, a best-selling author, and an entrepreneur. She was the corecipient with her husband, Dr. Kenneth Blanchard, of the Entrepreneur of the Year award from Cornell University.
Coauthor of The One Minute Manager Gets Fit and Working Well: Managing for Health and High Performance, Dr. Blanchard is well-versed in a variety of topics and often speaks on leadership, balance, managing change, and life planning. As cofounder of The Ken Blanchard Companies, she works diligently with Ken, developing the company into one of the world’s premier management consulting and training companies.
Dr. Blanchard now heads the firm’s Office of the Future, a think tank charged with shaping the future of both the training industry and the company.
Dr. Blanchard received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cornell University and her doctorate from the University of Massachusetts. Along with Ken, she teaches a course in leadership for the Master of Science in Executive Leadership program at the University of San Diego.
Scott Blanchard is a stimulating author, motivational speaker, accomplished corporate trainer, and passionate champion of coaching in the workplace. Scott founded Coaching.com, a Web-enabled corporate coaching and personal development service. Under his leadership, his organization is revolutionizing corporate coaching by offering the most advanced, accessible, and research-driven services in the industry. His personal philosophy is based on a fundamental shift occurring in the discipline of leadership: Great leaders do not succeed by doing what they are good at; instead, they succeed by getting things done with and through others.
Scott is senior vice president of The Ken Blanchard Companies. As a Blanchard family member and part owner, he represents the “next generation” charged with leading the business into the future. In addition, Scott is the principal architect of Blanchard’s strategic alliance with Ninth House® Network.
Scott is the coauthor of Leverage Your Best, Ditch the Rest, a book on corporate coaching. As a senior consulting partner for more than six years, Scott led major training interventions at numerous Fortune 500 companies. Scott is well-versed in Blanchard’s training programs, including Situational Leadership® II and Raving Fans®. He is also a certified facilitator and trainer for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®, a well-known temperament assessment tool.
Scott was educated at Cornell University and received his master’s degree in organizational development from American University in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Don Carew is a founding associate of The Ken Blanchard Companies and a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is an accomplished and respected management consultant, trainer, educator, and author. Don’s primary academic and consulting interests have been in collaboration and teamwork in organizations, leadership, and building high performing teams and organizations. While a full-time faculty member at the University of Massachusetts from 1969 to 1994, he was chair of the Organization Development Graduate Program. As a consultant, Don has worked with dozens of organizations in the United States, Mexico, Canada, and Europe in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, health care, hospitality, retail, human services, education, and government, as well as with The Ken Blanchard Companies themselves.
Don’s interest in teamwork and high-involvement organizations goes back to his teenage years, when he worked in two different manufacturing plants. He soon realized that the democratic values of participation, collaboration, and high involvement were not at work in those plants. This realization planted the seeds of his career-long interests and study. These interests became clearer as he continued in college and graduate school and developed connections with the NTL Institute. It was through T groups (human relations training groups) that he first experienced the tremendous power of teams to enhance the lives of individuals and organizations and to be a spawning ground for creativity and innovation. Don’s lifelong commitment to the principle that people have a right to be involved in decisions that affect their lives was further strengthened by a post-doctoral internship with NTL in Bethel, Maine.
Don’s association with the Blanchard family goes back to 1966, when he and Ken Blanchard were young faculty members at Ohio University. They started a friendship that has continued for 40 years. Don moved to the University of Massachusetts in 1969, and Ken joined the faculty in 1970. It was Don Carew’s and Eunice Parisi-Carew’s research on group development that led the Founding Associates of The Ken Blanchard Companies to change the Situational Leadership® II model so that it could be used with groups and teams as well as with individuals.
In addition to teaching at the University of Massachusetts, Don has been a faculty member at Trenton State University, Princeton University, and the University of San Diego. He is coauthor of two best-selling books: The One Minute Manager Builds High Performing Teams with Ken Blanchard and Eunice Parisi-Carew, and High Five with Ken, Eunice, and Sheldon Bowles. He is also a coauthor of the article “High Performing Organizations: SCORES.”
Don holds a bachelor’s degree in business from Ohio University, a master’s degree in human relations from Ohio University, and a doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of Florida. He is an associate of the NTL Institute and a licensed psychologist in Massachusetts.
Dr. Eunice Parisi-Carew is an accomplished management consultant and trainer and a sought-after motivational speaker.
With a broad base of experience in many facets of management and organizational development, she has designed, directed, and implemented training and consulting projects for a number of top North American corporations, including Merrill Lynch, AT&T, Hyatt Hotels, Transco Energy Company, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Team building, leadership, organizational change, and life management are among the many topics she addresses in seminars, speeches, and articles. She is also cocreator of the High Performing Teams product line offered by The Ken Blanchard Companies.
She has directed a graduate program in group dynamics and leadership at the University of Hartford and was a part-time faculty member at American University. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the NTL Institute. She has also served as Vice President of Professional Services at The Ken Blanchard Companies.
She received her doctorate of education in behavioral sciences from the University of Massachusetts and is also a licensed psychologist in the state of Massachusetts.
Currently, she is a senior researcher with the Office of the Future at The Ken Blanchard Companies. Her role is to study trends that occur five to ten years out and their implications for leaders, organizations, and business practices.
Dr. Fred Finch is the author of Managing for Organizational Effectiveness: An Experiential Approach. A founding associate of The Ken Blanchard Companies, he has been a consultant and leadership educator at Harvard University, Merrill Lynch, IBM, Shell International, and many other high-profile organizations. He received his doctorate from the Graduate School of Business at the University of Washington. He served as a professor of management and organizational behavior for 14 years in the Graduate School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Fred is coauthor with Ken Blanchard and Jim Ballard of Customer Mania! It’s Never Too Late to Build a Customer-Focused Company, which grew out of the study of Yum! Brands, the world’s largest quick-service restaurant corporation, with 850,000 employees in more than 100 countries. He is also coauthor with Pat Stewart of Situational Frontline Leadership, a popular training program for frontline leaders.
Susan Fowler is coauthor with Ken Blanchard and Laurence Hawkins of Self Leadership and the One Minute Manager, published in 2005.
Susan has established a solid and respected track record as a keynote speaker and an innovative product designer and developer in the field of leadership training. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award for creative training designs from the North American Society for Games and Simulations. As a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies, Susan has consulted with such clients as Pfizer, Harley Davidson, MasterCard, AMF Bowling, Dow Chemical, KPMG, Black & Decker, SC Johnson, TJX Retailers, The National Basketball Association, and dozens of others. Prior to that, she gained extensive, worldwide public seminar presentation experience with CareerTrack.
Susan’s goal is to be a catalyst for personal change and a teacher of the skills necessary to sustain self-motivation. Susan brings a unique perspective to her programs because of her extensive professional experience in the field of advertising, her broadcast work in television and radio, and her undergraduate degree in marketing from the University of Colorado. As one of the world’s foremost experts on personal empowerment, she has delivered training seminars, workshops, and keynote speeches to more than 50,000 people in over 20 countries and in all 50 states. Audiences applaud her high energy, sense of humor, insight, and pragmatic solutions to workplace issues.
With Ken Blanchard and Laurence Hawkins she created—and is the lead developer of—Situational Self Leadership®, a best-of-class self leadership and personal empowerment program. Her publications include Overcoming Procrastination, Mentoring, The Team Leader’s Idea-a-Day Guide (coauthored with Drea Zigarmi), and Empowerment (coauthored with Ken Blanchard). Susan is an adjunct professor for the University of San Diego’s Master of Science in Executive Leadership program.
Dr. Laurence Hawkins is one of the founding associates of The Ken Blanchard Companies, as well as an internationally renowned management consultant and motivational speaker. With Ken Blanchard and Susan Fowler, he coauthored the Situational Self Leadership program, which focuses on empowerment and taking initiative when you’re not in charge. He is also the coauthor with Ken and Susan of Self Leadership and the One Minute Manager, published in 2005.
Laurie has concentrated much of his work on aerospace, particularly Lockheed Martin and McDonnell Douglas, and pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline. Laurie has focused his career on applying the Blanchard standards of Situational Leadership® II, Situational Team Leadership, and Situational Self Leadership in the international arena, focusing on Europe, South America, and Saudi Arabia. More recently, he has been teaching the tools, concepts, and philosophy of self leadership to clients in China and Korea—countries where obedience is rapidly shifting to a culture of taking the initiative and entrepreneurship.
Laurie received his bachelor’s degree in American history and literature from Williams College and his master’s and doctorate degrees in leadership and organizational behavior from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Judd Hoekstra is one of Blanchard’s experts in organizational change and is coauthor of its Leading Change consulting methodology and training program. Judd’s approach to change is based on a shared commitment to Don Carew’s principle that people have a right to be involved in decisions that affect their lives and the concept that those who plan the battle rarely battle the plan.
Although he is a relative newcomer to The Ken Blanchard Companies, Judd’s impact on the company and his clients has been immediate and far-reaching. His positive attitude, his ability to work well with all people, and his passion for “doing the right things right” help those he works with make great things happen.
Prior to joining Blanchard in 2001, Judd served as a strategy execution consultant with Fourth Floor Consulting. Before that, he was a change management consultant with Accenture. He was primarily responsible for helping client executives lead their organizations through large-scale changes. Judd’s experience crosses a number of industries; his clients have included The Dow Chemical Company, Allstate Insurance Company, Anheuser-Busch, and Commonwealth Edison.
He received his bachelor’s in business management and marketing from Cornell University and graduated from the Advanced Business Management Program at Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Judd and his wife, Sherry, live in the Chicago area and are the proud parents of Julia and Cole.
Dr. Fay Kandarian has worked as both an internal and independent organizational change consultant over the past 20 years. She has been a consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies since 1998.
Her extensive line, staff, and executive experiences provide constant reference points that inform her consulting. Her areas of expertise include whole-systems change, executive coaching, strategic planning, intervention design, leadership and team development, communications skills, and process consultation.
While doing doctoral research at Columbia University’s Department of Organization and Leadership, Fay studied and developed proficiency in using large-group interventions as a new paradigm for organization development and large-scale change.
She researched Polarity Management (B. Johnson, 1996) as a training intervention to help teach systems thinking skills and later introduced Polarity Management’s “both/and” thinking to The Ken Blanchard Companies.
Working with fellow HPO team members Jesse Stoner, Eunice Parisi-Carew, and Don Carew, she helped create the HPO SCORES model and coauthored the article “High Performing Organizations: SCORES.” Using the HPO conceptual framework, she further investigated how leaders learn to guide their organizations to high performance.
She holds a bachelor’s from George Washington University, a master’s in business from the University of New Haven, and a master’s and doctorate in education from Columbia University.
Dr. Alan Randolph is an internationally respected and highly accomplished management educator, researcher, and consultant. His work focuses on empowerment, leadership, teamwork, and project management issues for both domestic and international organizations in the public and private sectors. He has worked in a variety of countries, including most recently Peru, Brazil, China, Germany, France, and Poland.
Dr. Randolph is a professor of management and international business at the Merrick School of Business at the University of Baltimore. He also is a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies. He has developed a variety of leadership and empowerment educational products. He has also published numerous articles in practitioner and academic journals such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, The Academy of Management Executive, Organizational Dynamics, and The Academy of Management Journal.
Dr. Randolph has also written and coauthored a number of books, including Go Team!: Take Your Team to the Next Level, Checkered Flag Projects: 10 Rules for Creating and Managing Projects That Win!, Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute, and The 3 Keys to Empowerment: Release the Power Within People for Astonishing Results. Many of his books have become best-sellers and have been translated into many languages around the world.
Dr. Jesse Stoner is widely known as one of the foremost experts on vision and leadership. A highly regarded management consultant and author, Jesse has worked closely with leaders for more than 20 years to help them create organizations in which their people can thrive and make a significant contribution. Her work in vision development has helped individuals, leaders, and companies create compelling visions, identify the strategies to capture them, and ensure that they are lived on a day-by-day basis.
Jesse coauthored with Ken Blanchard the best-seller Full Steam Ahead!: Unleash the Power of Vision in Your Work and Your Life. She is also coauthor of Creating Your Organization’s Future, a program that helps leadership teams develop a shared vision for their department or organization.
Jesse was a member of the original research team investigating the characteristics of high performing organizations. She helped create the HPO SCORES model and coauthored the article “High Performing Organizations: SCORES” and the assessment, The HPO SCORES Profile.
Additionally, she has contributed to the development of the Building High Performing Teams programs. She coauthored Team Development Stage Analysis (TDSA) and “The Team Member’s Role in Building High Performing Teams.”
Jesse earned advanced degrees in psychology and a doctorate in organization development from the University of Massachusetts.
Formerly president of Zigarmi Associates, Inc., Dr. Drea Zigarmi is the director of research and development for The Ken Blanchard Companies. His work has been critical to the company’s success with its clients. Almost every product that has been developed at The Ken Blanchard Companies over the past 20 years has Drea’s mark on it. He coauthored with Ken Blanchard the well-known Leader Behavior Analysis instrument and the Development Task Analysis form used in all Situational Leadership seminars.
He has coauthored three books: The Leader Within: Learning Enough About Yourself to Lead Others, The Team Leaders’ Idea-a-Day Guide, and Leadership and the One Minute Manager.
He received his bachelor’s in science from Norwich University. He earned a master’s in philosophy and a doctorate in administration and organizational behavior from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Dr. Patricia Zigarmi is a founding associate of The Ken Blanchard Companies, where she currently serves as vice president for business development. She has contributed to the company’s growth as vice president of sales and marketing and as vice president of consulting services. She is a speaker, consultant, product designer, business developer, account strategist, trainer, and team builder for many of Blanchard’s clients and is a mentor to many colleagues at Blanchard.
Pat is coauthor of Leadership and the One Minute Manager. She also designed Blanchard’s premier product line, Situational Leadership® II. With her leadership, ongoing initiatives for Situational Leadership® II training and coaching have been negotiated with many global companies and most of the Fortune 500 companies. She is also the author of Blanchard’s Leading Change program and a number of performance management products on Giving Feedback and Monitoring & Reviewing Performance.
Respected for her ability to listen and build trust, she has been a coach to the executives and managers of many companies.
She received her bachelor’s in sociology from Northwestern University and her doctorate in leadership and organizational behavior from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her first mentor was Warren Bennis, whom she shadowed in his role as a change agent as president of the University of Cincinnati. Her doctoral dissertation is a study of Warren’s leadership of four change initiatives. Pat met Ken Blanchard on her first day of graduate school, and they have worked together and inspired each other ever since.
In addition to her contributions to The Ken Blanchard Companies, Pat teaches Leading Change for the Master’s in Executive Excellence program at the University of San Diego. She is also a member of the San Diego Women’s Foundation. Pat lives in San Diego and is the mother of two daughters, Lisa and Alexa.