Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Every mature adult knows how to apologize and knows the positive impact that it can have. They do not need Ken and Margret's simple little trite book. Save your money.

Books like this are a major frustration. They promise so much but deliver so little. If the authors spent as much time on content as they did on being slick and cute this book might be worth its price, but sadly they didn't.

Books do not have to be long and complex to have significant value, but I feel totally cheated when they take a couple pages of real information and work hard to stretch it out to the required number of pages in order to make a sale.

Shame on the authors for producing it and shame on the publishers for letting them get away with it. Maybe a competent literary agent would have prevented this from happening.

I predict this book will be in the bargain bin and quickly forgotten before the authors collect their first check.

When I purchased the book I was expecting to learn something of value, and while I agree with the book's premise that apologies can be highly effective, it totally failed on providing me any significant insights as to how to best execute an apology. The book is way to superficial! It just states the obvious.

How do I go about getting an apology from the authors of the book?

Also, it appears that Ken is running out of "material" for his next "great" book when he stoops to co-authoring with his literary agent.

Another Blanchard marketing hype rip-off. If Ken and Margret are so great at making appologies they need to send me an appology for wasting my money by buying their book and the 20 minutes it took to read it. Like another reviewer said, they took 10 pages of pretty easy half baked ideas and stretched it into 107 pages to make a sale.

Margret pls send me an appology!

I received Ken's latest book for Christmas and I was greatly disappointed (I was disappointed that I couldn't easily take it back and get something to read with substance).

Apologies are very critical to our society and in all relationships. They are the "lubricant" that reduces the friction between people, groups and countries. Without them our entire history would be different. That is why Ken and Margret's superficial treatment of the subject is so frustrating and disappointing. They had the opportunity to really address the issue but instead they decided to provide the reader with a trite and overly simplistic story that provides the reader with minimal insight and information.

I hope another author picks up where Ken left off and publishes a book that truly addresses the issue of apologies.

I wish that the professional book reviewers would realize that the average reader has the ability and desire to digest a book that consists of something more than an overly simplistic "bedtime story".

Thanks.

After reading this book for the 2nd time I decide to write a review and was surprised to see so many negative reviews. The art of an apology is just that- an art. It is a learned skill to be crafted and improved over time. Perhaps the reviewers who are looking for more depth, and referring to Blanchard's book as a 'fairy tale' are precisely the folks who need it most. Apologies in both business and personal relationships are intensely important but sorely lacking in our society. Take a deep breath, open your hardened business-like heart, absorb the ideas in this book as fully as possible, and realize you are probably not nearly as good at apologizing as you think you are. I think it starts there.
I'm wondering if these are the same folks who would want more than one recipe for boiling an egg. Know what end result you are looking for and work to perfect it- fairy tale ending. You don't need volumes of research to teach the idea of apologizing. If you can't feel it- it's probably not there.

At first I wondered if there couls be any substance in such a small book. But when I read it, I realized you don't have to go on for 400 pages to get the point across. Although I'm not sure that every bad relationship could be fixed by an apology, taking the steps suggested in the book sure can't hurt. Plus, knowing you might have to apologize later makes you think about what you're doing NOW.

I have to admit: this is only the second ONE MINUTE MANAGER book I have read. While I appreciate the brevity and conciseness Blanchard uses in these books, I find the stories he wraps these messages in to be, well, trite. That said, I found THE ONE MINUTE APOLOGY to be of interest enough to overlook that drawback. Sure, it's still a rather silly story delivering the message, but the message itself is solid, rock-solid.

A recurring complaint of the ONE MINUTE MANAGER approach is that it routinely over-simplifies complex subjects. Well.... yeah, it does, and thank goodness. Life is complicated enough. Business moreso. What people need, what people want are simple solutions to help them solve problems or at least get STARTED solving a problem. This is where the ONE MINUTE APOLOGY is successful: it takes a very complex (and emotional) issue and gives the reader a very easy step-by-step approach to making amends when it's appropriate and necessary.

Is there more to the act of "apologizing"? Are people affected by others' actions more deeply than this book implies? Is it more difficult to really show someone you've offended that you've truly changed your ways? Perhaps.

But this book goes a long way in helping people start down the road to reconciliation by offering up a simple way to say "I'm sorry" in a meaningful manner.

As a professor of business ethics and management I was very encouraged when I came across Blanchard's latest book. Managers are often faced with situations where they do make the wrong decisions due to poor judgement or lack of proper data; This will never change. But on the other hand how they handle these situations after the fact often becomes a matter of ethics (and good sound management). A key tool in these situations is an apology (in all of its various forms).

To bad Blanchard took the very critical and complex tool of the apology and made it into a trivial "pop-science". Making material readable is very important, but making it trival is totally unacceptable and does a tremendous disservice to the reader and the material.

Back in the `70s, there was the simple saga of the Seagull who soared. This reminds me of that. The Homily flavour also resonates with Fr. Andrew M. Greeley's *Summer at the Lake.*

OMA is a parable of pride preventing acknowledgement of error, and intervention of the One Minute Manager with RULES on the why and how of a proper apology. This is one of those Books of Life Concepts that one will have to read several times in order to fully "get it" and incorporate into one's life.

And, in the Forest Gump Chocolate Box Simile Department, Blanchard opines that life is also like the game of Monopoly - at the end, it all goes back into the box: "No matter how you push and shove for money, recognition, power, prestige, and possessions, when life is over, everything goes back into the box." Reviewed by TundraVision, Amazon Reviewer