In honor of Women’s History Month, I’m going to write about Margie – my brilliant, beautiful wife of almost 62 years.
The old saying “Behind every successful man there is a woman” is not true in our case. Margie never had my back; she has always stood by my side as my life partner. Without Margie I would be nowhere. She is the love of my life, my teammate and my best friend. And 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 spending the summer in town. A friend of mine, who we called “Looper,” was dating her, but his father had died and Looper had to go home to run the family dairy. He asked me if I would like to take Margie out to dinner every now and then as a favor to him. One day my roommate asked if I wanted to have drinks with him and one of Margie’s soon-to-be-married sororities. My roommate was supposed to be best man at their wedding. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll invite Margie McKee to join us. She’s almost married too.’
Margie worked as a speech therapist and counselor at a camp for children with serious speech problems. I picked her up at camp and we drove eight miles back to town. I remember asking, “Why would you want to spend the summer with all those special needs kids?” She spent the rest of the ride describing her feelings to the children; she was so filled with compassion. She had a real heart for those children and also had a need to help people. I think I fell in love with Margie on that eight mile ride.
The origins of SLII®
In the fall of 1966, Margie (pregnant with Debbie), Scott, and I arrived at Ohio University. I had gotten a job as an assistant to Harry Evarts, dean of the School of Business Administration. Paul Hersey had just arrived on campus as chair of the Management Department, where I began teaching a course at the dean’s request. I discovered that I enjoyed teaching.
I heard that Hersey was teaching a great leadership course, so in December I came to see him and said, “Paul, I understand you’re teaching a great leadership course. Could I participate next semester?
“Nobody checks my course,” Hersey said. “If you want to consider it an honor, you are welcome.” And he walked away.
I was amazed. I went home and told Margie about the conversation.
“Can you imagine? He doesn’t let me control his course. I have a Ph.D. and he doesn’t, and He want to me to take are course for credit?”
Margie said, “That’s all well and good, but is he any good?”
“He should be fantastic.”
“Then why don’t you put your ego aside and follow his course?”
I had to convince the registrar to let me take Hersey’s undergraduate program because I already had a Ph.D. So I took the course, wrote all the papers and had a great experience.
After the course ended, Hersey took me aside and asked me to co-write a textbook with him, which would be Organizational behavior management: leveraging human resources. It is still in print, now in its 10the to process.
Without Margie’s suggestion, Paul Hersey and I would not have co-authored that book, which popularized the Situational Leadership®* model we co-created. The concepts were later revised by Margie, me and our company’s other Founding Associates to become SLII®, our flagship product.
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 co-authored a series of children’s books called Value stories with his wife Ann Donegan. He was writing a book called The one minute shouting match. Margie carried Spencer to me by hand and told us she thought we should meet.
Then Margie said something that would change our entire lives: “You should write a children’s book for managers. They don’t read anything else.”
The next week, Spencer came to see me speak at a seminar I was giving in town. He was sitting in the back, laughing, apparently enjoying my presentation. At the end he came to me and said, ‘To hell with parenting, let’s write The One Minute Manager®!” And we did.
To date, the book has sold more than fifteen million copies. Without Margie it wouldn’t have happened.
The Ken Blanchard Companies® and beyond
During the ten years that Margie was president of our company, I was sometimes asked why she was president and not me. I thought it was clear that she was the one who should be president. That was true: when Margie started her term, we were a $5 million company. When she left that position, we were one thirty million dollar company. (Margie is the first to say that working with her brother, Tom McKee, who joined the company as general manager of operations, made all the difference.) I was happy to work alongside Margie and Tom and encourage them because I always been a cheerleader!
Margie was always interested in keeping an eye on business trends. She also believed that leaders must continue to manage the present, apart from planning for the future. So when she ended her term as president of the company, she and Blanchard co-founder Eunice Parisi-Carew founded a unique, innovative think tank they called Office of the Future (OOF). With help from Margie’s assistant, Lily Guthrie, OOF studied and reported emerging trends in leadership, technology, and other workplace issues. Margie saw their work and research as a challenge to Blanchard’s status quo and as an impetus for change that would ensure the continued vitality and success of our company. OOF’s findings and reports were available to clients and other organizations to help plan for the future, and to the media to advise the public on workplace trends.
Today, Margie is as active and interesting as ever. Being a lifelong teacher, she now teaches career planning courses to young people in our company. And because she is a lifelong learner, when the pandemic started, she took up a new hobby: watercolor painting. She’s really good!
Thank you, Margie, for being such a great partner. You’re the best!
*Situational Leadership® is a registered trademark of Leadership Studies, Inc., dba The Center for Leadership Studies.
Reference By: howwelead.org
