The economic downturn has caused executives at all levels to scramble to find innovative ways to keep employees motivated and contributing to the organization. Enterpriseleadership.org turned to Ken Blanchard, the best-selling management book author, and leadership researcher and consultant, to learn how C-level executives can lead at a higher level. In fact, Leading at a Higher Level (Revised and Expanded) is the title of Blanchard's recent book. It  includes work The Ken Blanchard Companies have done with Nissan, Tyco International, and Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company.

Blanchard gain fame in 1982 when his 111-page One Minute Manager made the best-sellers list. It has sold more than 13 millions copies. This book remains on the list of best-selling business books. He has continued to turn out best-selling titles such as Whale Done, Know You Can, and The One Minute Entrepreneur. Blanchard frequently co-authors books with CEOs, such as Garry Ridge, the CEO of The WD-40 Company.

He teaches in the Executive Leadership Program at San Diego State University. Blanchard has received many honors and awards for his contributions in the fields of management, leadership, and inspirational speaking. He was inducted into Amazon.com's Hall of Fame as one the top 25 best-selling authors of all times.

EL. Why did you decide to write this book despite the economic downturn?

KB. For a long time, people have been asking us for our curriculum -- in what ways do we help companies? This book became an attempt to pull together everything we have been doing for 30 years. I have 15 co-authors. All of these people helped us build our company including my wife and my son. It was a good time to do it. I define leading at a higher level as essentially helping people accomplish worthwhile goals. It takes into consideration the needs and concerns of everyone involved. Making money is not a worthwhile goal; it is the byproduct of a goal. You need to consider why the economic downturn happened. It came about because of greed, short-term goals, and Wall Street. It is an entire value issue.

EL. What affect has the economic downturn had on C-level executives and what have companies done about it?

KB. I recently spoke at a major Siemens conference in Budapest, Hungary. The economic downturn has also affected this company, bringing about some ethical issues. Attendees included all of Siemens' major clients. The conference had the name Ascend to suggest leading at a higher level. So, what can we learn going forward? How do we operate in a more ethical way? European companies call it the three Ps-- people, profit, and the planet (the environment.). Companies today have much interest in these types of things. Some people will not get it. I am talking about people who evaluate their life on their performance and the opinion of others. They keep score on how much new money they make. Enough is never enough.

EL. Who are the leading-at-a-higher-level CEOs whom you admire?

KB. I wrote one book with Garry Ridge, the president of theWD-40 Company, called Helping People Win a Work: A Business Philosophy Called 'Don't Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A.' He is a good example of a CEO who leads at a higher level. I am also writing a book with Colleen Barrett who just stepped down as the president of Southwest Airlines. This amazing organization leads at a higher level. Bill Pollard, president of ServiceMaster, exemplifies another CEO who leads at a higher level. I have been impressed with the president of American Express Ken Chenault. He has gone through good and bad times with American Express. I am excited about Meg Whitmore, the former CEO of Ebay.com, who plans to run for governor of California. The California governor's race needs a candidate who knows something about business and who can take a leadership role. Some of these folks, including Obama, need a course in economics.

EL. What role does technology play in the ability to lead at a higher level?

KB. We have to look at technology in a positive light. A catalyst for Obama's presidential win included his ability to lead at a higher level. He had an honest desire to talk openly to people in other countries. He ran a 2010 campaign, while Clinton and McCain both ran 1990s campaigns. Obama twittered people and he also sent them email. He used technology to keep the communication open. I try to do the same. For example, every morning I leave a message for everyone in our company. I function as the chief spiritual officer and energy officer. I praise people. I also leave a conventional message about our vision and values. People can hear in on the voice mail and receive it via email. Now I also use twitter for communication.

I do not think electronic communication, however, should always function as the first line of communication. People ought to get away from their desks and talk to people, not send email to someone in the next office.

EL. Can you briefly describe how you helped Nissan executives lead at a higher level?

KB. We have done much situational leadership training throughout Nissan. We helped them to develop a common language around performance and a way to communicate with people. In situational leadership, we always say it increases the quality and the quantity of the conversations between leaders and their people. That has been a helpful thing to them. We have done this at Nokia and American Express.

EL. Do these companies use any other methods besides the common language?

KB. I do not know enough about what they do with technology. They used us as a way to deal with people face to face. We try to get managers to meet at least once every two weeks one-on-one with each of their direct reports at least for 30 minutes at a time. The direct reports set the agenda and managers meet with their people 26 times a year. That really can have an impact. I wrote about this in the book with Ridge.

EL. What would you tell executives and managers about using situational leadership in order to get the most productivity from people with different skill levels?

KB. People often ask me if they need to be face-to-face with people to use situational leadership. The answer is 'no.' It all starts with first having clear goals. Ridge defined very clear goals for WD-40 Company employees. This process replicates knowing everything that will be on the final exam before you take it. Once everyone understands the goals and objectives, then together they can analyze their development level. This includes their competency and their commitment to do that. For example, if you deal with self-directed achievers who know what they are doing and are committed to doing it, you need to use a different leadership style than for very enthusiastic beginners. The latter become very excited about a new assignment, but they do not have a true sense of what they ought to do.  You can delegate to self-directed achievers, but the enthusiastic beginners will need direction.

We also use a coaching style for disillusioned learners, people who find things more difficult than they thought. Then we have cautious people who know what to do but who are afraid to do it on their own. It really helps people to decide. You might have to do different strokes for different folks. Likewise, you might have to do different strokes for the same folks for different parts of their job. It really permits people who deal with others to focus on what part of someone's job needs more attention. You also need to determine the type of attention that will work the best. Should it be via telephone, face-to-face, or email? It gives you an entire strategy for dealing with people.

EL. Can you provide an example of when you had to use situational leadership?

KB. When I was a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts, I got in trouble for supervising too many doctoral students. My students were in different levels of development in their doctoral thesis. Some people wrote better than I did. If they needed me, they would call me. I had other students who needed tender loving care once and awhile. I also had students who needed much direction and supervision. I could use different strokes for different folks. The assumption that you need to use the same leadership style with everyone is not true.

EL. You mentioned how the innovative use of technology helped the Obama campaign. Do you see innovation efforts in companies that lead at a higher level?

KB. Companies that lead at a higher level tend to treat their people as business partners. When you treat your people as business partners, you also share information with them, and create opportunities for them to be empowered and be creative. Whenever I lecture about innovation, I talk about the hourly 3M employee who developed the Post-it note. Now 3M welcomes employees at all levels to have ideas and come up with innovations and suggestions. If companies want to survive today, they need to have four characteristics:

• customer drive because today the customer is king;
• cost-effectiveness by managing the financial part of the business;
• speed and agility because it excites your customers to know the person they deal with can make decisions; and
• continuous improvement in innovation.

Leading at a higher level encourages the spread of innovation throughout the organization. As a result, not all brains lead up the hierarchy. Companies leading at a higher level do not use words like superior or brag about who works for whom.

EL. Are companies that lead at a higher level prone to embrace social media more than more traditional companies?

KB. Yes! These companies are constantly innovating and taking suggestions from their employees. All of the smart companies want bright Y generation types. Look at the people who ran Obama's election campaign! They were in their early 20s. We have been searching to get more young people into our organization. About 25 percent of our employees are Y generation. When we ask them to work on a problem, they usually do not go to their boss. Instead, they go to the Web and then they get in a chat room. It amazes me what they can do with technology because they grew up with it.

EL. What can C-level executives do to get other levels of management to lead at a higher level?

KB. What I call servant leadership has two parts: strategic leadership and operational leadership. Strategic leadership includes setting the vision and the values, the direction, and the strategic initiatives. This is the job of the traditional hierarchy. Operational leadership includes how you live according to the values, and how you accomplish the goals and the strategic direction. You have to turn the traditional pyramid upside down so that the people at the lowest part of the organization rise up. These folks are closest to the customers. That is the servant part of servant leadership. The strategic is the leadership part of servant leadership. Most organizations get into trouble because they become bureaucracies run by ego-driven leaders who want to keep the hierarchy alive and well for operational leadership. Everyone sucks up to the hierarchy away from the customers, and then senior management wonders why things do not work out. When you empower, you give power. People can make decisions and do things that excite the customers.

We did a study on which of those two leadership behaviors -- strategic or operational -- has the biggest impact on organizational success. We found that beyond 90 percent comes from operational leadership and the rest from strategic leadership. Strategic leadership is important because it starts the direction. However, your people and your customers do not know what strategic direction is. All they know is how they are treated. If you do not drive leadership throughout your organization, then you will never empower your front-line people who can get excited and build loyalty with the customer base.  The interaction between passionate employees and customers drives organizational success.

EL. What should executives look for in future leaders? How should they integrate older leaders with younger ones?

KB. Organizations should not throw out their older seasoned people, but perhaps create opportunities for them to mentor the young people. The young people have tremendous energy and creativity, but they do not always know the culture or the environment, and what they need to accomplish. You need to find ways to have these two populations value each other. Today you need to manage the present and create the future at the same time. It is not good to have the same group of people doing both tasks. You cannot send operational leaders away to plan your future. They will probably kill your future because they either become overwhelmed with the present or have no vested interested in the future.

Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a technology writer from Boston, MA. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.

One of the world's most influential living management thinkers, Charles Handy, who is 75 years old, has year-after-year been listed alongside business experts including Peter Drucker and Tom Peters in the prestigious Thinkers 50 list.  His views on management and life have inspired others for decades. In his latest book Myself and Other More Important Matters, this best selling author of books, including The Age of Unreason and The Elephant and the Flea, shares his special blend of wisdom, giving readers uncommon insight into business and careers.

After a career as an economist at Shell International, Handy ran the first graduate school business program in London. He was a full professor at the London Business School. He also served as Warden of St. George's House in Windsor Castle, a private conference and study center concerned with ethics and values in society. Many British know Handy for this 'Thoughts for Today' on the BBC's Radio Today program.  His articles have appeared in the Harvard Business Review.

Enterpriseleadership.org recently spoke with Charles Handy to discuss everything from how the corporation of the future will look like to what does it really mean to manage.  Here's what he had to say:

EL: In your book, Myself, you write that people say they manage something when they're really coping with it.  So what does it mean to manage? 

CH: In English, if you ask someone if he or she has managed all right today, you don't actually mean that the person went around motivating people and drawing up strategy plans and so forth. You mean did you get by or did you cope. That's the interesting thing.  Applied to people, manage doesn't have a nice connotation. For instance, transport managers don't think of themselves as managing people, but managing the transport function. People don't like to think of themselves as being managed because they associate it with being manipulated or controlled. They liked to be led. In some industries, such as the film business, people who look after others don't have the title of manager. They're called agents, partners, or directors. I try to avoid the word.  People in companies get by.

EL: People have called you the European equivalent of Peter Drucker.  How do any of your beliefs about management differ from Drucker's?

CH: I'm pleased by it. I don't think my beliefs about management differ from his.  Whenever I've had nice insight about something, I'd discover that Drucker had the same insight five years earlier. That always irritated me. We thought along similar lines. We talked not just about the organization and what goes on inside it, but we also talked a lot about society. We're both social philosophers as well as organizational thinkers. That's the similarity. Of course, some things divided us. He was more accepting of the North American capitalism model. I find it a bit cruel and greedy. He wrote more books and they continue to sell better than mine.

EL: Why do you consider yourself a social  philosopher?  Why do you take issue with people calling you a management  guru?   

CH: I don't want anyone calling me a management guru, which I find an irritating expression. Peter Drucker once said they only call you a guru because Americans can't spell management theorist. I have a broader perspective than most so-called management gurus. I'm interested in the way work defines our lives and the way organizations define work. I'm interested in looking at the kinds of lives we've all been leading and the kinds of the values we bring to those lives. That's all tied up with work and organizations. I'm speculating about what's life all about.

EL:  How do you feel about people who run their lives by technology?

CH: It's great if it's your servant. The danger is that it seduces you. In turn, you spend your time surfing the Web trying to find some bit of fascinating information. It's not a good thing. You wind up letting the computer start to run your life.  Computers control organizations, which is also very dangerous. George Orwell's 1984 presented the grime scenario of people being watched by devices similar to computers.

EL: What were some of the valuable lessons you learned in Borneo during your management apprenticeship with Royal Dutch Shell?              

CH: In those days, Borneo was a primitive place. The country had only 30 miles of road. You got around by boat or tiny airplanes. It was scary at times. However, one important event stands out. When I got there, I learned that we had no telephone line to the head office in Singapore. In those days, we didn't have any email or anything like that. If I wanted to communicate with my boss, I had to write him a letter. The letter took a week to get there, and my boss took a week to get back to me. I quickly realized I was on my own. If I made a mistake, I could correct it. No one needed to know I made a mistake. I didn't have to endure the disgrace of being reprimanded for something I did wrong. I also had a very loyal staff.  I, however, learned from my mistakes. That's what worries me about computers. You can't make mistakes without people knowing about them. It's difficult for people to learn from their mistakes. You learn by experimenting and experiments don't always work.

EL: What first inspired you  to create a graduate school for Britain’s managers? 

CH: When I left Shell in the mid 1960's, I was looking for something to do. The longest formal program for any manager included one day. Can you believe that? I concluded that Britain had three occupations that didn't require decent people to have any formal training or formal education. These occupations included being a politician, a parent, or a manager. We couldn't do anything about being politicians or about parenting. We could do something about being a manager. I noticed that the armed services provided formal training for many of its top jobs. People attended a staff college for one year.  No other organizations provided anything close to this. I discovered that the London Business School wanted to offer a one-year Sloan program. I introduced myself to the principal who was looking for someone to run the program. After I got the job, I went to the U.S. to learn how business schools operated and then returned to London.

EL: In 2007 in Boston, at the Summit on the Future of the Corporation, you gave a historical perspective on the evolution of the corporation, its purpose and its future design. Can you briefly describe the future design of the corporation?

CH: When I joined Shell, it was one big company. The future organizational structure of the corporation will resemble a spread eagle. It's a federated structure.  It will consist of a collection of different entities, some wholly owned. These entities will fan out across the world to provide a global reach. They can't be totally controlled from the center. The corps of people in the middle will provide the strategic direction of the corporation. They will also decide how money will get spent, and select who will run each business bit. The bits will have to be largely independent and autonomous. That's a new kind of challenge because you just can't tell people what to do in a federated organization. You have to negotiate things. You also need to have some type of constitution that protects the rights of the different bits of the organization.

EL:Isn't this  structure going to be difficult for people to cope  with?

CH: Yes! Managing will become difficult. You'll need to manage by values.  People will need to have a sense of what's the right thing to do and what direction they should go in. Technology will help enormously because it will keep people in touch with each other. The great thing is not to let them take away your being a master. People are going to have to rely more on their own initiative. No one at the center of these spread eagle things can tell you what to do. They're probably on the other side of the world. And you've never met them.

EL: In Myself you talk a lot about people needing to adapt the mindset of an independent agent.  Will this attitude work better in the organizational structure you described?

CH: Absolutely! Each unit of the organization will have its core staff. However, these units will increasingly use independents and smaller operating companies to help do their task. These organizations need to be incredibly flexible in this world because it is changing so fast. If you try to employee everybody to do everything you want them to do, you're stuck with these people. They might not be the right people and might not be able to change fast enough. You might need extra resources, which you can't afford because you've stuck with the old ones. It makes sense to have partners around the place. Some of these partners don't need an office or to be put on the company's pension scheme. You can easily get rid of them when you no longer need them.

EL: One of the quotes attributed to you is "Profit is secondary to their real purpose, which is to make a difference in the world." Can you explain this further?

CH: Most of the enlightened businesses would agree with this. A pharmaceutical company might perceive its mission to be curing sick or be providing medicine for needy people about the world. They, of course, have to make a profit because they have to pay dividends to investors. They have to make money to invest in the future.  You feel energized and excited if you're working in an organization, and if you're feeling you're doing something useful, not just working for the shareholders. I wouldn't want to wake up in the morning and say, 'I'm going to make some shareholder richer today.' I'd rather wake up and know I've customers whose demands I need to meet.  I really wanted to make a difference in my little world in Borneo. I wanted people to have a good life.

EL: Are there any companies or entrepreneurs whom you admire?

CH: Every time I mention a company I like, it runs into trouble.  I'd rather not comment. I do, however, admire Richard Branson, He set out to do something better than other people were doing it. He started an airline. He hated being treated like cattle when he traveled. He wanted his airline to treat people as people. He had to make money to keep it going. Making a difference underscores all the stuff he does.

EL: How do you stay active in management today?

CH: I act as a coach to people in business. I have this interesting process. People who've read my books, can call us when they are in London. If I'm going to be free the next morning, they are welcome to join my wife and I for breakfast at our home in Putney from 8:30 to 9:30. We've had everyone from religious monks to young people who want to test their ideas for a business.

Author: Elizabeth M. Ferrarini - She is a technology writer  from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.