Success Quote by Ken Blanchard

Blanchard is doing something quietly subversive for the corporate bookshelf: shifting the blame (and the solution) away from individual hustle and onto collective meaning-making. “Productivity” here isn’t treated as a fuel you can pour into people via incentives or pressure. It “seems to depend” on perception - on whether workers experience the organization’s mission as a ladder they can climb or a ceiling they keep hitting.

The key phrase is “see their own goals in relation to.” That’s not a call for blind alignment; it’s an admission that most workplaces run on competing narratives. Employees arrive with private math: careers to build, families to support, skills to learn, dignity to protect. Organizations arrive with public math: targets, timelines, shareholder stories. When those equations feel mutually reinforcing, productivity looks effortless and even “cultural.” When they feel extractive, output becomes transactional - people comply, conserve energy, and stop offering their best thinking.

Blanchard’s context is late-20th-century management culture, when “motivation” got repackaged as leadership technique. His subtext is that managers can’t engineer performance solely through structure; they have to broker a psychological contract. The quote flatters leaders with a lever they can pull - alignment - while also indicting them: if your team is dragging, it may be because your organization’s goals read like someone else’s win condition.

It’s pragmatic, even kindly, but not naive. It recognizes that productivity is rarely a mystery; it’s a referendum on whether people feel used or used well.