Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers, and by psychology's fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.
Marcus Buckingham, coauthor of the national bestseller First, Break All the Rules, and Donald O. Clifton, Chair of the Gallup International Research & Education Center, have created a revolutionary program to help readers identify their talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance. At the heart of the book is the Internet-based StrengthsFinder® Profile, the product of a 25-year, multimillion-dollar effort to identify the most prevalent human strengths. The program introduces 34 dominant "themes" with thousands of possible combinations, and reveals how they can best be translated into personal and career success. In developing this program, Gallup has conducted psychological profiles with more than two million individuals to help readers learn how to focus and perfect these themes.
So how does it work? This book contains a unique identification number that allows you access to the StrengthsFinder Profile on the Internet. This Web-based interview analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your five most powerful signature themes. Once you know which of the 34 themes -- such as Achiever, Activator, Empathy, Futuristic, or Strategic -- you lead with, the book will show you how to leverage them for powerful results at three levels: for your own development, for your success as a manager, and for the success of your organization.
With accessible and profound insights on how to turn talents into strengths, and with the immediate on-line feedback of StrengthsFinder at its core, Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the most groundbreaking and useful business books ever written.
Effectively managing personnel--as well as one's own behavior--is an extraordinarily complex task that, not surprisingly, has been the subject of countless books touting what each claims is the true path to success. That said, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton's Now, Discover Your Strengths does indeed propose a unique approach: focusing on enhancing people's strengths rather than eliminating their weaknesses. Following up on the coauthors' popular previous book, First, Break All the Rules, it fully describes 34 positive personality themes the two have formulated (such as Achiever, Developer, Learner, and Maximizer) and explains how to build a "strengths-based organization" by capitalizing on the fact that such traits are already present among those within it.
Most original and potentially most revealing, however, is a Web-based interactive component that allows readers to complete a questionnaire developed by the Gallup Organization and instantly discover their own top-five inborn talents. This device provides a personalized window into the authors' management philosophy which, coupled with subsequent advice, places their suggestions into the kind of practical context that's missing from most similar tomes. "You can't lead a strengths revolution if you don't know how to find, name and develop your own," write Buckingham and Clifton. Their book encourages such introspection while providing knowledgeable guidance for applying its lessons. --Howard Rothman
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Find your strengths and put them to work for you!:
In an ocean full of bigger fish it can be difficult to stop living on the offense and consider our own strengths. How will you stand out amongst the other 200 people at that job interview if you yourself have no idea what your strengths are? And if you don't know what you are good at, are you applying for the best job for yourself in the first place? `Now Discover Your Strengths' is the follow up to Buckingham's previous book `Break all the Rules'. This book focused on identifying and using your... more info
How do you want to spend the rest of your life?:
This a good book if you want to rethink what you are doing with your life. Stephen Covey integrates some of this kind of thinking in the Eight Habits. Share this with your kids in high school, and definitely before they head off to college. Dave
Marketing Tool:
I bought this book NEW at a bookstore that was going out of business. I was really enjoying reading it until I got to Chapter 3, which directs you to go online and take their StrengthsFinder test using the "unique" code on the jacket of the book. I was disgusted to learn that someone has already used the code (or so I am told by the FAQ on the site). Then I realized that this entire book, which reads remarkably fast and could probably be condensed down to 50 pages, is just a tool to get people to... more info
Now Discover Your Strengths:
Fantastic book as an individual read or as a team in the work environment. Easy to read and understand and at the end you have the results of the Strengths Finder Survey and a concrete set of steps to help you begin assessing your current work and personal decisions so they "play to your Strengths" Every Manager should have their team read this and share their strengths.
