Books by Marcus Buckingham

Now, Discover Your Strengths

by Marcus Buckingham

Product Description

The 20th anniversary edition of Now, Discover Your Strengths comes with an access code to the Clifton StrengthsFinder 2.0 assessment. This updated assessment includes reports and resources that go far beyond the standardized reports of the older assessment by providing you with personalized insight statements unique to your specific combination of strengths.

Many people have little sense of their talents and strengths, much less the ability to build their lives around them. Instead, they are raised and taught to become experts in their weaknesses — and spend their lives trying to fix them — while their strengths lie dormant.

Led by Don Clifton, the Father of Strengths-Based Psychology, Gallup created a revolutionary program to help people identify their talents; develop them into strengths; and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance. Twenty years ago, Gallup released Now, Discover Your Strengths to bring this program to the world.

At the heart of this book is CliftonStrengths, the assessment that is the product of decades of research and hundreds of thousands of interviews to identify the most prevalent human strengths. CliftonStrengths reveals 34 dominant talent themes that you can translate into personal and career success. To develop this assessment, Gallup conducted psychological profiles with more than 2 million individuals to help people around the world focus and perfect these themes. Since Now, Discover Your Strengths was first released two decades ago, more than 20 million people worldwide have taken the CliftonStrengths assessment.

The 20th anniversary edition includes a unique access code to take CliftonStrengths — previously known as StrengthsFinder 2.0 — which is a significantly more robust program than the assessment that appeared in the original edition of the book. This web-based assessment analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your top five themes.

Once you know which of the 34 themes you lead with — such as Achiever, Activator, Empathy, Futuristic and Strategic — the book will show you how to use your top themes for your own development, for your success as a manager and for the success of your organization.

With accessible and profound insights into how to turn talents into strengths, and with immediate online feedback from the CliftonStrengths assessment at its core, Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the most groundbreaking and powerful business books ever written.

Amazon.com Review

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

The One Thing You Need to Know: ... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success

by Marcus Buckingham

Following the success of the landmark bestsellers First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham offers a dramatically new way to understand the art of success.

With over 1.6 million copies of First, Break All the Rules (co-authored with Curt Coffman) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (co-authored with Donald O. Clifton) in print, Cambridge-educated Buckingham is considered one of the most respected business authorities on the subject of management and leadership in the world. With The One Thing You Need to Know, he gives readers an invaluable course in outstanding achievement -- a guide to capturing the essence of the three most fundamental areas of professional activity.

Great managing, leading, and career success -- Buckingham draws on a wealth of applicable examples to reveal that a controlling insight lies at the heart of the three. Lose sight of this "one thing" and even the best efforts will be diminished or compromised. Readers will be eager to discover the surprisingly different answers to each of these rich and complex subjects. Each could be explained endlessly to detail their many facets, but Buckingham's great gift is his ability to cut through the mass of often-conflicting agendas and zero in on what matters most, without ever oversimplifying. As he observes, success comes to those who remain mindful of the core insight, understand all of its ramifications, and orient their decisions around it. Buckingham backs his arguments with authoritative research from a wide variety of sources, including his own research data and in-depth interviews with individuals at every level of an organization, from CEO's to hotel maids and stockboys.

In every way a groundbreaking book, The One Thing You Need to Know offers crucial performance and career lessons for business people at all career stages.

Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance

by Marcus Buckingham

Outlines a six-step, six-week process through which employees can make the most of their assets while rewriting their job descriptions, in a guide that explains how to determine one's strengths, promote oneself without bragging, and maintain a focused career path. By the author of First Break All the Rules. 250,000 first printing.

Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance

by Marcus Buckingham

Marcus Buckingham’s books have guided millions to become top performers in everything they do by focusing on their strengths. In Go Put Your Strengths to Work, a Wall Street Journal bestseller, Buckingham will show you how to hone and apply your strengths for maximum success in your career.

Research data show that most people do not come close to making full use of their assets at work—in fact, only seventeen percent of the workforce believe they use all of their strengths on the job. Go Put Your Strengths to Work aims to change that through a six-step, six-week experience that will reveal the hidden dimensions of your strengths. Buckingham shows you how to seize control of your assets and rewrite your job description under the nose of your boss. You will learn:

-Why your strengths aren't “what you are good at” and your weaknesses aren’t “what you are bad at.”
-How to use the four telltale signs to identify your strengths.
-The simple steps you can take each week to push your time at work toward those activities that strengthen you and away from those that don’t.
-How to talk to your boss and your colleagues about your strengths without sounding like you’re bragging and about your weaknesses without sounding like you’re whining.
-The fifteen-minute weekly ritual that will keep you on your strengths path your entire career.

With structured exercises that will become part of your regular workweek and proven tactics from people who have successfully applied the book's lessons, Go Put Your Strengths to Work will arm you with a radically different approach to your work life. As part of the book's program you'll take an online Strengths Engagement Track, a focused and powerful gauge that has proven to be the best way to measure the level of engagement of your strengths or your team's strengths. You can also download the first two segments of the renowned companion film series Trombone Player Wanted.

Go Put Your Strengths to Work will open up exciting uncharted territory for you and your organization. Join the strengths movement and thrive.

The Truth About You: Your Secret to Success

by Marcus Buckingham

An Experience to Revolutionize Your Life from Marcus Buckingham - the World's Leading Expert on Career Success!
Want to know what you are supposed to do with your life? The Truth About You is an experience to unlock life's toughest questions. The process this revolutionary toolkit teaches will create higher satisfaction and performance in life and work. This cutting-edge product includes:
Enhanced DVD. A high-energy film reveals how and why you must discover and prioritize your strengths and includes access to a wealth of downloadable resources, including five bonus Strength Tip videos.
Interactive Book. With insightful exercises and tried-and-true life wisdom no one else will tell you, the book takes you to the location of your most powerful and unchanging talents.
ReMemo Pad. Designed for a life on-the-go, the ReMemo Pad becomes your companion to complete the task of revealing your strengths using your everyday experiences.
Perfect for high school and college students, young professionals, and people simply wanting to revitalize their career, The Truth About You helps you develop the kind of clarity and passion that drives a successful and satisfying future. Marcus Buckingham will help you discover the real truth, the truth about you . . . it will be your secret to success.

StandOut: The Groundbreaking New Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths Revolution

by Marcus Buckingham

StandOut, the revolutionary new book and online assessment tool from Marcus Buckingham, is the result of extensive research, statistical testing, and analysis of the world's top performers. From the coauthor of Now, Discover Your Strengths and the recognized leader of the strengths movement, StandOut unveils your top two Strength Roles and offers sharp, practical ideas that professionals and managers in any organization can use to find their edge and win at work.

Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently

by Marcus Buckingham

Read Find Your Strongest Life and discover:
How to make the most of the role you were born to play How to get others to understand who you really are The successful strategies of other women like you
Check out what women are already saying about Find Your Strongest Life.
Brooke: When I read the “Ten Myths” that opened the book, I was completely hooked. The statistics are interesting and fresh. I also related to the problem that sets up the book: "Which parts of me should I cut out?" As I read, I could see myself in the Marcus’s big-picture analysis and statistics. The early part of the book made me anticipate a breakthrough. And Marcus delivered. Overall, he explains a woman's dilemma perfectly . . . in fresh terms with a unique spin. The main ideas in each chapter were so engaging. Chapter 6 in particular is worth the price of the book. I have already started looking for strong moments in my life, and I want to tell every woman I know to do the same. It is definitely life-changing.
Rebecca: It was really good. It was awesome. And to be honest, perfect timing for my life. I'm REALLY in that place. I can't tell you how badly I've been depressed for the last several months just trying to figure out what to do differently so I'm not so miserable. On one hand, I'm grateful I have a job still. I have a mortgage and bills and all that. But on the other hand...I can't continue to work at a job that gets me nowhere, is not rewarding, not challenging, and mentally drains me. I really have started avoiding my family because I've become so rude and snippy. It's a bad cycle. BUT...God willing this year (sooner than later) I will be able to put this behind me and do what I love :) Even if it's making half as much money. Thanks for thinking of me to read this. I needed it!

Delaney: I was on a plane as I finished reading the manuscript. I was going to be with my daughter who is a law student. As I finished the pages, Marcus helped me gain a new understanding of myself that stood out like a neon sign: I am the person who helps others build infrastructure, get through situations ,and set everything right. It goes beyond motherhood. I am an event planner by birth. I see big pictures and the components necessary to get from vision to execution. The content helped me to reframe my own thinking. Very helpful. I’m excited to take the online test and see which role I'm born to play.

Jennifer: As a working mother, I found the concept of the book fascinating. There are daily struggles of trying to balance being the perfect wife, mother, and employee, and the book helped me truly understand how to navigate all those demands.

Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World

by Marcus Buckingham, Ashley Goodall

Forget what you know about the world of work
You crave feedback. Your organization's culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. Your competencies should be measured and your weaknesses shored up. Leadership is a thing.
These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they're lies. As strengths guru and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham and Cisco Leadership and Team Intelligence head Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies--distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking--that we encounter every time we show up for work. Nine lies, to be exact. They cause dysfunction and frustration, ultimately resulting in workplaces that are a pale shadow of what they could be.
But there are those who can get past the lies and discover what's real. These freethinking leaders recognize the power and beauty of our individual uniqueness. They know that emergent patterns are more valuable than received wisdom and that evidence is more powerful than dogma.
With engaging stories and incisive analysis, the authors reveal the essential truths that such freethinking leaders will recognize immediately: that it is the strength and cohesiveness of your team, not your company's culture, that matter most; that we should focus less on top-down planning and more on giving our people reliable, real-time intelligence; that rather than trying to align people's goals we should strive to align people's sense of purpose and meaning; that people don't want constant feedback, they want helpful attention.
This is the real world of work, as it is and as it should be. Nine Lies About Work reveals the few core truths that will help you show just how good you are to those who truly rely on you.

StandOut 2.0: Assess Your Strengths, Find Your Edge, Win at Work

by Marcus Buckingham

The Groundbreaking Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths Revolution

In the years since the publication of First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, millions have come to the simple but powerful realization that to get the most out of people, you must build on their strengths. And yet, as Marcus Buckingham astutely points out, though the strengths-based approach is now conventional wisdom, the tools and systems inside organizations—performance appraisals, training programs, and succession planning systems—remain stubbornly remedial and exclusively focused on measuring skills, finding gaps, and attempting to plug them. It’s a crisis for individuals and organizations, with management ideas and everyday practice utterly out of sync.

That’s about to change. StandOut 2.0 is a revolutionary book and tool that enables you to identify your strengths, and those of your team, and act on them. The original edition of StandOut provided top-notch insights from one of the world’s foremost authorities on strengths, as well as access to a powerful, cutting-edge online assessment tool. StandOut 2.0 also includes the assessment and a robust report on your most dominant strengths. The report is easily exported so you can use it to present the very best of yourself to your team and your company.

StandOut 2.0 is your indispensable guide for building on your strengths to further your career—and help your team and organization win.

Love and Work: How to Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life

by Marcus Buckingham

A Wall Street Journal bestseller
World-renowned researcher and New York Times bestselling author Marcus Buckingham helps us discover where we're at our best—both at work and in life.
You've long been told to "Do what you love." Sounds simple, but the real challenge is how to do this in a world not set up to help you. Most of us actually don't know the real truth of what we love—what engages us and makes us thrive—and our workplaces, jobs, schools, even our parents, are focused instead on making us conform. Sadly, no person or system is dedicated to discovering the crucial intersection between what you love to do and how you contribute it to others.
In this eye-opening, uplifting book, Buckingham shows you how to break free from this conformity—how to decode your own loves, turn them into their most powerful expression, and do the same for those you lead and those you love.
How can you use love to reveal your unique gifts?
How can you pinpoint what makes you stand out from anyone else?
How can you choose roles in which you'll excel?
Love and Work unlocks answers to these questions and others, so you can: Choose the right role on the team. Describe yourself compellingly in job interviews. Mold your existing role so that it calls upon the very best of you. Position yourself as a leader in such a way that your followers quickly come to trust in you. Make lasting change for your team, your company, your family, or your students.

Love, the most powerful of human emotions, the source of all creativity, collaboration, insight, and excellence, has been systematically drained from our lives—our work, teams, and classrooms.
It's time we brought love back in.
Love and Work shows you how.

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People, Updated and Expanded (featuring Are You a Good Boss--Or a Great One? by Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback)

by Daniel Goleman, Marcus Buckingham, Harvard Business Review, Tsedal Neeley, Linda A. Hill

Bring out their best.

If you read nothing else on managing people, read this book. We've chosen a new selection of current and classic Harvard Business Review articles that will help you earn your people's trust, build successful teams, and coach employees to help them reach their potential.

This book will inspire you to:

• Balance the competing priorities of managing both up and down
• Identify the most common sources of conflict--and learn how to resolve them
• Fine-tune your management style using emotional intelligence
• Navigate the challenges of dispersed and hybrid teams
• Cultivate high engagement without overwork or burnout
• Find--and keep--the best people

This collection of articles includes: "Leadership That Gets Results," by Daniel Goleman; "The Power of Small Wins," by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer; "The Leader as Coach," by Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular; "Superbosses Aren't Afraid to Delegate Their Biggest Decisions," by Sydney Finkelstein; "The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome," by Jean-Francois Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barsoux; "The Overcommitted Organization," by Mark Mortensen and Heidi K. Gardner; "Global Teams That Work," by Tsdeal Neeley; "Four Types of Team Conflict--and How to Resolve Them," by Randall S. Peterson, Priti Pradhan Shah, Amanda J. Ferguson, and Stephen L. Jones; "Why Employees Quit," by Ethan Bernstein, Michael B. Horn, and Bob Moesta; "The Feedback Fallacy," by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall; "To Excel, Diverse Teams Need Psychological Safety," by Henrik Bresman and Amy C. Edmondson; "Managers Can't Do It All," by Diane Gherson and Lynda Gratton; "Are You a Good Boss--or a Great One?" by Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback.

HBR's 10 Must Reads are definitive collections of classic ideas, practical advice, and essential thinking from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Exploring topics like disruptive innovation, emotional intelligence, and new technology in our ever-evolving world, these books empower any leader to make bold decisions and inspire others.

This Updated and Expanded edition features new, breakthrough articles, additional short-form pieces, and a detailed discussion guide to give you and your team the tools you need for sustained success.

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Employee Engagement

by Marcus Buckingham, Adam Grant, Harvard Business Review, Renee A. Mauborgne, Peter Cappelli

Engage your employees and transform your organization.

If you read nothing else on employee engagement, read this book. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you make your employees feel valued, motivated, and ready to do great things.

This book will inspire you to:

• Invest in a culture of cohesive teams
• Turn employee feedback into action
• Learn why people quit--and how to retain them
• Curb burnout by designing better jobs
• Make HR a champion of employees
• Create a purpose-driven organization

This collection of articles includes "Creating a Purpose-Driven Organization," by Robert E. Quinn and Anjan V. Thakor; "How Customers Can Rally Your Troops," by Adam Grant, "Why Employees Quit," by Ethan Bernstein, Michael B. Horn, and Bob Moesta; "The Power of Hidden Teams," by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall; "Do You Tell Your Employees You Appreciate Them?" by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman; "The Case for Good Jobs," by Zeynep Ton; "To Curb Burnout, Design Jobs to Better Match Employees' Needs," by Michael P. Leiter and Christina Maslach; "HR's New Role," by Peter Cappelli and Ranya Nehmeh; "Turn Employee Feedback into Action," by Ethan Burris, Benjamin Thomas, Ketaki Sodhi, and Dawn Klinghoffer; "Beware a Culture of Busyness," by Adam Waytz; "Collaborative Overload," by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant; "Designing the Hybrid Office," by Anne-Laure Fayard, John Weeks, and Mahwesh Khan; and "Blue Ocean Leadership," by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.

HBR's 10 Must Reads are definitive collections of classic ideas, practical advice, and essential thinking from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Exploring topics like disruptive innovation, emotional intelligence, and new technology in our ever-evolving world, these books empower any leader to make bold decisions and inspire others.