Marcus Buckingham

How do you get to what's real?

Your organization's culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. People's competencies should be measured and their weaknesses shored up. People crave feedback.

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--running through our organizational lives. Nine lies, to be exact. They cause dysfunction and frustration and ultimately result in a strange feeling of unreality that pervades our workplaces.

But there are those who can get past the lies and discover what's real. These are freethinking leaders who recognize the power and beauty of our individual uniqueness, who 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 matters most; that we need less focus 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.

If you embrace each person's uniqueness and see this as key for all healthy organizations; if you reject dogma and engage with the real world; if you seek out emergent patterns and put your faith in evidence, not philosophy; if you thrill to the power of teams--if you do all of these, then you are a freethinking leader, and this book is for you.

"In the years since publication of First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, millions have had 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, even 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, exclusively focused on measuring skills, finding gaps, and attempting to plug them. It's a crisis for individuals and organizations, with management ideas and management 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 to act on them. The original StandOut provided top-notch management 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 is your indispensable guide and tool for building on your strengths to further your career, and to help your team and organization win"--

Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its revolutionary study of more than 80,000 managers in First, Break All the Rules, revealing what the world’s greatest managers do differently. With vital performance and career lessons and ideas for how to apply them, it is a must-read for managers at every level.

Included with this re-release of First, Break All the Rules: updated meta-analytic research and access to the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment, which reveals people’s top themes of talent, and to Gallup’s Q12 employee engagement survey, the most effective measure of employee engagement and its impact on business outcomes.

What separates the greatest managers from all the rest?

They actually have vastly different styles and backgrounds. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They don’t hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They don’t believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They don’t try to help people overcome their weaknesses. And, yes, they even play favorites.

In this longtime management bestseller, Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its massive in-depth study of great managers. Some were in leadership positions. Others were front-line supervisors. Some were in Fortune 500 companies; others were key players in small, entrepreneurial firms. Whatever their circumstances, the managers who ultimately became the focus of Gallup’s research were those who excelled at turning each individual employee’s talent into high performance.

Gallup has found that the front-line manager is the key to attracting and retaining talented employees. This book explains how the best managers select an employee for talent rather than for skills or experience, set expectations, build on each person’s unique strengths rather than trying to fix his or her weaknesses, and get the best performance out of their teams.

And perhaps most important, Gallup’s research produced the 12 simple statements that distinguish the strongest departments of a company from all the rest. First, Break All the Rules is the first book to present this essential measuring stick and to prove the link between employee opinions and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction and the rate of turnover.

First, Break All the Rules presents vital performance and career lessons for managers at every level — and best of all, shows you how to apply them to your own situation.

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 in hardcover, 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.

One of the top 10 bestselling business books of all time

With more than 2 million copies sold, Now, Discover Your
Strengths is being re-released with an updated version of
Gallup’s world-renowned CliftonStrengths assessment.

More than a book
The 20th anniversary edition of Now,
Discover Your Strengths includes
a unique access code to the
CliftonStrengths assessment — the
same one that appeared in the runaway
bestseller StrengthsFinder 2.0 — with a
significantly more robust program than
the StrengthsFinder assessment in the
original edition of the book.

Rich content
Full of compelling, memorable stories as
well as insights from decades of Gallup
research and hundreds of thousands
of interviews, Now, Discover Your
Strengths is the most comprehensive
book ever written on developing
individual and team strengths.

Global and committed
customer base
More than 22 million people around the
world have taken the CliftonStrengths
assessment. Many Fortune 1000
companies; famous NGOs such as the
World Bank and United Nations; and
federal agencies and departments,
including the military, have used the
CliftonStrengths assessment to
empower individuals and groups.

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.