Now, Discover Your Strengths

Free Press, 2001, Hardcover

Product Description

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.

Amazon.com's Best of 2001

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

Product Details

Title: Now, Discover Your Strengths
Sales Rank: 145 in Books
Author: Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton
Publisher: Free Press, 1 edition, 2001-01-29, Hardcover, 272 pages, ISBN: 0743201140
Package Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches, 0.9 pounds

Customer Reviews

Pass on this book NOW: Nice concept that could have been handled with a 10 page paper. Clearly authors had to have some volume to prove value so they drone on and on and on. Very tedious reading. Then at every turn they continue to try to sell other products or services. The major killer is having an online exam to evalute your strengths; however, the code is only good… More reviews

The good and the bad: The book is very interesting and very effective. The internet test is very accurate. Nevertheless each strength profile should be discussed more in depth. Let's say you get an idea of who you are but you would like to get more of it. Anyway, the price is worth the stuff you find in the book! More reviews

Strengths review: I wish my husband could have read it and used the code. I had gone on a job interview before reading this book and one of the questions they asked me, was what strategies would I use in a certain situation. And all I thought was that is THE dumbest question ever, how am I going to answer that, it all depends, I hate that word strategy....… More reviews

Don't Buy Used: The information in the book is very helpful but do not buy the book used if you want to take full advantage of what it has to offer. A majority of the book is centered around the results of their online strength finder accessed with a code in the book jacket that can only be used once. More reviews

Strengths Finder test not useful: I have read the book and taken the test. While the concept is sound (focus and develop your strengths, do only damage control on your weaknesses), the test does not reveal anything that could be applicable to my work. Many of the 180 questions are just simply asking you where your strengths are and then telling you the… More reviews

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