Now, Discover Your Strengths

Now, Discover Your Strengths deepens that message with a web-based inventory to identify basic talents. My inventory didn't reveal any surprising talents. Rather, it took personality traits so pervasive that I wouldn't even have identified them as strengths and brought them to my attention. I've already been able to use the information to understand my successes and failures in work and personal lives, and am using it to help craft my future direction.

The book itself is quite shallow. It gives you one page of detail on each of the major strengths, and one page of bullet points on "how to manage someone with this strength." There's disappointingly little on how the strengths impact other relationships. How do I work with my BOSS? How do I work with my peers? How do I make my relationship work? How do I find someone with complementary talents (how do I figure out which other talents I *want* to work with?)

Though the authors say that it's the interaction between different strengths that create the richness, they don't spend much time delving into how strengths combine beyond a couple cursory examples. Certainly in my case, it's been the interaction between my strengths that has been most powerful.

The strengths are truly pervasive, and the authors limit their discussion to a shallow discussion and narrow application.

The book seems mainly an excuse to market the web-based inventory, which you're allowed to take only ONCE for each copy of the book you buy. You can't even buy more licenses without buying the book (a nice little trick to push book sales and probably get the book listed as a best-seller, when in fact all people want is the web-based inventory).

So while I'd love to loan the book to a friend, or buy licenses to have my clients take the inventory, the need to structure it all as the purchase of dozens of books makes the whole venture seem much less worthwhile.

The inventory gets 5 stars from me, the book gets two stars, and the marketing trick of one survey per book gets a whopping ZERO stars.

The Gallup Organization (the pollsters) have been doing a systematic study of excellence for the last thirty years. They interviewed over two million people about their strengths and found that each person's talents are enduring and unique and each person's greatest room for growth is in the area of his or her greatest strength. Gallup's report, by Marcus Buckingham, author of "First, Break All the Rules" and Donald Clifton, is called "Now, Discover Your Strengths" (Free Press, 2001). When most people think of changing they focus on their deficits. This is usual to our culture, but not as helpful to our self-improvement as focusing on our strengths. The survey calls strengths the activities that we consistently do near perfectly, without much effort or thought. Strengths grow out of our talents, naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be put to a productive use When these natural talents are combined with knowledge and skills, our performance is outstanding. Most people don't know where their real strengths are because they don't think that whatever comes easily to them is as important as what requires struggle. In fact, people often feel that "everybody can do that" when thinking about their talents. They don't realize how unique their own combination of talents, knowledge and skills can be. Others deliberately suppress their natural talent because of social pressures. We can change our level of knowledge and skills, but if the natural talent is not there we will never be great at what we are trying to learn. Learning to do what we have no talent for helps us go through the motions, but can never help us give a great performance. Talents are revealed by looking at what we yearn for, what we can learn most rapidly, and what positive activities bring us the greatest satisfaction. These areas are clues to our natural talents. "Now, Discover Your Strengths", guides the reader to a web site where a 30 minute questionnaire analyzes your instinctive reactions and tells you what your five most powerful talent themes are. This survey is an excellent way to clarify who you are and where you need to focus your energy. The book is aimed at business people but the web site test would be helpful to everyone from teens up. Unfortunately, the strengths profile is only available one time to one purchaser of each book, a policy that discriminates against library readers or people who want their whole family to read the book and take the test. This policy feels mean spirited. I guess the policy makers didn't have the talent of "fairness" or "inclusiveness". Nevertheless, the test results may be worth the price of the book.

I agree with what "First, Break All the Rules" said, in that, we should seek to build the strengths of our employees rather than fix their weaknesses. But, I walked away from that book saying "ok, that was great, but how do you determine a strength or talent?"

"Now, Discover your Strengths" gives practical insights on the strengths and inate talents of people. I was impressed by this and also by the real life examples of people displaying the stregth being discussed. The disheartening thing about the test is that it only gives your top 5 strengths when it's likely that 8-10 strenths are outwardly shown (in my opinion).

Unlike other readers, I DID NOT see this and the online test as meant to be a "personality" test. Quite the contrary. I believe it accurately measures what it says it does: STRENGTHS.

I'm looking forward to applying this information to the organizations I work with.

Since my question after reading the first book (how do you determine someone's strenghts?) was answered with "Now Discover your Strenthgs", I'm guessing that if there is a third book, it will discuss what to do with your strengths now that they're discovered.