Now, Discover Your Strengths: How to Develop Your Talents and Those of the People You Manage

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Marcus Buckingham and Donald O Clifton's Now, Discover Your Strengths proposes a unique approach to managing personnel: focus on enhancing people's strengths rather than eliminating their weaknesses. Effectively managing personnel--as well as one's own behaviour--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. 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 Maximiser) and explains how to build a "strengths-based organisation" by capitalising 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 Organisation and instantly discover their own top five inborn talents. This device provides a personalised 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