Now, Discover Your Strengths

Rating:
Summary: Good Management Text
Review: The strength of "Now Discover Your Strengths" lies not with discovering one's own strenghts (mine were all self-obvious), but in learning to manage the strengths of others and in providing the concept of a "strengths-based organization". The book recommended numerous useful strategies for managing people who exhibit each of the various traits/strenghts and in providing strategies for creating a strenght-based organization.
For learning better how one's personality relates to one's career, try "Do What You Are", a more self-insightful personality text.

Rating:
Summary: An extraordinarily useful book
Review: There are thousands of books which will tell me what's wrong with me. This one concentrates on what's right with me. In a NY Times review of the book, the writer complained "but who will tell me what my weaknesses are." One of the authors replied, gently, "that might be the purview of a spouse!" I'm a professional coach, and I recommend this to all my coachees. They, in turn, find themselves motivated and energized to action. Gotta love it!

Rating:
Summary: good ideas - execution leaves mixed feelings
Review: I'm happy a book makes it so high on the bestseller list explaining to people that they are better off focusing on strengths (both for themselves, as for the organizations they work for). At jobEQ.com, we have been "educating" our customers to do the same, and as the authors of this book acknowledge, only 25 to 40% of persons will grasp that notion immediately. I also appreciate that the authors explain how a manager can use the knowledge of these strengths (or themes) to manage their staff better.

If the authors would write a second edition, there are some things that I would recommend them to address. My first remark is linked to the writing style: this book is written in an "imperative" form: it contains a lot of sentences with "you need to do this", "you should do that", ... This style tends to put of people, risking that they miss the message. Secondly, they have WRONG, OUTDATED notion of the brain: contrary to what people used to say 5 to 10 years ago, the good news of recent research is that brain cells that die of ARE replaced (even if you get older) and you remain capable of forming new connections between brain cells (maybe unless you get a disease, such as Parkinson, ...). Thirdly: the book does not really address what kind of job would be good for you.

Finally some feedback about the test: don't take it BEFORE you read chapter 3 in the book - at least then you will understand how they built it. Still, I have my doubts about the way it is built. Using the amount of interviews as a "proof of credibility" didn't impress me: Often for scientific purposes, it doesn't matter much if you did 5.000 or a million interviews - all that matters is that you can validate the test. Also, I know that most people probably have MORE than 5 strengths, which is just an ARBITRARY number Gallup chose. Given the importance they address to these 5 strengths, just imagine what opportunities you will miss by ignoring these 2 other strengths. I would rather prefer to get a FULL picture, getting all my strengths and weaknesses, and having this information ordered from strongest to weakest.

Patrick E.C. Merlevede - Co-author of "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence"

Rating:
Summary: Nothing is a magic bullet, but this book can be helpful
Review: Nothing is a magic bullet, but this book can be helpful on a personal and organizational level. If the book could tell each person exactly what they should be doing it would probably cost lots more. I thought that I knew myself relatively well and could identify my strengths without the survey. The survey results yielded 4 that I knew (or could guess), but added one that really changes my perspective on things (and is true). This newly uncovered "strength" has given me a lot of "wisdom of hindsight" about how I have achieved and failed in the past. In my job I am using the concepts to help the people that I coach apply themselves effectively. On a personal level I am currently using the information along with other information to describe and invent my ideal job. I will then either create it where I currently work or go find a place where I can. What more can a person ask? P.S. Find a copy of "Where do I go from here with my life?" by Crystal and Bolles if you want to reinforce what you learn from identifying your strengths.

Rating:
Summary: Very interesting.
Review: Please explain to me how to fully use it, if you take it out from the library?

Rating:
Summary: Super Book
Review: Once again, Marcus Buckingham has written a wonderful book. Everyone has the potential to be a superstar, as long as they are in the right job.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: This book quite simply can change your life. I took the StrengthsFinder test earlier this year, and I have looked at life differently ever since. Donald Clifton has spent twenty years monitoring and discovering patterns of strength in the best of the best.

Whether you have achiever, context, futuristic, emphathy, restorative, or whatever, this book and test is going to dramatically change the way you look at the world. I currently work in the field of Leadership Identification and Development and this test time and time again shows students and young adults ages 18-30, a new way to approach life.

I always wondered why I had, without trying, met over 200 famous people in my life, and always wanted them to remember me, the strength significance played out in my life. If you are a business or educational institution this book and test can radically alter how you select employees, leaders, and how you can communicate more effectively with existing employees.

If there is a weakness in this book, it is that is does not go deeper. Clifton does a great job showing how he and others developed this process over years and years of study. Personally I want to be compared against the best, and this is what the book and test do. Have you ever wondered why you always size yourself up against everyone else and if you knew you could not win you did not even play? --Competition.

The beauty of this book is that your personal combination of strengths can put you as unique as 1 in millions, and the chances of meeting someone that is your exact double is next to impossible. How great is it that we are all so unique? Does not lend much credence to the theory that we are all here by some cosmic accident.

Our society, educational systems, businesses, and so many other institutions always try to build us up where we are weak. I worked at a company in Washington, DC and was utilized as an office manager and executive assistant, a job I was clearly not wired to do. With the the themes of competition, achiever, activator and significance, how could I ever handle ordering pens and pencils and organizing a contact database? I could not! I want to change the world, and now I know why-- I was wired to do it.

Do you know instantly how people are feeling when you walk in a room? I cannot, and I know my emphathy is low or non-existent. My dreams of becoming a counselor were misguided at best. This book, and the test will help you find out how you are wired and what a perfect job for you would be.

Can you wake up and say, I am doing what I was created to do and enjoying it? If not, I suggest you read this book and meditate over the information you receive back from it.

Thanks to Donald Clifton for an excellent and cutting edge work.

Rating:
Summary: Discover an Excellent Starting Point
Review: Now, Discover Your Strengths is a provacative and extremely practical book with a gem of an on-line survey instrument. Do you want to know your strengths? This is a book + survey instrument that will help you. Well worth the investment.

One of the big nuggets of value in this book is the amount of research that Gallup conducted to back up the on-line strength surveying mechanism.

The survey is uniquely focused on identifying your strengths. This is not a test like Myers Briggs (that focuses more on personality traits). The test takes 30-40 minutes on-line and the results are tabulated instantly with summary and full-text interpretation reports. Your customized report is printable or viewable (at a later date) on-line. (You must purchase the book to get the secret password to take the test.)

I asked for an additional code for a family member to be able to take the test and the on-line customer service rep agreed and sent me a new code within a couple hours - very courteous. I imagine that the survey will be available without the book at some point, but the book adds important information that helps readers understand other people.

The authors are credible and the Gallup organization adds deep practical underpinning. This book will appeal to the pragmatic reader. Educators and theorists will appreciate the inclusion of the appendix/technical report describing the testing theory and apparatus.

The book is not focused so much on the application of talents as it is the discovery of talents. The author chose not to draw a stronger correlation between strengths and possible career fit. (Richard Bolles does a great job with career matching in his books: What Color is Your Parachute and The Three Boxes of Life.)

In closing: the survey very accurately identified and articulated my key strengths. It probably will help you, too.

Rating:
Summary: A timely guide to job satisfaction
Review: This is not only a co-written book, it is backed up by the Gallup Organisation and a survey of over two million people over a thirty year period. Although it is written with career and team management in mind, it is worth reading simply for personal development. The first learning point of the book is an understanding of how everyone's brain is wired in a unique way to give each person a unique combination of talents. This is fascinating information. A hundred billion neurons in the brain each with fifteen thousand synapse connections by the age of three. But by the age of sixteen, half of those synapse connections have disappeared to create a unique pattern for each of us in what we find difficult and, crucially, what we can perform with consummate and consistent ease. The second learning point is to understand that success and excellence do not come from fixing our weaknesses, but from developing our strengths. For years, employers have made the mistake of directing staff training to the improvement of weak areas while taking strengths for granted. The misguided aim is to produce a well rounded performer. But, as the book shows, the real performers are those who concentrate almost exclusively on their natural talents. The unique strength of this book is that each copy comes with a unique reference number for the reader to get access to the StrengthsFinder Profile, a dedicated website questionnaire of 180 questions designed to identify your own top five talents, taken from a list of 34 "themes". It is the identification of those themes, and the kind of questions needed to elicit them, which has emerged from the exhaustive survey of over 2 million people. Your profile will not necessarily tell you that you are in the right or the wrong job. It may point you to a more effective role you could be taking within that job. Undoubtedly it will help you to identify how you can improve your performance and job satisfaction by playing to your strengths more of the time. The book is particularly good at explaining how a different balance of strengths can produce excellent job performance even in the same type of job, because there are any number of ways to do an excellent job in the same field of work. It also provides practical damage limitation strategies for managing your weaknesses. If you are a manager or work within a team, the remainder of the book will help you determine the strengths of your team and the best way to approach each type of person. Having taken the StrengthsFinder profile, you can repeat it at any time and there is ongoing support in the form of email advice on how to make the most of your own strengths. The information offered through this book and the StrengthsFinder profile will provide a great deal of insight into your present circumstances and challenges, and prove an invaluable resource for contemplating any future career development.

Rating:
Summary: Common Authors - Why
Review: This book is very expensive and the authors tell you that taking multiple surveys are helpful in the book. They actually do not let you take the surveys multiple times and do not return your phonecalls when you leave a message on the 800 number that they list in the book. Do not waste your money until they allow more tests - especially for the price that they charge! You can buy 2 or 3 other good books for the price of this one.