Rating: 
Summary: Great Buy!
Review: With a lot of career books in my shelfs I find this book rather helpful. It certainly made me rethink and rediscover my strengths.
I really do recommend it!
Rating:
Summary: Gifts, Skills, and Preferences--All Three
Review: Buy the book! A code found on the book jacket that lets you take the StrengthsFinder insturment, and print out the results and supporting documentation is worth the price of the book. As you read through the interpretation material, you will discover a bias in the research with which you may agree or disagree. I had both feelings simultaneously. The StrengthsFinder was incredibly accurate for me personally. However, being a professional survey, questionnaire, and inventory taker, I found that I could guess the answers that fit my self-perception. I highly regard a complex way of considering human personality that allows for a deep level of individuality. This complex way looks at gifts, skills, and preferences. Therefore, I find that-like all instruments-the StrengthsFinder is inadequate alone for making holistic life decisions. Even so, finding your strengths can mean finding lasting satistfaction in your field. So this book, the instrument, and the interpretation of each strength will help you focus yourself. I also found helpful a section that talked about how to have a strengths-focused organization.
Rating: 
Summary: Super
Review: I'm a coach -- personal, business and EQ -- and I find this book to be an invaluable tool in my practice. The nomenclature for the strengths is wonderful, and makes sense. As a helping professional, I can generally see what's going on with a client, but can't see the forest for the trees, and wasn't that easily able to describe my own strengths. Taking the test myself was most illuminating and I found out, with some feedback, that I wasn't really portraying my stengths in relations with others. I immediately compared it with the profile of someone I was working with, and it made it clear to us both the one area in which we were 'clashing'. Tension eased as we saw each other for what we were, and it's been smooth sailing. It's a shortcut to understand the person you're managing, relating to, living with, or working with. No single assessment is going to explain a complex living being, but this one will put together a lot of pieces for you and for your client, employee or S.O. The book is very easy to read; clear, well written and informative. Yes, we DID need words for strengths. It's time we quit focusing on "weaknesses". Everyone has them, but everyone also has strengths, and, as the authors say, your best chance at attaining excellence is by increasing your strengths, not shoring up your weaknesses, and it's also a much surer path to contentment.
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.
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