University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Go Put Your Strengths to Work
Book

Go Put Your Strengths to Work

6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance

Marcus Buckingham
Free Press, 2007
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable
  • Eye Opening

Recommendation

Marcus Buckingham is passionate about helping you identify your unique strengths and unleash their power. As you read and work your way through the program in this book, you will become convinced that growing through your strengths is the ticket to your future happiness, effectiveness and success. He refutes the approach of improvement by fixing mistakes as a dead end that cannot help you discover how you can be exceptional. The book constantly refers you to its associated Web site for materials that will help you work through the exercises. Buckingham wants you to act rather than just read a theoretical tract. Nothing presented in this book will help you without action and implementation. However, if you take up the challenge, you will become empowered as you take charge of your work through your strengths. getAbstract recommends this book because it contains just a few simple ideas that could change your life.

Summary

Strengths and Mistakes

People make mistakes. The real question is whether you would do better by learning from those mistakes or by focusing on building your strengths instead. Do athletes perform better by filling their minds with images of winning or images of losing? Research says it is the former. Are your workdays filled with tasks that let your strengths flow? Does your work engage your very strongest abilities? Or do you spend your days managing your mistakes?

Recent research has explored two approaches toward business success, “Appreciative Inquiry” and “Positive Organizational Change.” Both have the same fundamental principle: Managing mistakes can help you limit the range of negative outcomes you might incur, but will not contribute to great success. However, if you study what works in your organization and build on it, you can expand your “positive deviance” – that is, the good side of being out of sync with the ordinary. You may consider deviance a negative factor, but it isn’t. It simply indicates that which is out of the norm.

You know that great feeling of accomplishment you get when you have used your best efforts to do a great piece of work? ...

About the Author

Marcus Buckingham is the author and co-author of several best-selling books including First, Break All the Rules; Now, Discover Your Strengths and The One Thing You Need to Know.

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