StandOut

The good news is that management consultant Marcus Buckingham, a perennial best-selling author, offers a very useful pep talk about putting your best foot forward. He urges readers to identify and maximize their strengths to move ahead in their careers. His profiles of various roles exemplifying personal strength provide great information that you can use to make a more meaningful impact at work and to live more fully. Alas, the bad news – or at least the commercial news – is that the author says you need help identifying your strengths, and for that, you need to buy the book to get the one-time code for taking a “strengths profiles” quiz on his website. Once you learn your category with this assessment, you can use more of the book’s information. Welcome to the innovative world of interactive media. Of course, you can try to figure out your strong points yourself, but Buckingham cautions, “It is hard to see your own uniqueness. Your strengths are a part of you whether you’re conscious of them or not. And because they’re so woven into the fabric of who you are, they can actually be quite difficult to pinpoint.” With or without the code, getAbstract believes you’ll find real value in this common sense text if you accept that the strengths you think you have may not match those the author would cite.