Marcus Buckingham

Once you’ve broken all the rules and launched your career by writing an instant classic management book, what do you do for an encore? If you’re Marcus Buckingham, you dedicate yourself to understanding what makes world-class managers tick, bottling it, and sharing it with the world.

Marcus first conquered the bestseller lists in 1999 with First, Break All the Rules. While the title may imply an iconoclastic streak, his continuing plea for managers to break with tradition has nothing to do with rebellion; instead, he argues, rules must be broken and discarded because they stifle the originality and uniqueness — the strengths — that can enable all of us to achieve our highest performance.

Following up on his highly successful debut book, Marcus continued to drive the message that people’s unique personal strengths are the key to unlocking their potential. As a co-author of Now, Discover Your Strengths, he helped create StrengthsFinder, the personal assessment tool that gave millions of individuals a new vocabulary to positively describe their ingrained talents, adding the phrase “Top 5” to the lexicon of managers and business people around the world. (Marcus’s Top 5, for the record: Futuristic, Context, Focus, Ideation, Intellection).

In addition to refining and reinforcing his message in subsequent books (The One Thing You Need to Know; Go Put Your Strengths to Work; The Truth About You; Find Your Strongest Life) and keynote addresses worldwide, he founded The Marcus Buckingham Company (catchy name, that) in 2007 to create tools and training that would help managers and organizations access the untapped potential of their people’s strengths.

His latest project, StandOut, is a book and strengths assessment combination that uses a new research methodology to reveal your top two “strength Roles” — your areas of comparative advantage. StandOut goes beyond description to give people practical innovations that fit their strengths, and provide managers with quick insights on how to get the best from each member of their team.

How does he do it? What’s his secret? How has this Buckingham fellow maintained his momentum in spreading his message around the world? We, his crack staff have wondered the same thing, so we set out to analyze it.

Strengths-Based Innovation — Find Your Edge: Win at Work

What does it take for people to stand out at work? How can an organization’s best practices and innovations be shared most effectively? Marcus argues that the future of Learning and Development will focus on delivering to each employee only those innovations and techniques that fit his or her particular strengths.

The Difference between Great Managing and Great Leading

Although many people assume that leadership is simply the next step for those who have proven themselves as managers, Marcus presents compelling evidence that, in key ways, great leaders must do the exact opposite of what the best managers do in order to excel.

What the World’s Best Managers Do Differently

What sets great companies apart? Survey data gathered over decades’ worth of interviews with thousands of managers and workers around the world reveals one simple truth: there are no great companies. Every company is made up of separate teams, and the performance of those teams, no matter how successful the company may be, varies widely. What makes the difference? The manager.

Strengths-Driven Performance

What is the correlation between engagement and performance? Marcus explains the specific lever that most impacts employee engagement: the extent to which they have the opportunity to play to their strengths.

Finding Your Strongest Life

Recent survey findings created headlines about a shocking decline in women’s happiness over the last several decades. While many in the media rushed to conclusions about the impact of the research on feminism and on women today, Marcus avoids easy judgments and examines the causes and the appropriate response to a contemporary crisis for women.