Marcus Buckingham

OK
About Marcus Buckingham
Marcus Buckingham is a global researcher and the world’s authority on what the most effective leaders and highest-performing people do differently. He is the New York Times best-selling author of two of the most popular business books of all time, First, Break All the Rules, and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Marcus’ 2019 Harvard Business Review cover article, "The Feedback Fallacy," was recently selected by HBR as one of the most influential articles of the last 100 years. Marcus is the creator of the StandOut strengths assessment and the co-creator of StrengthsFinder - his strengths assessments have been completed by over 25 million people worldwide.
Building on two decades of experience as a Senior Researcher at The Gallup Organization, he leveraged his data-based discoveries to build a $100 million tech company focused on helping people find and contribute their strengths at work. Beginning with First, Break All the Rules, and continuing through his latest book Love and Work (Harvard Business Review Publishing, April 5th, 2022) he is known for using reliable psychometric data to get to the core of what drives engagement, resilience, and productivity. He currently guides the research agenda of the ADP Research Institute as Head of People + Performance.
Customers Also Bought Items By
Author updates
Books By Marcus Buckingham
A Wall Street Journal bestseller
World-renowned researcher and New York Times bestselling author Marcus Buckingham helps us discover where we're at our best—both at work and in life.
You've long been told to "Do what you love." Sounds simple, but the real challenge is how to do this in a world not set up to help you. Most of us actually don't know the real truth of what we love—what engages us and makes us thrive—and our workplaces, jobs, schools, even our parents, are focused instead on making us conform. Sadly, no person or system is dedicated to discovering the crucial intersection between what you love to do and how you contribute it to others.
In this eye-opening, uplifting book, Buckingham shows you how to break free from this conformity—how to decode your own loves, turn them into their most powerful expression, and do the same for those you lead and those you love.
How can you use love to reveal your unique gifts?
How can you pinpoint what makes you stand out from anyone else?
How can you choose roles in which you'll excel?
Love and Work unlocks answers to these questions and others, so you can:
- Choose the right role on the team.
- Describe yourself compellingly in job interviews.
- Mold your existing role so that it calls upon the very best of you.
- Position yourself as a leader in such a way that your followers quickly come to trust in you.
- Make lasting change for your team, your company, your family, or your students.
Love, the most powerful of human emotions, the source of all creativity, collaboration, insight, and excellence, has been systematically drained from our lives—our work, teams, and classrooms.
It's time we brought love back in.
Love and Work shows you how.
Included with this re-release of First, Break All the Rules: updated meta-analytic research and access to the CliftonStrengths assessment, which reveals people’s top themes of talent.
What separates the greatest managers from all the rest?
They actually have vastly different styles and backgrounds. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They don’t hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They don’t believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything they set their mind to. They don’t try to help people overcome their weaknesses. And, yes, they even play favorites.
In this longtime management bestseller, Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its massive in-depth study of great managers. Some were in leadership positions. Others were front-line supervisors. Some were in Fortune 500 companies; others were key players in small, entrepreneurial firms. Whatever their circumstances, the managers who ultimately became the focus of Gallup’s research were those who excelled at turning each individual employee’s talent into high performance.
Gallup has found that the front-line manager is the key to attracting and retaining talented employees. This book explains how the best managers select an employee for talent rather than for skills or experience, set expectations, build on each person’s unique strengths rather than trying to fix their weaknesses, and get the best performance out of their teams.
And perhaps most important, Gallup’s research produced the 12 simple statements that distinguish the strongest departments of a company from all the rest. First, Break All the Rules is the first book to present this essential measuring stick and to prove the link between employee opinions and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction and the rate of turnover.
First, Break All the Rules presents vital performance and career lessons for managers at every level — and best of all, shows you how to apply them to your own situation.
Forget what you know about the world of work
You crave feedback. Your organization's culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. Your competencies should be measured and your weaknesses shored up. Leadership is a thing.
These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they're lies. As strengths guru and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham and Cisco Leadership and Team Intelligence head Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies--distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking--that we encounter every time we show up for work. Nine lies, to be exact. They cause dysfunction and frustration, ultimately resulting in workplaces that are a pale shadow of what they could be.
But there are those who can get past the lies and discover what's real. These freethinking leaders recognize the power and beauty of our individual uniqueness. They know that emergent patterns are more valuable than received wisdom and that evidence is more powerful than dogma.
With engaging stories and incisive analysis, the authors reveal the essential truths that such freethinking leaders will recognize immediately: that it is the strength and cohesiveness of your team, not your company's culture, that matter most; that we should focus less on top-down planning and more on giving our people reliable, real-time intelligence; that rather than trying to align people's goals we should strive to align people's sense of purpose and meaning; that people don't want constant feedback, they want helpful attention.
This is the real world of work, as it is and as it should be. Nine Lies About Work reveals the few core truths that will help you show just how good you are to those who truly rely on you.
With over 1.6 million copies of First, Break All the Rules (co-authored with Curt Coffman) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (co-authored with Donald O. Clifton) in print, Cambridge-educated Buckingham is considered one of the most respected business authorities on the subject of management and leadership in the world. With The One Thing You Need to Know, he gives readers an invaluable course in outstanding achievement -- a guide to capturing the essence of the three most fundamental areas of professional activity.
Great managing, leading, and career success -- Buckingham draws on a wealth of applicable examples to reveal that a controlling insight lies at the heart of the three. Lose sight of this "one thing" and even the best efforts will be diminished or compromised. Readers will be eager to discover the surprisingly different answers to each of these rich and complex subjects. Each could be explained endlessly to detail their many facets, but Buckingham's great gift is his ability to cut through the mass of often-conflicting agendas and zero in on what matters most, without ever oversimplifying. As he observes, success comes to those who remain mindful of the core insight, understand all of its ramifications, and orient their decisions around it. Buckingham backs his arguments with authoritative research from a wide variety of sources, including his own research data and in-depth interviews with individuals at every level of an organization, from CEO's to hotel maids and stockboys.
In every way a groundbreaking book, The One Thing You Need to Know offers crucial performance and career lessons for business people at all career stages.
In the years since the publication of First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, millions have come to the simple but powerful realization that to get the most out of people, you must build on their strengths. And yet, as Marcus Buckingham astutely points out, though the strengths-based approach is now conventional wisdom, the tools and systems inside organizationsperformance appraisals, training programs, and succession planning systemsremain stubbornly remedial and exclusively focused on measuring skills, finding gaps, and attempting to plug them. It’s a crisis for individuals and organizations, with management ideas and everyday practice utterly out of sync.
That’s about to change. StandOut 2.0 is a revolutionary book and tool that enables you to identify your strengths, and those of your team, and act on them. The original edition of StandOut provided top-notch insights from one of the world’s foremost authorities on strengths, as well as access to a powerful, cutting-edge online assessment tool. StandOut 2.0 also includes the assessment and a robust report on your most dominant strengths. The report is easily exported so you can use it to present the very best of yourself to your team and your company.
StandOut 2.0 is your indispensable guide for building on your strengths to further your careerand help your team and organization win.
Read Find Your Strongest Life and discover:
- How to make the most of the role you were born to play
- How to get others to understand who you really are
- The successful strategies of other women like you
Check out what women are already saying about Find Your Strongest Life.
Brooke: When I read the “Ten Myths” that opened the book, I was completely hooked. The statistics are interesting and fresh. I also related to the problem that sets up the book: "Which parts of me should I cut out?" As I read, I could see myself in the Marcus’s big-picture analysis and statistics. The early part of the book made me anticipate a breakthrough. And Marcus delivered. Overall, he explains a woman's dilemma perfectly . . . in fresh terms with a unique spin. The main ideas in each chapter were so engaging. Chapter 6 in particular is worth the price of the book. I have already started looking for strong moments in my life, and I want to tell every woman I know to do the same. It is definitely life-changing.
Rebecca: It was really good. It was awesome. And to be honest, perfect timing for my life. I'm REALLY in that place. I can't tell you how badly I've been depressed for the last several months just trying to figure out what to do differently so I'm not so miserable. On one hand, I'm grateful I have a job still. I have a mortgage and bills and all that. But on the other hand...I can't continue to work at a job that gets me nowhere, is not rewarding, not challenging, and mentally drains me. I really have started avoiding my family because I've become so rude and snippy. It's a bad cycle. BUT...God willing this year (sooner than later) I will be able to put this behind me and do what I love :) Even if it's making half as much money. Thanks for thinking of me to read this. I needed it!
Delaney: I was on a plane as I finished reading the manuscript. I was going to be with my daughter who is a law student. As I finished the pages, Marcus helped me gain a new understanding of myself that stood out like a neon sign: I am the person who helps others build infrastructure, get through situations ,and set everything right. It goes beyond motherhood. I am an event planner by birth. I see big pictures and the components necessary to get from vision to execution. The content helped me to reframe my own thinking. Very helpful. I’m excited to take the online test and see which role I'm born to play.
Jennifer: As a working mother, I found the concept of the book fascinating. There are daily struggles of trying to balance being the perfect wife, mother, and employee, and the book helped me truly understand how to navigate all those demands.
Five years' worth of management wisdom, all in one place.
Get the latest, most significant thinking from the pages of Harvard Business Review in 5 Years of Must Reads: 2021 Edition. Every year, HBR editors examine the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past twelve months to select the definitive articles that have provoked the most conversation, the most inspiration, and the most change. From how you can lead with authenticity by moving past your comfort zone, to understanding how blockchain will affect your industry, to creating a workplace where gender equity can thrive, the articles in this five-book collection will help you manage your daily challenges and meet the changing competitive landscape head-on.
Books in the HBR 10 Must Reads series offer essential reading selected from the pages of Harvard Business Review on topics critical to the success of every manager. Each book is packed with advice and inspiration from leading experts such as Clayton Christensen, Michael Porter, W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne, Herminia Ibarra, Marcus Buckingham, Joan C. Williams, Roger Martin, Adam Grant, and Katrina Lake. Company examples range from Pepsico, DHL, and Deloitte to Alibaba, Adobe, and Stitch Fix. 5 Years of Must Reads: 2021 Edition brings the most current and important business conversations to your fingertips.