Now, Discover Your Strengths (ISBN 0743201140)

Amazon.com Review:
Effectively managing personnel--as well as one's own behavior--is an extraordinarily complex task that, not surprisingly, has been the subject of countless books touting what each claims is the true path to success. That said, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton's Now, Discover Your Strengths does indeed propose a unique approach: focusing on enhancing people's strengths rather than eliminating their weaknesses. Following up on the coauthors' popular previous book, First, Break All the Rules, it fully describes 34 positive personality themes the two have formulated (such as Achiever, Developer, Learner, and Maximizer) and explains how to build a "strengths-based organization" by capitalizing on the fact that such traits are already present among those within it. Most original and potentially most revealing, however, is a Web-based interactive component that allows readers to complete a questionnaire developed by the Gallup Organization and instantly discover their own top-five inborn talents. This device provides a personalized window into the authors' management philosophy which, coupled with subsequent advice, places their suggestions into the kind of practical context that's missing from most similar tomes. "You can't lead a strengths revolution if you don't know how to find, name and develop your own," write Buckingham and Clifton. Their book encourages such introspection while providing knowledgeable guidance for applying its lessons. --Howard Rothman

WARNING This book is only a manual for a software tool that you might not be able to get:
You'll go page after page wondering when the content is going to start. It starts when you log into a site, using the registration number in the book, and take a test. You cannot use the number if it has been used before, which means that -all- the used books offered here are completely worthless. As far as the idea is concerned, it makes sense to have an outside analysis of what you might be good at, if you suspect that you have some undiscovered talent. But the book is a hoax, in that it is only the minor part of what it promises, and you'll likely spend your money before you find out that you won't receive the major part.

Nice try but falls short:
Well I 'm glad I read the book and took the survey. But the book left me very frustrated and is a very disappointing book. Yeah it's nice to know my strengths but the entire summary is one paragraph of less then two dozen sentences; and three short (as very few sentences) anecdotes for that attribute. This book should be sold to target individuals. The manager's chapter on how to deal with their direct reports is very shallow and it sets the reader up to realize you have to buy a book per person since there are no license purchase abilities to use this book and it's tools as a useful corporate tool. The fact that a manager would have to buy boxes of books is sad. So one has to resort to "creative" marketing to drum up business? Discovery of strengths is just the first step. We, at work, have gone through several stages of a similar process and it took months and the individual sessions and the supervisors and team sessions took hours. So my critique is based on extensive experience of going through several of these type of personality analysis. This is not a do it yourself project for a manager. The authors would serve the public better if they told the reader up front that this is an introduction to this deep topic and that for further comprehension they can be reached for corporate level consultations. Once I entered the web site that was my assessment of this book. That this is nothing more then a shallow carrot to gain more corporate consultation business. I finished reading the book and was very frustrated and angry at how shallow the entire topic is and am frankly surprised at how many fawned over this book. The marketing ploy of having a unique access ID printed on the back of the book is deceptive and very disingenuous at best. I'm sure the author is aware of the "used book" market. So forcing the buyer to buy another one is wrong on so many levels. If this book is as good as you critics rave and the authors claim then one would think that the purchaser should be able to share the new discovery with spouse or friend and spread the new found source of knowledge thus generating greater interest and possibly more business for consultation. Based on the business model, I now see, I regret telling my friends to go out and purchase this book. I will now tell them to not purchase this book and rather to seek other sources to achieve the same goal. This book rates a one star only because of the little new found information gleaned from a verbosely written book that could have been summed up in a pamphlet. Oh yes the reports we got at work from our industrial psychologists were about 15 pages of in-depth analysis of our strengths and weakness. I was expecting deeper insight to each of the attributes and instead discovered a one short paragraph summary of which the computer generated report also regurgitated the same summary as the book and did not provide any in-depth insight at all. I just paid $32 to learn that there is one born every minute and I was another one of those!

Helpful Tool:
A simple notion to emphasize your strengths, but powerfully adaptive with the StrengthsFinder on-line tool.

Gave me clarity to my specific strengths:
After taking survey, the top 5 results gave me clarity to my personal strengths and I have used them to further my career. In addition, I've bought copies for my entire management team to compare individual strengths and how we can be a strength overall to our Company.

Couldn't access the survey:
I purchased this book a couple of weeks ago after hearing glowing reviews from a friend. I also checked out what amazon reviewers had to say before purchasing and was anticipating a valuable learning experience. I skimmed through the book, then decided to take the online survey. But when I entered the code, I was informed that it was no longer valid--had already been used. Now since I bought a new copy from Amazon, I can only assume that somewhere along the line another person knew what to look for and registered that code. Although I will still read the book and probably gain some insight, I was particularly interested in incorporating what I would have learned from the survey. I'm very dissatisfied for the first time in my long association with Amazon.