Ngali

Most of us fail to build our lives around individual strengths and talents -- instead, misguided by parents, teachers, managers, and psychology's fascination with pathology, we focus on our weaknesses while our abilities remain in the background. Now this fascinating new audio will help anyone shed new light on what they have to offer the world, by using the StrengthFinder Profile -- Gallup's twenty-five year, multimillion dollar effort to identify the 34 most prevalent human talents through more than 2 million individual psychological profiles. Now, Discover Your Strengths boldly reveals which of the 34 themes represent the listener's most dominant strengths, and subsequently challenges workers, managers, and executives at every level to improve their lives.
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