Now, Discover Your Strengths Book

Average Rating:

The reader must go to a web site and take an assessment test rather early in the book. After the reader takes the test, Buckingham and Clifton work at unraveling old ways of looking at performance and standard practices. For example, they dare to suggest that the paradigm of improving a person's weaknesses as a strategy to implement optimum performance on the job or elsewhere is faulty. You may disagree, and you may find the test useless if you take it. In my instance, the test clearly verfied my areas of talent. So I gave the book five stars, because it's an amazing groundbreaking book - we now have a way to identify and talk about 34 different groups of human talents - and I don't care how Gallup, Buckingham, and Clifton arrived at the results they did if the results are clearly true, as in my case.

Now, Discover Your Strengths doesn't tell you how to find a career based on your top five strengths. It's a very personal decision, and also impractical, given that about 33 million combinations of five exist. Buckingham and Clifton give examples of successful people and what they chose as careers, which utilize some combination of their strengths, and other useful suggestions, such as strategies to mitigate weaknesses.

Highly recommended. I never would have known any of this had someone not suggested I read the book, and now a whole new way of looking at myself and the world is open to me. econ

The authors want to offer companies the language and means to implement a management system that focuses on employee strengths instead of systems that focus, as most now do, on overcoming employee weaknesses. They also want individuals to spend more time developing their talents into strengths and to look at weaknesses as something to manage but not obsess over (great chapter on just how to do that).

You're given a registration code so you can take the strengths index online yourself (only one person per code). Once you're told what your strengths are, don't expect to find out which careers you may best be suited for. The authors admit that it is not their intent to offer career guidance to individuals, but you'll still gain some interesting insights about yourself.

The tone of the book is good-natured and encouraging: "Spontaneous reaction, yearnings, rapid learning, and satisfactions will all help you detect the traces of your talents." One of the most valuable things I read in the book was how often people are reluctant to build on their own strengths because mediocrity and failure are so much less risky. I encourage anyone attracted to this book's ability to present new possibilities for your life to read a copy of WORKING ON YOURSELF DOESN'T WORK by Ariel and Shya Kane. The Kanes are masters in the art of showing people how to transform possibilities undreamt of into everyday realities.