The SQUEEZE: Honing your strengths should be both professional and academic goals for achieving maximum success. Marcus Buckingham suggests that people should be able to cultivate and apply their strengths to their career using a step-by-step tool that allows individuals to take control of their assets, rewrite their job description, and kick-start a strengths revolution. In Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Buckingham provides a road map that aims to help managers learn and teach themselves how to approach work by emphasizing their personal strengths. Buckingham’s book appeals to both the business manager and the employee tasked with the goal of developing habit-forming actions that will later produce long-term success. Buckingham believes that it is important to discern and measure one’s strengths and capitalize on their strengths; and monitor their weaknesses, utilizing them to convert failure into victory. Buckingham’s book is a must-read for anyone who wants to communicate their strengths at an optimal level.

Notable Endorsement: “Although everyone will not agree with all the elements of Buckingham's approach, he offers valuable insight into maximizing employees' strengths rather than the more common focus on weaknesses and failure.”-- Mary Whaley, American Library Association

Common Q’s Answered by this Book:

• What is the link between communicating your strengths and managing your weaknesses?
• How can teaching “strengths-building” contribute to both personal and professional successes?
• What are the 6 steps to achieving outstanding performance and how do they help to develop habit-forming techniques?

About the Author: Marcus Buckingham conducted research for 17 years at the Gallup Organization. Buckingham conducted research on the world’s best leaders and their respective workplaces. Buckingham’s work with Gallup forms the basis of many of his bestselling books titled First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Best Managers Do Differently and Now, Discover Your Strengths, both of which Buckingham served as the co-author. Buckingham founded his own company, TMBC; the purpose of the company is to provide strengths-based consulting, management training, and e-learning. To date, Buckingham has spread the strengths message in keynote addresses to over 250,000 people around the globe. Buckingham completed a master’ degree in social and political science from Cambridge University and he is a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Leadership and Management.

Book Vitals:

Publisher: Free Press (December 2010)