Now, Discover Your Strengths
by Donald O. Clifton, Marcus Buckingham
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Book Reviews of Now, Discover Your Strengths
Book Review: Great Subjective Psychology with Weak Statistical Analysis
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a great compendium of 34 positive business-related talents... An online test analyzes your immediate inclinations (strongly agree, agree or neutral) on 180 questions. Your answers determine your generalized reactions in life. A tendency to respond consistently in a certain way points toward your personal strengths (a euphemism here to mean your 'proclivities'). Your bottom ranked areas are called non-talents that will never exist and should not really be concentrated on. This is the 'revolution' that is presented.
Employees are to be hired for positions based on heavy-weighted attention to these talents (instead of the traditional weighting on experience and skills). Managers are to manage each employee individually according to his/her specific tested talents.
This book masks much of the precepts of this wild new theory by couching it throughout the book in traditional and conventional Harvard Business School type theory. Solid advice is given on measuring employees performance objectively and through survey. Weaknesses... should be addressed when they interfere with successful action (common sense).
Too much direct association is made with talents, satisfaction, and willingness. The book assumes these all go hand in hand... period. It is hard-wired in our brains. It doesn't ever address the fact that subject A's 10th place talent may be greater than subject B's 1st talent. It doesn't take into account the breadth of one's various talents - only the top five. Our hobbies that we love and enjoy... Are we all that talented in them?
That said, this is a great tool to discover more about yourself and rend you from some of your possible self-delusions, realizing that it is OK to be strong in some areas, but not in 'every' area. Maybe you will get a deeper insight into what you 'love' that will change your life.
Too heavy on conclusions, too heavy a concentration only on strengths (subjective business proclivities) and an almost ambivalence concerning weaknesses, no sense of balance, playing loose with statistics but heavy with the lives affected... Albeit insightful and offers possibilites into the mitigation of the sometimes stressful business world on the human experience. Quality and thought-provoking interview and six-month review questions.
Four Stars
Book Review: good ideas - execution leaves mixed feelings
Summary: 3 Stars
I'm happy a book makes it so high on the bestseller list explaining to people that they are better off focusing on strengths (both for themselves, as for the organizations they work for). At jobEQ.com, we have been "educating" our customers to do the same, and as the authors of this book acknowledge, only 25 to 40% of persons will grasp that notion immediately. I also appreciate that the authors explain how a manager can use the knowledge of these strengths (or themes) to manage their staff better.If the authors would write a second edition, there are some things that I would recommend them to address. My first remark is linked to the writing style: this book is written in an "imperative" form: it contains a lot of sentences with "you need to do this", "you should do that", ... This style tends to put of people, risking that they miss the message. Secondly, they have WRONG, OUTDATED notion of the brain: contrary to what people used to say 5 to 10 years ago, the good news of recent research is that brain cells that die of ARE replaced (even if you get older) and you remain capable of forming new connections between brain cells (maybe unless you get a disease, such as Parkinson, ...). Thirdly: the book does not really address what kind of job would be good for you.
Finally some feedback about the test: don't take it BEFORE you read chapter 3 in the book - at least then you will understand how they built it. Still, I have my doubts about the way it is built. Using the amount of interviews as a "proof of credibility" didn't impress me: Often for scientific purposes, it doesn't matter much if you did 5.000 or a million interviews - all that matters is that you can validate the test. Also, I know that most people probably have MORE than 5 strengths, which is just an ARBITRARY number Gallup chose. Given the importance they address to these 5 strengths, just imagine what opportunities you will miss by ignoring these 2 other strengths. I would rather prefer to get a FULL picture, getting all my strengths and weaknesses, and having this information ordered from strongest to weakest.
Patrick E.C. Merlevede - Co-author of "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence"
Book Review: A good point about strengths
Summary: 4 Stars
There were many things I liked about this book and some that I found difficult. Buckingham's theme of focusing on one's strengths rather than weaknesses (as so many development programs and activities do) is an excellent one. He also provides a very good strategy for doing this:
1. How to distinguish your natural talents
2. Having a system to identify your dominant talents
3. Having a common language to describe your talents.
Let's start with the first - "talents". In talents, Buckingham distinguishes between what is innate and what can be acquired through practice. He categorises one's expertise into talents, knowledge and skills and makes the quite valid point that a person can improve performance in an area through practice and developing knowledge and skills. However, the extent to which overall performance (or expertise) can be enhanced is limited to the degree of innate talent. I liken this innate talent to aptitude.
The system to identify one's natural talents is based on the StrengthsFinder Profile. This profile is completed on line using a code provided with the purchase of the book. When I tried to log in using my code I was told that I had to register at one of these sites:
* StrengthsQuest
* Vital Friends
* StrengthsExplorer
* Bucket Book
* Gallup Online
As I object to having to do this, it is probably unfair of me to comment on this aspect of the book other than to say that I think the idea of a system such as a questionnaire to identify one's talents is a good one.
The final aspect a "common language" is fully outlined in the 34 themes of StrengthsFinder. Two points I would make about these. Firstly, from the text I think it would be hard to identify in others these 34 patterns. I also found the description of these to be a little light on.
On balance, this book is worthy of note for its emphasis on strengths and in awakening us to the notion of "natural talents" - worthy of a read for this point. Choose yourself whether you want to take the test.
Bob Selden, author What To Do When You Become The Boss: How new managers become successful managers
Book Review: Discover Your Strengths...Then Exploit Others'
Summary: 3 Stars
This is almost a really good book. For all the publicity and praise, there is a uniquely profound and empowering Message here: Lose your inferiority complex; our "Performance" hang-ups are too often about trying to function like everyone else, instead of capitalizing on our own individual idiosyncrasies. Harnessing our intrinsic talents is the most obvious way to contribute something unique to our work and to our lives. Unfortunately, this message gets buried underneath the same tired Nu-Business tripe which assumes that productivity in the workplace is the ultimate human endeavor. It seems as though the authors' tunnel vision blinded them in the face of a grand revelation, and not seeing the potential brillance inherent in this book's premise, felt compelled to water it down with a heavy prescription of corporate "relevance".
Witness the uncomfortable third section of the book, where the authors instruct us, after discovering our own strengths, in the art of manipulating the particular strengths of our co-workers. Apparently if you got the impression that we're locating our talents and the talents of others in order to be happy and self-fulfilled, you missed the real point...THE BOTTOM LINE OF COURSE! The authors' attempts to pretend that some of these skills can be productively expressed in the Office, like Ideation and Intellection, are great for a laugh..."Give this individual time to sit and think...Listen to their 'ideas'...Dupe them into thinking their job makes any use whatsoever of their creativity...etc." Better advice would be for the employer to cut a severance check for their Ideationist and buy them a plane ticket for New York or Paris.
To wrap things up, it's a quick read, got a good central premise, and should be most useful for the Reader's Digest/"Oh Boy Now I'll Get That Promotion!" set. For everyone else i'd recommend that you take to heart the point being made by this book...and put the $17 bucks towards something actually useful for developing your strengths. And keep an eye out for employers acting funny and talking about cultivating the uniqueness inherent in everyone. It's still the same game for them...just new rules.
Book Review: Assessment is great, book is mediocre
Summary: 3 Stars
"Concentrate on talents, not weaknesses" is a major takeaway the authors' first book, First, Break All The Rules.Now, Discover Your Strengths deepens that message with a web-based inventory to identify basic talents. My inventory didn't reveal any surprising talents. Rather, it took personality traits so pervasive that I wouldn't even have identified them as strengths and brought them to my attention. I've already been able to use the information to understand my successes and failures in work and personal lives, and am using it to help craft my future direction.
The book itself is quite shallow. It gives you one page of detail on each of the major strengths, and one page of bullet points on "how to manage someone with this strength." There's disappointingly little on how the strengths impact other relationships. How do I work with my BOSS? How do I work with my peers? How do I make my relationship work? How do I find someone with complementary talents (how do I figure out which other talents I *want* to work with?)
Though the authors say that it's the interaction between different strengths that create the richness, they don't spend much time delving into how strengths combine beyond a couple cursory examples. Certainly in my case, it's been the interaction between my strengths that has been most powerful.
The strengths are truly pervasive, and the authors limit their discussion to a shallow discussion and narrow application.
The book seems mainly an excuse to market the web-based inventory, which you're allowed to take only ONCE for each copy of the book you buy. You can't even buy more licenses without buying the book (a nice little trick to push book sales and probably get the book listed as a best-seller, when in fact all people want is the web-based inventory).
So while I'd love to loan the book to a friend, or buy licenses to have my clients take the inventory, the need to structure it all as the purchase of dozens of books makes the whole venture seem much less worthwhile.
The inventory gets 5 stars from me, the book gets two stars, and the marketing trick of one survey per book gets a whopping ZERO stars.