Marcus Buckingham Quotes

I need to reach out to people who work for small to mid-sized companies, and help them identify and apply their strengths at work.

The true genius of a great manager is his or her ability to individualize. A great manager is one who understands how to trip each person's trigger.

In most cases, no matter what it is, if you measure it and reward it, people will try to excel at it

It remains true that great managers recognize individualities and focus on developing strengths rather than weaknesses. Great leaders, in sharp contrast, recognize what is (or could be) shared in common - a vision, a dream, a mission, whatever - and inspire others to join them in the given enterprise.

The fact remains that we have an obligation to discover what we really, really, really want to do (which is probably what we do best) and then do it even better... much better.

When you feel as though you can't do something, the simple antidote is action: Begin doing it. Start the process, even if it's just a simple step, and don't stop at the beginning.

CEOs hate variance. It's the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.

Sustained success means making the greatest possible impact over the longest period of time

Americans just love convening. They are a convention-happy country and they love to get together to talk.

Focusing on strengths is the surest way to greater job satisfaction, team performance and organizational excellence.

The best way to find out whether you're on the right path? Stop looking at the path.

You should know that what wakes me up at night, what gets me running fast in the morning, and, frankly, what prompts me to lose any semblance of my habitual reserve is the conviction that work doesn't have to be this grim. We can do better.

As with all catalysts, the manager's function is to speed up the reaction between two substances, thus creating the desired end product. Specifically, the manager creates performance in each employee by speeding up the reaction between the employee's talent and the company's goals, and between the employee's talent and the customer's needs.

People should be hired "as is" and their managers then help them to develop their individual strengths while completing tasks for which they have the greatest aptitude and in which they have the greatest interest.

You won't find a CEO who doesn't talk about a 'powerful culture' as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time, you'd be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the strength of that culture.

Your strongest life is built through a continuous practice of designing moment by moment.

Convey your passion and link your strengths to measurable results. Employers and interviewers love concrete data.

Too many of the organizations I have observed resemble a farm in Kansas. They have lots of fences and silos as well as a storm cellar.

Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're actually doing every day.

The difference between a pebble and a mountain lies in whom you ask to move it.

Remember the Golden Rule? "Treat people as you would like to be treated." The best managers break the Golden Rule every day. They would say don't treat people as you would like to be treated. This presupposes that everyone breathes the same psychological oxygen as you. For example, if you are competitive, everyone must be similarly competitive. If you like to be praised in public, everyone else must, too. Everyone must share your hatred of micromanagement.

Companies don't have one culture. They have as many as they have supervisors or managers. You want to build a strong culture? Hold every manager accountable for the culture that he or she builds.

What do we know to be important but are unable to measure?

Most of the time, our limitations are self-imposed.

My point is, people really don't change very much.

I think a good business book has one coherent idea that is richly played out.

The secret to living a strong life is right in front of you, calling to you every day. It can be found in your emotional reaction to specific moments in your life.

Clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.

There has to be a way to redirect employee's driving ambition and to channel it more productively. There is. Create heroes in every role. Make every role, performed at excellence, a respected profession.

If you want execution, hail only success. If you want creativity, hail risk, and remain neutral about success.

If we have to know without a doubt that the choices we are making are the perfect ones, we risk never making any choices at all.

As a general rule, people tend to do best what they enjoy doing most.

The opposite of a leader isn't a follower. The opposite of a leader is a pessimist.

Leaders are fascinated by future. You are a leader if and only if, you are restless for change, impatient for progress and deeply dissatisfied with status quo. Because in your head, you can see a better future. The friction between 'what is' and 'what could be' burns you, stirs you up, propels you. This is leadership.

Women have lives that become increasingly empty. They're doing more and feeling less.

Define excellence vividly, quantitatively. Paint a picture for your most talented employees of what excellence looks like. Keep everyone pushing and pushing toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve.

We live with them every day, and they come so easily to us that they cease to be precious.

Born of the impossibly varied options we have to amuse ourselves, cutting-edge companies are finding innovative ways to tailor our entertainment choices to who we are, relieving us of the burden of finding the diamond in the rough of 500 TV channels or thousands of movies and music albums released every year.

Gen Y is really quite distinct from Gen X; it's really self-involved and very narcissistic - their cameras are filled with pictures of themselves; Facebook, it's about me. It's a generation that's been pampered by their parents and their schools, given prizes for just taking part.

You will learn and grow the least in your areas of weakness.

You shouldn't take pride in your natural talents any more than you should take pride in your sex, your race or color of your hair

Teach your children how to identify their own strengths and challenge them to contribute these strengths to others.

In a war, no matter the outcome of a certain skirmish or battle, the winner is the party whose attitudes, behaviors and preoccupations come to dominate the postwar landscape. By this measure, the outcome of the gender wars, if wars they were, is clear: women won.

Strengths are not activities you're good at, they're activities that strengthen you. A strength is an activity that before you're doing it you look forward to doing it; while you're doing it, time goes by quickly and you can concentrate; after you've done it, it seems to fulfill a need of yours.

Getting after this terrible, avoidable waste of human potentiality is what gets me out of bed every morning.

Life's tricky for women because they have to make more choices than men. And yes, choice is good, but boy, you better be an expert choice-maker.

Discover what you don't like doing and stop doing it.

"Freedom, individualism, authenticity and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: Sustained success comes only when you take what's unique about you and figure out how to make it useful!"