Marcus Buckingham - Subsequent Books

Subsequent Books

• Now, Discover Your Strengths

Strengths became the explicit focus of Buckingham's next book (coauthored with Donald O. Clifton), Now, Discover Your Strengths, which states, "We wrote this book to start a revolution, the strengths revolution" (p. 5). Directly tied to a new Gallup personal assessment tool called "StrengthsFinder", the book presented 34 "talent themes" that characterize individuals. Those who took the assessment received a report detailing which of the 34 talent themes were their top 5 matches. In the book, the authors define a strength as "consistent near perfect performance in an activity."

• The One Thing You Need to Know

Buckingham's first solo book aimed to simplify his business advice down to "one thing" each for managers, leaders, and individual contributors. In contrast to what he would later write, in this book Buckingham contends that the advice to "discover my strengths and cultivate them" is not the most important key to individual success. Rather, he claims that the one thing a person must do in order to thrive is to "discover what you don't like and stop doing it".

• Go Put Your Strengths to Work

In this book Buckingham focused on helping individuals identify their personal strengths. Where Now, Discover Your Strengths had provided a question-and-answer assessment to describe the test taker's strengths in broad categories, Go presented a more individualized approach, asking readers to consciously observe themselves as they engaged in their work and note the specific things that made them feel strong. Settling on a definition of strengths as "those activities that make you feel strong", the book encouraged people to maximize their productivity and personal satisfaction both by cultivating their strengths and by ceasing to do what they don't like (now called "stopping your weaknesses").

• The Truth About You

This book explains the same messages as in previous books, but targeted toward high school and college students.

• Find Your Strongest Life

This book is aimed specifically at women. It was inspired by Buckingham's appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

The book generated the first substantial controversy of his career by taking as its starting point some recent survey data indicating that women had become less happy in the past 40 years. Some prominent feminists including Katha Pollitt and Barbara Ehrenreich criticized the book and a series of articles written by Buckingham in Huffington Post. Pollitt and Ehrenreich argued that the studies were flawed, that the results weren't accurately represented by Buckingham and others, and that other studies showed different results.

Find Your Strongest Life was accompanied by a new personal assessment tool called the Strong Life Test, which categorized women according to 9 "Roles," assigning a "Lead Role" and "Supporting Role" to everyone who took the assessment. The book provided general and situation-specific advice based on a person's specific Roles.