Marcus Buckingham
2011 Ranking: #8
Shortlisted: 2011 Thinkers50 Leadership Award
Marcus Buckingham is best known for his work on “strengths” – the idea that it is more productive to focus on a person's strengths rather than their weaknesses. He is the founder and CEO of the eponymous Marcus Buckingham Company.
Buckingham is the author or co-author of seven bestselling books. In First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently (1999), he argues that rules suppress positive attributes that boost performance, such as originality. The book was based on 88,000 interviews with managers carried out by the polling company Gallup.
Subsequent books include Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001), and Go Put Your Strengths to Work (2007), and he has also created the StrengthsFinder personal assessment tool. Success, according to Buckingham, comes from embracing what is unique about us as individuals and putting it to work. His other books include The One Thing You Need to Know (2005) and The Truth About You: Your Secret to Success (2008).
His latest book, StandOut, (2011) is published with an online personal assessment, to help readers identify their top "strength roles" which, when combined, reveal their "edge" as a leader.
