Marcus Buckingham
The best way to find out whether you're on the right path? Stop looking at the path.Collection: Best
We dream of having a clean house - but who dreams of actually doing the cleaning? We don't have to dream about doing the work, because doing the work is always within our grasp; the dream, in this sense, is to attain the goal without the work.Collection: Dreams
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.Collection: Movies
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.Collection: Strength
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.Collection: Inspirational
Focusing on strengths is the surest way to greater job satisfaction, team performance and organizational excellence.Collection: Jobs
You will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses.Collection: Weakness
The difference between a pebble and a mountain lies in whom you ask to move it.Collection: Inspiring
Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time.Collection: Yield
The Four Keys of Great Managers: When selecting someone, they select for talent ... not simply experience, intelligence or determination. When setting expectations, they define the right outcomes ... not the right steps. When motivating someone, they focus on strengths ... not on weaknesses. and When developing someone, they help him find the right fit ... not simply the next rung on the ladder.Collection: Determination
People leave managers, not companiesCollection: People
As a general rule, people tend to do best what they enjoy doing most.Collection: People
A note of caution: We can never achieve goals that envy sets for us. Looking at your friends and wishing you had what they had is a waste of precious energy. Because we are all unique, what makes another happy may do the opposite for you. That's why advice is nice but often disappointing when heeded.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Strong
Many of us feel stress and get overwhelmed not because we're taking on too much, but because we're taking on too little of what really strengthens us.Collection: Stress
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.Collection: Simple
Innovation and best practices can be sown throughout an organization - but only when they fall on fertile ground.Collection: Fall
Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in.Collection: Trying
The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.Collection: Class
Great leaders rally people to a better future.Collection: People
Clarity is the answer to anxiety. Effective leaders are clear.Collection: Leader
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.Collection: Strong
A strength is what you do that makes you feel strengthened.Collection: Feels
The opposite of a leader isn't a follower. The opposite of a leader is a pessimist.Collection: Opposites
Clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.Collection: Leader
Authenticity is your most precious commodity as a leader.Collection: Leader
Your strongest life is built through a continuous practice of designing moment by moment.Collection: Inspiring
You will learn and grow the least in your areas of weakness.Collection: Inspiring
No idea will work if people don't trust your intentions toward them.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Hero
If you want to be clear, act.Collection: Inspirational
When it comes to exploring your creative side, it's very easy to think of all the reasons you can't do it-you don't have the time, you don't have the money, etc.-but if you are truly passionate about expressing yourself, you can find a way. 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. Take the next step and the next until what you've dreamed about begins to become reality.Collection: Simple
True individuality can be lonely.Collection: Inspiring
I do still get extremely nervous before speeches. My biggest fear is that I'll be standing there in front of hundreds of people and be incapable of talking. I'm afraid that I'll make a complete fool of myself and be unable to go on.Collection: Talking
The time you spend with your best (employees) is, quite simply, your most productive time.Collection: Employee
There are "four keys" to becoming an excellent manager: finding the right fit for employees, focusing on strengths of employees, defining the right results, and hiring for talent - not just knowledge and skills.Collection: Skills
You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure.Collection: Inspiring
There is no shortage of mechanisms by which to measure almost anything.Collection: Shortage
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.Collection: Two
We all want the chance to express the very best of ourselves and to be challenged to keep reaching for more. Our time at work affords us this chance - not the only chance, to be sure, but, given that we're there forty or fifty hours a week, it's one of the best.Collection: Fifty
"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!"Collection: Being Yourself
To get the best coaching outcomes, always have your 1-on-1's on your employee's turf not yours. In your office the truth hides.Collection: Office
Every time you make a rule you take away a choice, and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.Collection: Choices
It's a special person - and personality - who can lead a start-up to soaring success and sustain that success for the long term. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg are star examples.Collection: Jobs
Women have lives that become increasingly empty. They're doing more and feeling less.Collection: Feelings
In most cases, no matter what it is, if you measure it and reward it, people will try to excel at itCollection: People
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.Collection: Oxygen
The corporate world is appallingly bad at capitalizing on the strengths of its people.Collection: People
Every company wants to know how to find and keep highly talented women in the workplace.Collection: Want