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Marcus Buckingham

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  • Sales & Marketing
  • Managing & Leading
  • Creative Thinkers & Innovators
  • Choice Authors
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Once you\'ve broken all the rules and launched your career by writing an instant classic management book, what do you do for an encore? If you\'re Marcus Buckingham, you dedicate yourself to understanding what makes world-class managers tick, bottling it, and sharing it with the world. Marcus first conquered the bestseller lists with “First, Break All the Rules.” While the title may imply an iconoclastic streak, his continuing plea for managers to break with tradition has nothing to do with rebellion; instead, he argues, rules must be broken and discarded because they stifle the originality and uniqueness — the strengths — that can enable all of us to achieve our highest performance. Following up on his highly successful debut book, Marcus continued to drive the message that people\'s unique personal strengths are the key to unlocking their potential. As a co-author of “Now, Discover Your Strengths,” he helped create “StrengthsFinder,” the personal assessment tool that gave millions of individuals a new vocabulary to positively describe their ingrained talents, adding the phrase \"Top 5\" to the lexicon of managers and business people around the world (Marcus\'s Top 5, for the record: Futuristic, Context, Focus, Ideation, Intellection).
In addition to refining and reinforcing his message in subsequent books and keynote addresses worldwide, he founded his own company to create tools and training that would help managers and organizations access the untapped potential of their people\'s strengths. His latest project, “StandOut,” is a book and strengths assessment combination that uses a new research methodology to reveal your top two \"strength Roles\" — your areas of comparative advantage. “StandOut” goes beyond description to give people practical innovations that fit their strengths, and provide managers with quick insights on how to get the best from each member of their team.

***CURRENT TOPICS

“Strengths-Based Innovation — Find Your Edge: Win at Work”
What does it take for people to stand out at work? How can an organization\'s best practices and innovations be shared most effectively? Marcus argues that the future of Learning and Development will focus on delivering to each employee only those innovations and techniques that fit his or her particular strengths. Excellence happens all the time in an organization, but it can be tricky to harness this excellence and make it work for you. So often, when companies try to reproduce what their best performers do differently, the result is just another lifeless policy that ends up constraining people instead of freeing them to do their best work. The trick is to help people put innovative ideas into practice without stifling the personal strengths that give them their edge.
In this speech, Marcus discusses a customized best practice delivery system for both managers and employees. Using 9 distinct Roles to identify each person\'s unique combination of strengths, Marcus gives individuals tips and techniques on how to put their particular edge to use. And managers will get lots of raw material to be better coaches based on the specific strengths of their team members. At the end of the speech, you will know how to move beyond the one- size-fits-all approach and find those practices that are best for you.

“The Difference between Great Managing and Great Leading”
Although many people assume that leadership is simply the next step for those who have proven themselves as managers, Marcus presents compelling evidence that, in key ways, great leaders must do the exact opposite of what the best managers do in order to excel. The many facets of great managing and great leading could be detailed endlessly, but Marcus Buckingham draws on a wealth of examples to uncover the single controlling insight that lies at the heart of each. Lose sight of this \"one thing\" and even your best efforts will be diminished or compromised. Success comes to those who remain mindful of the core insight, understand all of its ramifications, and orient their decisions around it. Marcus backs his arguments with authoritative research from a wide variety of sources, including his own data and in-depth interviews with individuals at every level of an organization, from CEOs to hotel maids and stockboys. He cuts through the thicket of often-conflicting possibilities and zeroes in on what matters most, revealing the surprisingly different keys to great managing and great leading.