Now, Discover Your Strengths

The book is fascinating. The concept of locating and concentrating on using strengths (your own and your employees') rather than fixing their weaknesses is well layed out.

Strengths are talents, innate or developed tendencies and abilities which have, through experience, education or training been honed to a level placing the possessor in rarified air in this regard.

The book and tape give you a code which serves as a password to take an online test to discover your top 5 strengths of 34 identified by the Gallup Organization. I would guess three will not really surprise you, two will send you diving back into the book to read more about them.

By the way, my wife called the number on the StrengthFinders Website and explained that I bought the book and she, too, would like to take the test. The phone representative gave her a new code, and she took the test.

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The Talents and Strengths share similarities to some of the elements of the "Inner Self" of "Follow your Bliss" or the "Authentic Self" of Dr. Phil McGraw's "Self Matters." When you find yourself learning a skill with remarkable ease and speed, or doing all the recommended reading in a course during the first week, these are clues. You likely have an affinity for the subject.

Others might be a burning desire to please, to help, to inform, to relate and more.

The business goal is to put the person with the strength in the position that uses it. Then to use the techniques of Great Managers to guide them to brilliance. I recommend both "First" and "Now."


Micro$oft Meets the Gall-up Organization   July 21, 2004
 22 out of 30 found this review helpful

Every other book on personality that I am aware of has the assessment contained right within the book's pages. The author's of "Now, Discover Your Strengths," however, have come up with a new bookselling scheme. To take the assessment one must use a unique keycode printed on the inside cover of the book's jacket to access a website. The code is good for only one assessment, meaning one book per person (unless you personally file a complaint, I understand)--and not even that, but one assessment per person. Whether "Now, Discover Your Strengths" adds to our body of personality assessment is certainly debatable. Whether it takes greed to a new level is certainly not. My opinion is that it is best to stick with a book not so marred--an "open source" book, we could say.


A truism, streteched to book length.   April 27, 2007
 22 out of 25 found this review helpful

Having read the many positive reviews on this book, as well as the slick high-production-value promotional collateral put out by it's authors and publisher, I hoped for something that would really help me identify and conceptualize how I could best/better apply my inherent talents and personality tendencies in the real world.

I knew I was in trouble right away when the book justified it's thesis not by scientific experiment and data, but rather by vague references to polling (the authors are employees of, or otherwise tied in with the Gallup polling organization) and anecdotal assertions about celebrities like Warren Buffet and Colin Powell.

IF you MUST know what this book actually says, I can save you the time and money required to buy and read the book by conveying it's content in one sentence: It's important to consider and apply your inherent personality traits to maximize your career success. The book is nothing but a book-length repetition of this same message. The proof it vaguely offers to back up this intuitive "truistic" assertion is shallow and fluffy. Most disappointingly, that is all they wrote.

The "personality test" is a great selling gimmick, but the information it returns reminds me of a horoscope or a fortune cookie. It is vague, and general and difficult to relate to any particular practice, nor does the book offer practical means to turn these purported traits into practical beneficial action. If you're trying to decide whether to, say, stay on as a used car salesman, or retreat to some hermitage to write your magnum opus, this book will be of no practical help. It just repeats the same message over and over, page after page after chapter after chapter. Fluffity, fluff, fluff, fluff.

I must admit that I did get ONE practical idea from this fluffball book: Apparently anyone can make a mint by taking some specious bromide, e.g. "Doing whatever you want is good for you", and stretch it into a couple hundred pages of baseless repetitive assertion of that same idea, and have it lapped up by folks willing to pay a good buck to hear what they want to hear.