Strengthsfinder 2.0: From the Author of the Bestseller Wellbeing [Hardcover]

This book has a unique code that lets you do a 30-minute talent test on their web site. After, just print the report to have your top 5 talents, with recommandations to further develop your talents. You'll want to, then, consult the book to get more info. about your own talents. At work, we decided to all get this book, do the test, (including our boss), and we each created our yearly professional development plan based on our unique talents rather than our weaknesses. (This exercise can be done with or without a consultant). So much more motivational !

This books is one of the most impact full business books I've ever come across. Since I read it my personal business focus has not been the same.

Strengths Finder is a life-changing questionnaire and the answer to "who am I and what should I do" all wrapped into one resource. The book describes 37 strength "themes" that outline in great detail 37 types of strengths.

Natasha's 4 Favourite Things about the Book:

1. Each book comes with a personalized code that you use to access an online questionnaire. The quiz was thorough and complete and very thought provoking.

2. Each strength theme is amazingly detailed with suggestions for how to best use this particular gifting. I got so much clarity about how to brand myself after reading my top 5 themes.

3. Strength Finder 2.0 is not a personality test ' it is a "test" explaining what are your core capabilities.

4. It gives you total emotional freedom because you see in type who you are and just as importantly, who you are not.

If you've ever asked yourself the question "what am I great at? What should I be doing with my life?" Then this is the book for you.

You will probably find no head-snapping revelations in this book if you have already read Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman's First, Break All the Rules and/or Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton's Now, Discover Your Strengths (especially the latter). Nor does Tom Rath claim to offer any. Rather, this is a new and upgraded edition of the Gallup organization's previous online test (StrengthsFinder 1.0) that enables those who take it to identify and measure their talents relative to "more than 5,000 new personalized Strengths Insights that we have discovered in recent years."

In Rath's two previously published books, How Full Is Your Bucket? co-authored with Donald O. Clifton and Vital Friends, he shares his own reactions to an abundance of research data which reveals the importance of two separate but related forces which have profound impact on the workplace: getting strengths in alignment with work to be done and then developing them even more with strategic delegation and close supervision.

What we have in this book, Strengths Finder 2.0, is a wealth of new research material that Rath examines with exceptional precision and uncommon eloquence. I strongly encourage each reader to take full advantage of the self-diagnostic opportunities that both Rath and the Gallup organization generously offer. Of course, once various exercises are completed, a significant challenge remains: to take effective and productive action to apply what has been learned. It is helpful to be aware of what Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton so aptly characterize as the "knowing-doing" and "doing-knowing" gaps. It is also helpful to recall Peter Drucker's observation more than 40 years ago: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."

Presumably Rath agrees that, more often than not, the Yoda is right: "Do or do not. There is no try."