Top 108 Quotes & Sayings by Marcus Buckingham

American culture is CEO obsessed. We celebrate the hard-charging heroes and mythologize the iconoclastic visionaries. Those people are important.

Most of my work has been in corporations, studying how you build an organization that helps people to identify and work to their strengths.

I think a good business book has one coherent idea that is richly played out.

Always work hard. Intensity clarifies. It creates not only momentum, but also the pressure you need to feel either friction, or fulfillment.

My career expertise is as a psychometrician - somebody who builds tests to measure personality. Companies would employ me to build interviews to measure the talents of people before they were hired.

In a war, no matter the outcome of a certain skirmish or battle, the winner is the party whose attitudes, behaviors and preoccupations come to dominate the postwar landscape. By this measure, the outcome of the gender wars, if wars they were, is clear: women won.

Americans just love convening. They are a convention-happy country and they love to get together to talk.

CEOs hate variance. It's the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.

Your strongest life is built through a continuous practice of designing moment by moment.

Emphasize your strengths on your resume, in your cover letters and in your interviews. It may sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people simply list everything they've ever done. Convey your passion and link your strengths to measurable results. Employers and interviewers love concrete data.

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.

Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're actually doing every day.

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.

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.

Innovation and best practices can be sown throughout an organization - but only when they fall on fertile ground.

The best way to find out whether you're on the right path? Stop looking at the path.

Men have the choice to arrange their schedules so they can pick up the kids from school twice a week. And they have the choice not to, and then to feel guilty about this choice.

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.

Gen Y is really quite distinct from Gen X; it's really self-involved and very narcissistic - their cameras are filled with pictures of themselves; Facebook, it's about me. It's a generation that's been pampered by their parents and their schools, given prizes for just taking part.

Google and Facebook, each in their own way, have revolutionized the delivery of advertising based on search and social networking, creating a sort of anti-Spam: targeted, relevant ads that a consumer might actually welcome rather than spurn.

You won't find a CEO who doesn't talk about a 'powerful culture' as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time, you'd be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the strength of that culture.

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.

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.

Women have lives that become increasingly empty. They're doing more and feeling less.

Every company wants to know how to find and keep highly talented women in the workplace.

We need to say goodbye to the traditional methodologies of corporate universities.

The true genius of a great manager is his or her ability to individualize. A great manager is one who understands how to trip each person's trigger.

It's odd that I'm a big name in America and not known in Britain.

The corporate world is appallingly bad at capitalizing on the strengths of its people.

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.

Though women begin their lives more fulfilled than men, as they age, they gradually become less happy. Men, in contrast, get happier as they get older.

People buy pads all the time, because they want to write stuff down. We're never going to get away from paper, ever. People like writing; that's why more people are writing more real thank-you notes now - not just to stand out, but because there's something about pen to paper, about holding something cool in your hands.

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.

Life's tricky for women because they have to make more choices than men. And yes, choice is good, but boy, you better be an expert choice-maker.

If we have to know without a doubt that the choices we are making are the perfect ones, we risk never making any choices at all.

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.

The best strategy for building a competitive organization is to help individuals become more of who they are.

Focusing on strengths is the surest way to greater job satisfaction, team performance and organizational excellence.

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.

Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in.

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.

People should be hired "as is" and their managers then help them to develop their individual strengths while completing tasks for which they have the greatest aptitude and in which they have the greatest interest.

As a general rule, people tend to do best what they enjoy doing most.

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.

People leave managers, not companies

You grow most in your areas of greatest strength. You will improve the most, be the most creative, be the most inquisitive, and bounce back the fastest in those areas where you have already shown some natural advantage over everyone else your strengths. This doesn't mean you should ignore your weaknesses. It just means you'll grow most where you're already strong.

Managers are, and should be, totally responsible for recognizing individual strengths (both natural talents and skills), getting those strengths in proper alignment (i.e. in the right "seats"), and then leveraging them.

Discover what you don't like doing and stop doing it.

Authenticity is your most precious commodity as a leader.

You can find energizing moments in each aspect of your life, but to do so you must learn how to catch them, hold on to them, to feel the pull of their weight and allow yourself to follow where they lead.

Define excellence vividly, quantitatively. Paint a picture for your most talented employees of what excellence looks like. Keep everyone pushing and pushing toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve.

A strength is what you do that makes you feel strengthened.

You will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses.

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.

The difference between a pebble and a mountain lies in whom you ask to move it.

The opposite of a leader isn't a follower. The opposite of a leader is a pessimist.

In the minds of great managers, consistent poor performance is not primarily a matter of weakness, stupidity, disobedience, or disrespect. It is a matter of miscasting.

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.

Clarity is the answer to anxiety. Effective leaders are clear.

Great managers know they don't have 10 salespeople working for them. They know they have 10 individuals working for them . A great manager is brilliant at spotting the unique differences that separate each person and then capitalizing on them.