Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Buy "First, Break All the Rules" and forget this book.
I read "First, Break All the Rules" and found its advice sound and useful. The key finding is that the best managers work hard to understand what their employees true *talents* are and then shape the job to allow the employee to perform to their maximum. It doesn't pay to focus on people's weaknesses; focus on their strengths. The message to the individual is the same, find your talent and grow it rather than spend all of your time on your weaknesses. Unfortunately, "Now, Discover Your Strengths" makes the same point but without all the loads of useful management advice. "Discover" has you take a web based quiz to find your top 5 strengths. What if you have more than 5 strengths? Too bad, for you won't be told how you scored on the other strengths. Does "Discover" help you discover that you should focus on your artistic or writing talents? NO. Your talents in this book are "Deliberative" or "Woo" or "Context". Basically, if you want to get a take on the way you approach life and work, then this book may help you and tell you how to get your manager to treat you, but it won't find your *talents*. I fully recommend reading the first book and thinking hard about what you do well at and enjoy doing. Save your money and don't buy this book. I see this book as an attempt by Gallup to position themselves as an integral part of the review process at major corporations and make money from every employee taking the quiz. This wouldn't be a bad thing for employees, but managers and you'd be better served by the first book by itself. I found the quiz a bit confusing and marked an awful lot of the questions with "no preference". After reading the book, I wanted to take the quiz again (as the book implies you can), but Gallup *refuses* to allow you to take the quiz more than once. This means that your spouse or friend that you loan the book to won't be able to take the test until they fork over money for a new copy of the book. If you get a used or a returned copy, I hope the previous owner didn't take the test and then return the book!
Rating:  - Nothing new
While the Gallup organization is well known for it's polling abilities, and their previous book, "First Break all the Rules" is a respected management tool, it appears the authors felt it was time to write another book, whether or not they had enough new material or not. The basic premise is that we all have strengths and we should find those, capitalize on those and manage around our weaknesses. A reasonable message, and one that is pretty well covered in the first 15-20 pages. The rest of the book is filler to expand the book to 260 pages. After all, who would pay a list price of US$28 for a 20 page booklet? There are other management books out there that are far superior. Pass on this one.
Rating: - Interesting Approach
"Discover Your Strengths" is an easy to read review of the work the Gallup Organization has done in studying and defining talent, the natural tendency to perform with excellence in certain situations. The book does a great job of explaining the approach and methodology used to discover individual talents and how they become strengths (with knowledge and skill) and it does a good job of defining the 34 strengths they isolated after interviewing over 2 million people whose performance was identified as excellent. The authors want to offer companies the language and means to implement a management system that focuses on employee strengths instead of systems that focus, as most now do, on overcoming employee weaknesses. They also want individuals to spend more time developing their talents into strengths and to look at weaknesses as something to manage but not obsess over (great chapter on just how to do that). You're given a registration code so you can take the strengths index online yourself (only one person per code). Once you're told what your strengths are, don't expect to find out which careers you may best be suited for. The authors admit that it is not their intent to offer career guidance to individuals, but you'll still gain some interesting insights about yourself.
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