ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Marcus Buckingham
Founder of the Strengths Revolution, Researcher of People + Performance, Best-Selling Author
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 creates high performance on teams, learning what HR systems accelerate – or hinder –that performance, and revolutionizing the world of work as we know it.
Marcus first conquered the bestseller lists in 1999 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. The goal is to provide team leaders with the insights and tools they need to turn talent into performance and drive the organization toward greater success and productivity.
The definitive treatment of strengths in the workplace can be found in his best-selling books: First, Break All the Rules (coauthored with Curt Coffman; Simon & Schuster, 1999); Now, Discover Your Strengths (coauthored with Donald O. Clifton; The Free Press, 2001); The One Thing You Need to Know (The Free Press, 2005); Go Put Your Strengths To Work (The Free Press, 2007); The Truth About You (Thomas Nelson, 2008) Find Your Strongest Life (Thomas Nelson, 2009), StandOut (Thomas Nelson, 2011), and StandOut 2.0 (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015). His latest book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Publishing, 2019) takes an in-depth look at the lies that pervade our workplaces and the core truths that will help us change it for the better.
As an internationally renowned thought leader and business expert, Marcus has been the subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, Fortune, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal and has appeared on numerous television programs, including “Larry King Live,” “The Today Show” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” He is routinely lauded by such corporations as Toyota, Facebook, lululemon, Coca-Cola, Box, Master Foods, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, and Disney as an invaluable resource in informing, challenging, mentoring and inspiring people to find their strengths and sustain long-lasting personal success. He now leads People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute and remains CEO The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC).
Ashley Goodall
Senior Vice President of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco
Ashley Goodall is an executive, leadership expert, and author, and has spent his career exploring large organizations from the inside. He looks for the lessons from the real world that help people and teams thrive, and that make work a more human place for all of the humans in it.
His first experiences of teams and leadership were as a student musician and conductor. He was fascinated by the unspoken understanding between people playing together and carried this fascination into the corporate world. He currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Leadership and Team Intelligence (LTI) at Cisco, a new organization he has built to focus entirely on serving teams and team leaders, and which aims to reveal the answers to some of the most challenging questions about work. What is special about the best teams? Why do we follow one leader and not another? How can we make more teams like our best teams, and more leaders like our best leaders?
The new approaches he has pioneered address everything from performance management, to feedback, to team activation technology, to real-time team intelligence, to social network mapping, to strengths-based leadership—and together these challenge much of the conventional wisdom of work today.
Ashley is the co-author, with Marcus Buckingham, of Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, April 2019), and of two cover stories in the Harvard Business Review: The Feedback Fallacy, (March/April 2019), and Reinventing Performance Management, (April 2015).