Marcus Buckingham

There has to be a way to redirect employee's driving ambition and to channel it more productively. There is. Create heroes in every role. Make every role, performed at excellence, a respected profession.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Our talents come so easily to use that we acquire a false sense of security: Doesn't everyone see the world as I do? Doesn't everyone feel a sense of impatience to get this project started? Doesn't everyone want to avoid conflict and find the common ground? Can't everyone see the obstacles lying in wait if we proceed down this path? Our talents feel so natural to us that they seem to be common sense.

The greatest managers in the world do not have much in common. But despite their differences, these great managers do share one thing: Before they do anything else, they first break all the rules of conventional wisdom.

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.

Forcing your employees to follow required steps only prevents customer dissatisfaction. If your goal is truly to satisfy, to create advocates, then the step-by-step approach alone cannot get you there. Instead, you must select employees who have the talent to listen and to teach, and then you must focus them toward simple emotional outcomes like partnership and advice....Identify a person's strenths. Define outcomes that play to those strengths. Find a way to count, rate or rank those outcomes. And then let the person run.

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.

Managers are encouraged to focus on complex initiatives like reengineering or learning organizations, without spending time on the basics.

Simply put, this is one insight we heard echoed by tens of thousands of great managers: People don't change that much.Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out.Try to draw out what was left in.That is hard enough.

The Four Keys of Great Managers:1. "When selecting someone, they select for talent ... not simply experience, intelligence or determination."2. "When setting expectations, they define the right outcomes ... not the right steps."3. "When motivating someone, they focus on strengths ... not on weaknesses."4. "When developing someone, they help him find the right fit ... not simply the next rung on the ladder.

In fact, over the last twenty years, authors have offered up over nine thousand different systems, languages, principles, and paradigms to help explain the mysteries of management and leadership.

Remember the Golden Rule? "Treat people as you would like to be treated." The best managers break the Golden Rule every day. They would say don't treat people as you would like to be treated. This presupposes that everyone breathes the same psychological oxygen as you. For example, if you are competitive, everyone must be similarly competitive. If you like to be praised in public, everyone else must, too. Everyone must share your hatred of micromanagement.

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.