Marcus Buckingham Named Top Business Thinker

The Thinkers50 announced today that bestselling author and renowned thought leader Marcus Buckingham has been selected as one of the top ten best and brightest management thinkers in the world. Benchmark for Business, Harvard Business Review, and McGraw Hill are sponsoring the 2011 Thinkers50 Summit (thinkers50.com), a world-class management conference and biennial ranking of business gurus. This conference marks the launch of the 2011 Thinkers50 Awards at a prestigious black tie dinner and will culminate in a full-day conference featuring revolutionary insights on leadership, strategy and innovation presented by renowned thinkers Marshall Goldsmith, Costas Markides, Vijay Govindarajan, and Marcus Buckingham.

Buckingham has spent decades helping clients find and motivate their most talented employees. He coauthored Now, Discover Your Strengths, the book that launched StrengthsFinder— the online personal assessment tool that’s been taken by 5 million people, giving them a new vocabulary to positively describe their ingrained talents.

Now, with his newest bestseller, StandOut: The Groundbreaking New Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths Revolution (September 2011 / Thomas Nelson), he has taken strengths assessment into the next generation. Going beyond description, StandOut identifies a user’s key strength Roles and provides practical advice customized to the strengths of each user. With recommendations culled from the best practices of top performers Buckingham has studied over the course of his career, StandOut is the product of a massive data set and rigorous statistical testing.

Each of the nine possible strength Roles is fully delineated in the book, with a wealth of detail, including where you will be at your most powerful, how you can make an immediate impact, and how you can win as a leader, manager, salesperson, or individual contributor.

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Marcus Buckingham’s groundbreaking ideas started a strengths revolution that has changed the business world. His books have sold more than 4 million copies and he addresses over 250,000 people each year as a keynote speaker. Through his training and management consulting firm, The Marcus Buckingham Company  he teaches managers how to turn their associates’ strengths into performance. 

Before launching TMBC, Buckingham spent nearly two decades as a Senior Researcher at Gallup studying what drives exceptional performance in the world’s best managers. A past member of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Leadership and Management, he graduated from Cambridge University with a Master’s Degree in Social and Political Science. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.