Quotes from Marcus Buckingham

Every time you make a rule you take away a choice, and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.

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.

Sustained success means making the greatest possible impact over the longest period of time

The time you spend with your best (employees) is, quite simply, your most productive time.

Most of the time, our limitations are self-imposed.

Convey your passion and link your strengths to measurable results. Employers and interviewers love concrete data.

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

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.

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.

The fact remains that we have an obligation to discover what we really, really, really want to do (which is probably what we do best) and then do it even better... much better.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I need to reach out to people who work for small to mid-sized companies, and help them identify and apply their strengths at work.

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

CEOs the world over are fond of pointing to their workforce and saying "Our people are our greatest asset." And yet today, only two out of ten people think their assets are being well used at work.