The One Thing You Need to Know: ... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success,Books,Free Shipping,0743261658,

The One Thing You Need to Know: ... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success
by Marcus Buckingham

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Product Details

Binding Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number 658.409
EAN 9780743261654
ISBN 0743261658
Manufacturer Free Press
Number Of Items 1
Number Of Pages 304
Publication Date March 07, 2005
Publisher Free Press
Release Date March 07, 2005
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Product Description

Following the success of the landmark bestsellers First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham offers a dramatically new way to understand the art of success.

With over 1.6 million copies of First, Break All the Rules (co-authored with Curt Coffman) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (co-authored with Donald O. Clifton) in print, Cambridge-educated Buckingham is considered one of the most respected business authorities on the subject of management and leadership in the world. With The One Thing You Need to Know, he gives readers an invaluable course in outstanding achievement -- a guide to capturing the essence of the three most fundamental areas of professional activity.

Great managing, leading, and career success -- Buckingham draws on a wealth of applicable examples to reveal that a controlling insight lies at the heart of the three. Lose sight of this 'one thing' and even the best efforts will be diminished or compromised. Readers will be eager to discover the surprisingly different answers to each of these rich and complex subjects. Each could be explained endlessly to detail their many facets, but Buckingham's great gift is his ability to cut through the mass of often-conflicting agendas and zero in on what matters most, without ever oversimplifying. As he observes, success comes to those who remain mindful of the core insight, understand all of its ramifications, and orient their decisions around it. Buckingham backs his arguments with authoritative research from a wide variety of sources, including his own research data and in-depth interviews with individuals at every level of an organization, from CEO's to hotel maids and stockboys.

In every way a groundbreaking book, The One Thing You Need to Know offers crucial performance and career lessons for business people at all career stages.

As a social science researcher and an esteemed business consultant, Marcus Buckingham (First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths) has spent considerable time studying the big picture. This wide-angle approach led him to an unexpectedly narrow conclusion: There is a core concept to even the most complex topic. What he has discovered in The One Thing You Need to Know is that single 'controlling insights' exist for a whole range of situations, and when properly applied, can encourage exponential improvement and lead to precise action and results. In applying this concept to managing, leading, and individual performance he has pinpointed the single element necessary for achieving success in each of these three key positions.

Buckingham acknowledges the subtleties of the topic and his goal is 'not to make these subjects simpler, merely clearer.' And what could be clearer than one thing? The challenge lies in filtering out the nonessential matters and distinguishing 'between what is merely important and what is imperative' in order to produce the greatest and most far-reaching effects. In offering advice on how to do this he also details the three things you need to learn about a person to manage them effectively, explains why a lack of balance is a good thing, shows how to identify your own strengths and weaknesses, and discusses which personality traits all great leaders must possess.

Clearly written, informative, and enjoyable, the book aims to motivate readers to act--not just think--differently by providing concrete examples and specific lessons. And it need not be confined to the office--the concepts outlined in these pages can help people feel more fulfilled and productive in all aspects of life. --Shawn Carkonen

Essential Buckingham

First, Break All the Rules	Now, Discover Your Strengths	The One Thing You Need To Know, Audio CD
First, Break All The Rules, Audio CD	Now, Discover Your Strengths, Audio CD	First, Break All the Rules, Audio Cassette

If You Like Buckingham, You'll Love...

Jack Welch
Jim Collins
Larry Bossidy

Patrick Lencioni
Stephen Covey
Malcolm Gladwell

Tom Rath
Daniel Goleman
Clayton Christensen

A veteran researcher and consultant gives a superb lesson on how to thrive in any organizational role. The 'one thing' is a brilliant distillation of years of management theory and the author's own insights about human nature. His obvious comfort and deep well of experience make his comments both enjoyable and credible. While giving credit to the spectrum of management advice in common usage, his ideas sound fresh and original, and he offers many suggestions for putting them into practice. To achieve individually, he says, do what energizes you and eliminate what drains you. If you can't quit a role, tweak it, find the right partner, or find an aspect of the role that brings you strength. Top-shelf advice delivered flawlessly by a true organizational visionary. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

'The One Thing You Need to Know is actually a modest title. It contains many things you need to know. Marcus Buckingham is flat out the most original, provocative writer there is on the subjects of leadership and management. He comes to his theories the old-fashioned way: by truly getting to know the people and the workplaces he writes about. He also happens to be a wonderful writer and a joy to read.'

-- Tony Schwartz, coauthor of The Power of Full Engagement; president, The Energy Project

'Buckingham is a superb writer and speaker who can make complex ideas crystal clear, cut through to the core insight, and reveal its crucial importance. He has been an inspiration to all of us at Lexus.'

-- Denny Clements, group vice president and general manager, Lexus U.S.

'As I read The One Thing You Need to Know, for the first time I had the urge to compare someone -- Marcus Buckingham -- to Peter Drucker. Buckingham performs the most magical of acts: He speaks with surpassing common sense, yet reaches profoundly uncommon conclusions. This is a wise -- and radical -- book; a true gem worth savoring.'

-- Tom Peters

'Given the tremendous complexities of today's business environment and consumer expectations, Marcus Buckingham is able to deliver a clear path of understanding to the simple truths at the heart of managing and leading. The 'one thing' I find invaluable about this book is its unique, challenging examples about how to stay laser focused on operational excellence.'

-- Robert L. Nardelli, chairman, president, and CEO, The Home Depot, Inc.

'Marcus Buckingham has a keen sense of what it takes to excel, and he backs his insights with an impressive body of in-depth interviews and research. This is an important book for anybody who aspires to effective leadership, managing, or any kind of enduring individual achievement.'

-- Richard M. Kovacevich, chairman, president, and CEO, Wells Fargo and Company

Following the success of the landmark bestsellers First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham offers a dramatically new way to understand the art of success.

With over 1.6 million copies of First, Break All the Rules (co-authored with Curt Coffman) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (co-authored with Donald O. Clifton) in print, Cambridge-educated Buckingham is considered one of the most respected business authorities on the subject of management and leadership in the world. With The One Thing You Need to Know, he gives readers an invaluable course in outstanding achievement -- a guide to capturing the essence of the three most fundamental areas of professional activity.

Great managing, leading, and career success -- Buckingham draws on a wealth of applicable examples to reveal that a controlling insight lies at the heart of the three. Lose sight of this 'one thing' and even the best efforts will be diminished or compromised. Readers will be eager to discover the surprisingly different answers to each of these rich and complex subjects. Each could be explained endlessly to detail their many facets, but Buckingham's great gift is his ability to cut through the mass of often-conflicting agendas and zero in on what matters most, without ever oversimplifying. As he observes, success comes to those who remain mindful of the core insight, understand all of its ramifications, and orient their decisions around it. Buckingham backs his arguments with authoritative research from a wide variety of sources, including his own research data and in-depth interviews with individuals at every level of an organization, from CEO's to hotel maids and stockboys.

In every way a groundbreaking book, The One Thing You Need to Know offers crucial performance and career lessons for business people at all career stages.

Marcus Buckingham, graduated from Cambridge University in 1987, with a master's degree in social and political science. During his seventeen years with The Gallup Organisation, Buckingham helped lead research into the world's best leaders, managers, and workplaces. He drew on this research and used it as the basis for two bestselling books: First, Break All the Rules: What the World,s Best Managers Do Differently and Now, Discover Your Strengths, of which he was both the writer and the principal author. Buckingham is considered one of the world's leading authorities on employee productivity and the practices of leading and managing. He lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles, USA.

Chapter One: A Few Things You Should Know About the 'One Thing'

'Get me to the core'

'If you dig into a subject deeply enough, what do you find?'

In one sense this book began with a conversation with Carrie Tolstedt in a hotel lobby in Los Angeles. Carrie is the head of Wells Fargo's regional banking group, a position she has held for the last four years and in which she has been inordinately successful. As with many effective leaders, though, she is by nature self-critical. Despite the fact that she had just delivered a rousing speech to her regional managers, I was not overly surprised to find her standing off by herself looking a little dissatisfied.

'What's up?' I said. 'The speech went really well.' One always tends to offer reassurance to speakers after a speech, but in this case it was accurate. She had been speaking on the subject of customer service and how, with most banking products being a commodity in the marketplace, Wells Fargo would live or die based on the quality of its service. This message isn't new, either for Wells Fargo or the wider business world, and in the wrong hands it can pretty quickly descend into cliché. But Carrie had managed to keep the message coherent, the stories personal, and the examples vivid and powerful. It was a good speech.

'I don't know,' she replied. 'Sometimes I'm not sure how effective these speeches really are. The regional managers will now try to pass the message on to their district managers, and inevitably it will get tweaked in some way, changed somehow. Then it'll get changed again when the district managers pass it on to their store managers, and again when the store supervisors hear it, until, by the time it reaches the people who can really use it -- our customer service reps and personal bankers -- it will be significantly altered.

'Don't get me wrong, it's good that each level of my organization adds its own spin, but still, I sometimes think that the only way to keep this organization on the same page about customer service is to boil it down to its essence. My message should be so simple and so clear that, across all forty-three thousand employees, everyone comes to know what's at the core.'

At the time, I think I mumbled something about being sure that her message would get through to where it mattered most, but on a subliminal level her wish -- to see a subject so clearly that she could describe its essence simply, but without oversimplification -- must have registered. For weeks thereafter, no matter where I went on my travels, no matter whom I was talking to, I seemed to hear the same wish: 'Get me to the heart of the matter.'

Sure, the subject in question varied. Some people wanted to know the organizing principle of great management. Others were more interested in the essence of great leadership. Others asked about the driving force behind a successful career. But everywhere the wish was the same: Get me to the core.

Now, I suppose I could have chalked these wishes up to intellectual laziness. Why struggle with complex reality when you can skate by on the PowerPoint version of life instead? But this is a rather uncharitable and, in the end, unhelpful interpretation. We are all attracted to clarified versions of reality not because we are intellectually lazy, but because these versions often wind up being so useful. Take winter, spring, summer, and fall as an example. The four seasons are the PowerPoint version of the weather. Certainly they leave out a great deal of complexity, exception, and local variation, but nonetheless they've helped generations of farmers time their sowing and harvesting.

If there were any charges of intellectual laziness to be leveled, they probably should have been leveled at me. For seventeen years I had the good fortune to work with one of the most respected research organizations in the world, the Gallup Organization. During this time, I was given the opportunity to interview some of the world's best leaders, managers, teachers, salespeople, stockbrokers, lawyers, and all manner of public servants. The fact that I hadn't isolated a few core insights at the heart of great leadership, or managing, or sustained individual success didn't mean that these insights didn't exist. It simply meant I hadn't yet been focused enough to get it done.

Carrie's wish, and the many similar wishes I heard in the months following, pushed me to get focused. Since people wanted to reach down into the heart of the matter, I was, I realized, in a perfect position to help them get there. My research experiences at Gallup mostly consisted of surveying large numbers of people in the hopes of finding broad patterns in the data. Now, in my effort to get to the core, I would use this foundation as the jumping-off point for deeper, more immersive, more individualized research. I wouldn't survey a large number of good performers. Instead I would identify one or two elite players, one or two people who, in their chosen roles and fields, had measurably, consistently, and dramatically outperformed their peers. In the end these individuals covered a wide range, from the executive who transformed a failing drug into the best-selling prescription drug in the world, the president of one of the world's largest retailers, the customer service representative who sold more than fifteen hundred Gillette deodorants in one month, the miner who hadn't suffered a single workplace injury in over fifty years, all the way to the screenwriter who penned such blockbusters as Jurassic Park and Spider-Man.

And having identified them, I planned to investigate the practical, seemingly banal details of their actions and their choices. Why did the executive turn down repeated promotions before taking on the challenge of turning around that failing drug? Why did the retail president invoke the memories of his working-class upbringing when defining his company's strategy? The deodorant-selling customer service representative works the night shift. Is this relevant to her performance? One of her hobbies is weightlifting. Odd? Yes, but can it in any way explain why she is so successful so consistently? What was each of these special people actually doing that made them so very good at their role?

I have chosen to focus this deep dive on the three roles that are the most critical if you are to achieve something significant in your life and then sustain and expand this achievement, namely the roles of manager, leader, and individual performer. In part 1 of the book we focus on the two roles that underpin sustained organizational success.

What is the One Thing you need to know about great managing?

To get the best performance from your people, you have to be able to execute a number of different roles very well. You have to be able to select people effectively. You have to set expectations by defining clearly the outcomes you want. You have to motivate people by focusing on their strengths and managing around their weaknesses. And, as they challenge you to help them grow, you have to learn how to steer them toward roles that truly fit them, rather than simply promoting them up the corporate ladder.

Each of these roles involves significant subtlety and complexity. But, without denying this complexity, is there one deep insight that underpins all of these roles and that all great managers keep in the top of their minds? The chapter on great managing supplies the answer.

What is the One Thing you need to know about great leading?

When you study truly effective leaders, the first thing that strikes you is just how different they are. I could use any number of examples from today's business world, but instead, think back to the first four presidents of the United States. Although each of them experienced great success in rallying people toward a better future, their styles could not have been more dissimilar. George Washington's leadership style was to project an image of soundness and constancy, but he is not remembered as an inspiring visionary. In direct contrast, the second U.S. president, John Adams, was an inspiring visionary. He was so gifted a public speaker that he could hold a vociferous Congress in rapt silence for hours. However, as his struggles following the end of the Revolutionary War revealed, he was at his best only when railing against a perceived foe -- which, most of the time, happened to be Great Britain.

His successor, Thomas Jefferson, did not require a foe to bring out the best in him. Sitting alone at his writing desk he could conjure compelling word pictures from the blank sheets in front of him -- and yet, in contrast to Adams, he so feared public speaking that he changed the protocol so that all of his State of the Union addresses were written out and then handed to an assistant who ran down the street and delivered them to Congress.

James Madison was different again. He was a small man with a light voice who was unable to rely on inspiring word pictures to lead. Undeterred, he opted for a more pragmatic, political approach, working the floor of Congress and, one by one, building the alliances necessary to advance his agenda.

Despite these obvious differences and imperfections, each of these individuals is rightly upheld as a model of excellence in leadership. Thus, my question for the chapter on great leading is 'When you study models of excellence in leadership -- whether 250-year-old models or those of the present -- can you look past the superficial idiosyncrasies and identify one primary insight that explains why they excel?'

In part 2 we shift our focus to sustained individual success.

What is the One Thing you need to know about sustained individual success?

During the course of your life you will inevitably be exposed to all manner of options, opportunities, and pressures. The key to sustaining success is to be able to filter all these possibilities and fasten on to those few that will allow you to express the best of yourself. But what filter should you use? Should you actively seek out experiences that will enable you...

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Customer Reviews for: The One Thing You Need to Know: ... About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success

Rating

- Transformational Approach - AND they stick!
The 3 things that 'stuck':
1) As a Manager: Celebrate uniqueness
2) As a Leader: Call on needs we all share
3) Sustained Success: Cut out activities that don't feed you - pull from strength!

Rating

- It's not ONE thing...it's many
The title is misleading...it's not one thing, it's many...and the many things the author cites are rehashed wisdom and experience, though he does present them in a succinct way. This book is for management junkies, not serious people looking for practical strategies to improve their and their team's performance. This is one more example of the superficial competition to fill your bookshelves with passed on wisdom. Better to roll up your sleeves and just DO IT!

Rating

- Great Wisdom
I found Marcus Buckingham's wisdom about great management and leadership to be right on. Having worked in an environment that focused on people's weaknesses as an area for growth, this book was refreshing and pointed to the importance of developing talent and strengths. The examples are about well established people and very intriguing to study.

Rating

- A promise kept
Every book holds a promise. This one holds 3 and keeps 4. Not a bad score.
The book shares with you the secrets of individual success, management, leadership, and successful relationships. Yes, you could wish Marcus threw in the secret of eternal youth - but, I guess, he is still working on it. Good luck, Marcus! Your audience awaits!

Rating

- The One Review You Need to Read
How long should it take you to tell someone the ONE thing they need to know? A whole book? Mr. Buckingham is a promoter - a salesman. Nothing wrong with that but you are not going to achieve enlightenment by reading it. This is just a generation X Zig Zigler. Don't be pathetic and think that a self-help book is going to change your life. That only comes through reflection and personal growth. So, now for free I am going to tell you the one thing you need to know AND I am even going to give you two versions of it:
... Read More

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