DO YOU HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO WHAT YOU DO BEST EVERY DAY?

Chances are, you don't. All too often, our natural talents go untapped. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths.

To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of its online assessment, StrengthsFinder, in the 2001 management book Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book spent more than five years on the bestseller lists and ignited a global conversation, while StrengthsFinder helped millions to discover their top five talents.

In its latest national bestseller, StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup unveils the new and improved version of its popular assessment, language of 34 themes, and much more (see below for details). While you can read this book in one sitting, you'll use it as a reference for decades.

Loaded with hundreds of strategies for applying your strengths, this new book and accompanying website will change the way you look at yourself -- and the world around you -- forever.

Readers of Marcus Buckingham's bestselling NOW, DISCOVER YOUR STRENGTHS first encountered the practical and insightful online assessment test, Strengths Finder. . Now a more developed version is available on its own. STRENGTHS FINDER 2.0 is designed to help readers identif y their top five 5 skills and to put their skills to work for business and for life.

The Challenge:
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study:
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards:
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons:
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't.

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?

His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

Brilliant and entertaining, Outliers is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: Now that he's gotten us talking about the viral life of ideas and the power of gut reactions, Malcolm Gladwell poses a more provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the "self-made man," he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don't arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: "they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot." Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky."

Outliers can be enjoyed for its bits of trivia, like why most pro hockey players were born in January, how many hours of practice it takes to master a skill, why the descendents of Jewish immigrant garment workers became the most powerful lawyers in New York, how a pilots' culture impacts their crash record, how a centuries-old culture of rice farming helps Asian kids master math. But there's more to it than that. Throughout all of these examples--and in more that delve into the social benefits of lighter skin color, and the reasons for school achievement gaps--Gladwell invites conversations about the complex ways privilege manifests in our culture. He leaves us pondering the gifts of our own history, and how the world could benefit if more of our kids were granted the opportunities to fulfill their remarkable potential. --Mari Malcolm



Cultural critic Malcolm Gladwell applies his best trend watching insights and peripatetic methodology to the biq question of why some people achieve success and others do not. These Outliers, as he calls them--successful people who stand out from the rest of the crowd--may be business people, artists, athletes, entertainers, scientists, or work in other fields. In a variation of the nature versus nurture debates, Gladwell seeks answers in culture, environment, and upbringing. Without seeking simple formulas, he examines a range of artifacts--IQ tests, for example, and birth-date data--as he digs for answers in a book that draws on psychology, business, and sociology, and which explains difficult concepts in an accessible manner. THE OUTLIERS confirms that Malcolm Gladwell, here a public intellectual, is himself an Outlier.



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In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams.

Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech's CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni's utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight.

Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team. Just as with his other books, Lencioni has written a compelling fable with a powerful yet deceptively simple message for all those who strive to be exceptional team leaders.Once again using an astutely written fictional tale to unambiguously but painlessly deliver some hard truths about critical business procedures, Patrick Lencioni targets group behavior in the final entry of his trilogy of corporate fables. And like those preceding it, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is an entertaining, quick read filled with useful information that will prove easy to digest and implement. This time, Lencioni weaves his lessons around the story of a troubled Silicon Valley firm and its unexpected choice for a new CEO: an old-school manager who had retired from a traditional manufacturing company two years earlier at age 55. Showing exactly how existing personnel failed to function as a unit, and precisely how the new boss worked to reestablish that essential conduct, the book's first part colorfully illustrates the ways that teamwork can elude even the most dedicated individuals--and be restored by an insightful leader. A second part offers details on Lencioni's "five dysfunctions" (absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results), along with a questionnaire for readers to use in evaluating their own teams and specifics to help them understand and overcome these common shortcomings. Like the author's previous books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, this is highly recommended. --Howard Rothman

Interwoven with the fictional story of a woman who becomes CEO of a struggling, high-profile company with a dysfunctional executive team is an analysis of five behavioral problems that can ruin any productive environment. To remedy these common "dysfunctions," Lencioni offers a set of diagnostic questions to help readers assess their organizations and a model readers can follow to increase teamwork in the office.

BRAND NEW - 4TH / FOURTH EDITION

The PMBOK? Guide?Fourth Edition continues the tradition of excellence in project management with a standard that is even easier to understand and implement, with improved consistency and greater clarification.What's new? * Standard language has been incorporated throughout the document to aid reader understanding.* New data flow diagrams clarify inputs and outputs for each process.* Greater attention has been placed on how Knowledge Areas integrate in the context of Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling, and Closing process groups.* Two new processes are featured: Identify Stakeholders and Collect Requirements.Start meeting your standards for better project performance.

-Forget the concept of retirement, there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dreams are to escape the rat race, experiencing world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management. Just living more and working less, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint.

Entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss rewrites the rules and upsets conventional wisdom about work and success in his self-help guide to the new, rich economy. It is not necessary to toil for 70 hours per week, according to Ferriss, who runs a company called BrainQuicken. Successful people, he says, have actually mastered a system of working less by outsourcing tasks, severely cutting back on timewasters such as meetings, and working offsite. Ferriss tells how the principles that made him rich are transferable to other companies.

The Tipping Point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior cresses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas."The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life," writes Malcolm Gladwell, "is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do." Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell's The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject.

For example, Paul Revere was able to galvanize the forces of resistance so effectively in part because he was what Gladwell calls a "Connector": he knew just about everybody, particularly the revolutionary leaders in each of the towns that he rode through. But Revere "wasn't just the man with the biggest Rolodex in colonial Boston," he was also a "Maven" who gathered extensive information about the British. He knew what was going on and he knew exactly whom to tell. The phenomenon continues to this day--think of how often you've received information in an e-mail message that had been forwarded at least half a dozen times before reaching you.

Gladwell develops these and other concepts (such as the "stickiness" of ideas or the effect of population size on information dispersal) through simple, clear explanations and entertainingly illustrative anecdotes, such as comparing the pedagogical methods of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues, or explaining why it would be even easier to play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with the actor Rod Steiger. Although some readers may find the transitional passages between chapters hold their hands a little too tightly, and Gladwell's closing invocation of the possibilities of social engineering sketchy, even chilling, The Tipping Point is one of the most effective books on science for a general audience in ages. It seems inevitable that "tipping point," like "future shock" or "chaos theory," will soon become one of those ideas that everybody knows--or at least knows by name. --Ron Hogan

Malcolm Gladwell's highly imaginative pop treatise on the flow of goods and ideas in society reached a tipping point of its own, spending many weeks on the New York Times best-seller list , and then appearing for weeks on both lists following its paperback publication.

Proposing a contagion model, in which things spread through the population like viruses, Gladwell examines a range of phenomena--the sudden and unexpected popularity of Hush Puppies in the fashion world, the decline in the crime rate in New York City, how a book (THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD) became a bestseller out of the blue, a spike in youth suicide rates in Malaysia--teasing out the cause and logic, and showing how they all had a "tipping point" and how they illustrate one of three basic principles. He cites sometimes arcanely sourced studies to support his theories, and along the way has popularized terms such as "word-of-mouth marketing" and "stickiness." THE TIPPING POINT has changed the way we look at and talk about "stuff," and Gladwell's ideas have energized fields such as business, marketing, education, and sociology.

Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money--the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink in Drive. In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction--at work, at school, and at home--is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does-and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation--autonomy, mastery, and purpose--and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.

Daniel H. Pink, who previously outlined a new paradigm for the 21st-century business brain in his bestseller A WHOLE NEW MIND, argues that our models for creating incentive, best represented by the old notion of "the carrot and the stick," are as antiquated as the donkey they were originally meant for. Pink shows that purely financial motivations worked well for the repetitive tasks associated with the assembly-line production of the 20th century, but argues that today's technology-driven business world calls for problem-solving and creative thinking, which are actually discouraged by the former model. Pink shows that today's achievers are inspired by the intertwined concepts of autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and he uses decades of scientific research to convincingly back his claim. Pink provides a specific toolkit for managers to implement his ideas, and examines some contemporary businesses that are flourishing thanks to their mastery of creative motivation.

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation.

Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.

Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!"

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation.

Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.

Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!"

Offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists -- all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on.

David Allen, a productivity consultant, makes a fantastic case for increasing productivity by learning the value of relaxing. To put this principle into practice, GETTING THINGS DONE offers a host of tips and techniques designed to maximize efficiency and minimize procrastination by effectively using down time. This phenomenal bestseller is the go-to guide for organizing in the office and the home.