Discover Your Strengths

The Gallup Organization needs to catch a ride on a Cluetrain. They produced a book called Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham & Donald O. Clifton. This is the kind of book that you would expect to have some kind of instrument to help one discover one's strengths. Turns out it's not in the book, it's on the web. Cool, thought I, until I realized that you had to register using the 14-digit number inside the book jacket which would only work once.

I, of course, got the book from the library. The library, of course, glued the book jacket on in such a way that the number was ruined before anyone got to read the book. And even if the number hadn't been glued into oblivion, only the first borrower would have been able to take advantage of it. Not a good book for a library to own, but the collection librarian would have to read half-way through the book before he or she would realize that.

Can you imagine how many more books they could sell if the instrument were freely available? We might all be blogging "go take this test--and read the book!"

Anyway. Being reasonably self-aware, I decided to determine my own strengths from the descriptions in the book.

As a Developer, I feel that if you write a self-help book, a primary motivator should be to help people grow and that means making your material fully available through libraries to people who can't or won't purchase the book.

My Connectedness strength leads me to believe that a secondary motivator for such a book should be to change the world. You don't do that by hiding your light under a bushel or behind a firewall. The message in this book really could change our organizations. It delivers a convincing argument that the path to excellence is in developing our strengths while the path to mediocrity lies in attempting to remediate our weaknesses. But I can't recommend it to my organization--we would have to buy 150 copies to get started.

Both of these concerns, helping people and changing the world, should at least appear to take precedence over milking every last dollar out of the consuming public. The appearance of greediness takes something away from the overall message of the book--it makes me doubt its sincerity.

As someone with a strength of Intellection, I think that an instrument requires testing and that biasing the results by only allowing those who are willing and able to pay for a book to take the test is unacceptable.

I just stretched their definition of Intellection to make my story better, using my strength for Communication.

Fortunately, I am a Learner so I can invent my own method for figuring out what I want to know.

So, there. Their test would have given me five strengths. I'm 80% sure they would have been these: Developer, Connectedness, Intellection, Communication, and Learner. I suspect I'll get my money's worth (heh) out of the rest of the book with that 80% certainty.

I probably wouldn't have responded so negatively had I not taken a wonderful and free profile just this week. It was recommended by our Instruction Coordinator as part of a late summer effort to improve our teaching librarian skills. If you teach, consider taking the Teaching Perspectives Inventory. It doesn't work perfectly well for those of us teaching one-shots, but it's still a useful tool from a group of people who are enjoying the scenery from their Cluetrain.     #

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