The One Thing You Need to Know

About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success, By Marcus Buckingham

This book is at the crossroads between business success directions and self-help. More on the business side. It is quite efficiently written, so I'll try to do the same in the review. There are 3 major points, I'll reverse his order because I think the last is applicable to all of us, the other two are less so.

1. The one thing you need to know about individual success -- "Discover what you don't like doing and stop doing it". Whenever you become aware of some aspect you dislike, do not try to work through it. Do not chalk it up to the realities of life. Do not put up with it. Instead, cut it out of your life as fast as you can. Eradicate it.
2. Are leaders born, or are they made? They are born. A leader is born with an optimistic disposition or she is not. If she is not, then no amount of "optimism training"is going to make her view of the world as optimistic as it needs to be to lead. To lead effectively you must be unfailingly, unrealistically, even irrationally optimistic. Like it or not, this is not learnable.
3. All managers excel at turning one person's talent into performance. They will succeed or fail based on their ability to make their employees more productive working with them than they would be working with someone else.

The rest of the book is coverage of why these 3 items are especially important, as well as supporting information and anecdotes as to why the specific positions taken are true. My belief is that these three items ARE as critical as indicated, and are very much related. If you are bad at the task of turning talents into performance, you aren't ever going to be a great manager, no matter how hard you work at it ... and indeed, by breaking rule one, you are most likely to fail.

The same sort of analysis is key relative to leadership -- are you leading or are you managing? They are very different things.

The idea to not do what you don't like (and will typically be bad at as well) is sort of a reverse on discovering your strengths. There is some logic here -- sort of like the discussion about Michelangelo doing "David" supposedly said he didn't "create", he just uncovered the image that was in the stone. By removing that which we do not like, we become better in touch with "what we are", and increase our chances for success.

Quick read, well written, fairly useful information from a big picture point of view. Recommended.