Now, Discover Your Strengths

Now Discover Your Strengths is a self help book written by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D. At the heart of the book is the internet based "Strengths Finder," an online personal assessment test which will outline the user's strengths. The authors advocate focusing on building strengths rather than focusing on weaknesses.

The theory behind the book is that each adult individual possesses a certain number of fixed universal personal-character attributes, defined by the authors as "Personal Themes" which in combination effect the individuals tendency to develop certain skills more easily and excel in certain fields while failing in others.

The authors claim that by identifying the individual strength of the members of the organization , its members can be utilized in more suiting positions, hence developing the required skills easily, helping to reduce turnover, improve employee moral and the organizations overall performance.

The Gallop group, claims to have distilled the theory into practice by interviewing 1.7 million professionals from varying fields, have quantified the different "personal Themes" of the subjects, and have come up with 34 distinct attributes. The Gallope group also claims that each individuals success in a certain field is defined by a combination of five attributes (of the 34 they claim as quantifiable), which considering the complexity of the human mind, is a claim of very high order.

The "Strengths Finder" www.strengthsfinder.com is a web based questionnaire,which based on the answers claims to be able to define individual "Strengths". A single one time access is possible by entering and access code provided with the book.

There have been two versions of the book: "Now Discover Your Strengths 1.0", correlating the "Strength Finder" web application and "Now Discover Your Strengths 2.0" relating the the " Strengths Finder 2.0" Web application. There have been incidents in which codes have been rendered unusable, specially from the earlier version (1.0) in which the code has not been sealed. The company will not RESOLVE these issues, and customers will have to purchase the latest version in which the access code is sealed.

"Stryker Group", one of the largest orthopedics conglomerates (www.stryker.com) , have been testing their candidates via online "Strength Finder" based web questionnaires.