In the Media

Recommend the best business book you've read in recent years.
"Now, Discover Your Strengths," by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton. This book has been instrumental in how we think about developing talent at Facebook. Like all organizations, we have a system for giving feedback to our employees. A few years ago, Lori Goler, Facebook's head of human resources, brought Marcus to meet with our leadership team to help us improve this system. Marcus and his colleagues surveyed employees for 25 years to figure out what factors predict extraordinary performance. They found that the most important predictor of the success of a company or division was how many people answered yes to the question "Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?" And this makes sense.

CEOCFO: Ms. Jordan, would you tell us what was the vision when The Marcus Buckingham Company started and how that has developed?

Ms. Jordan: When the company started, Marcus had been a bestselling author for a number of years and a renowned speaker. He had a wonderful time traveling around the country, speaking, inspiring people, and helping people understand the value of leveraging strengths in the workplace—but he came to a point where he wanted to do more. He wanted to create sustainable, behavioral change for individuals within organizations. He formed The Marcus Buckingham Company with the idea that there were learning and development solutions that we could offer to take his work further. The vision was to create a strengths-based leadership development company. Our mission is to help managers become more effective in the workplace.

For more than a decade, pundits have been promising that technology will revolutionize training and development. An article in the January/February 2000 issue of The New Corporate University Review cited an ASTD estimate that within a year, 63 percent of organizations would offer employee courses via the Internet and 77 percent would provide training via their intranets. At about the same time, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted 1,000 percent growth for the U.S. corporate e-learning market over three years. And former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich, singing the praises of e-learning, declared that "classroom training is a 19th-century artifact."

We've all heard about how millennials have been raised by "helicopter parents," who hover over them and protect them from criticism and disappointment. The result is a "teacup" generation of young people who may appear outwardly perfect, but are easily shattered. For years, they have regularly been given pats on the back, often just for showing up. They made it to the end of the soccer season - fantastic, everyone gets a trophy! They took a test - how amazing! When they finally join the workforce, it's no wonder members of Gen Y expect a promotion just for being on time to work for six weeks straight.

Corporate America is in crisis. Consumer confidence is plummeting. Leaders are failing. In fact, more than 40 percent of new leaders fail within their first 18 months. Many companies, however, are also failing their leaders as they continue to invest in a broken leadership development model.

Once considered the great "melting pot" that formed immigrants from numerous different countries into a unified culture, America has, in recent decades, grown not only to recognize but to celebrate the differences among its citizens. It's striking, given our increased appreciation for people's unique contributions to our society, that learning and leadership development models -- programs designed to cultivate, nurture and help sustain talent at big enterprises and small firms alike -- are still mostly viewed as one-size-fits-all. Why?

It's a special person -- and personality -- who can lead a start-up to soaring success and sustain that success for the long term. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg are star examples. We've seen the superficial comparisons: both are college drop-outs who founded their empires in their early 20s; both are cultish icons who command the world's attention with the genius behind their innovations, but who are also revered for their eccentricities -- black turtleneck and hoodie included.

For decades, corporate training has gone one of two ways. Blue--chip companies -- the General Electrics (GE) and Procter & Gambles (PG) of the world -- have flown people somewhere for an expensive inculcation into company values. Smaller companies, unable to afford that expense, either hope to hire people with perfectly developed skills or undertake halfhearted webinars with little proven value.

Marcus Buckingham believes there are many managers who are doing things right these days. But unfortunately there are a lot headed down the wrong path.

Buckingham is the author of such best-selling books as "Now, Discover Your Strengths" and is a successful business guru who has been interviewed by media heavyweights such as Oprah Winfrey. But no matter who he is talking with, Buckingham contends that managers must change the ways they view the workplace today.

To make the list, the person must be known for "originality, practicality, presentation style, ability to communicate through writing, followers' loyalty, business sense, international outlook, rigor of research, impact, and the elusive guru factor. We've highlighted the top 10 names, as determined by online voting and panelists.