Mike Morrison is strong in Strategic, Ideation, and Relator. Can he have a positive conversation with someone like me, whose top themes include Input, Analytical, and Intellection? Or will my challenging — some would say nitpicking — questions put off the Dean for Associate Education and Development at the University of Toyota in Torrance, California, who has tendencies toward long-range visionary thinking and a preference for talking with close friends?

If you’re a boss and you think you’re pretty hot stuff, get your employees to answer three questions: Do I know what is expected of me at work? At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about me as a person?

If your employees would answer each question with a strong “yes,” you’re almost certainly a good boss. But don’t bet that they would.

Only one-third of American employees strongly agree that they know what is expected of them, says Marcus Buckingham, senior vice president of the Gallup Organization and co-author of “First, Break All the Rules,” by far the best book I’ve seen for managers. The book and his new follow-up, “Now, Discover Your Strengths,” are based on Gallup studies of more than 2 million people.

The Baltimore Ravens are in the Super Bowl today because they follow a workplace principle that many bosses and employees overlook: They emphasize their strengths far more than they try to overcome their weaknesses.

That flies in the face of traditional human resources strategies, built around performance reviews that tell employees how to improve on their weaknesses, said Marcus Buckingham, co-author of “Now, Discover Your Strengths, ” the follow-up to his 1998 best-seller, “First, Break All the Rules.” Both books are based on studies of more than 2 million people by the Gallup Organization.

AS the business of business has undergone a revolution in the last 15 years (desktop computers, the Internet, fax machines, casual attire), the business of business books — publishing and selling them — has capitalized on the chaos.

Sales of books on marketing and personal finance have flourished in the spacious aisles of airports, superstores and online booksellers. Basic management books like ”In Search of Excellence” or narratives like ”Liar’s Poker” now share shelf space with books ranging in subject from workplace dating to ”Quicken for Dummies.” And authors include sports heroes, a deep roster of self-anointed gurus and a constellation of executive celebrities like William H. Gates and John F. Welch Jr.

But the form of the business book is being tested by ”Now, Discover Your Strengths,” by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton of the Gallup Organization, which makes participating online an integral part of reading the book.

The sequel to last year’s bestselling First, Break All the Rules, it advocates focusing on strengths to render weaknesses unimportant. The price of the book entitles the buyer to a Web-based profile called StrengthsFinder that helps identify a person’s top five “themes” from a list of 34 identified by Gallup consultants Buckingham and co-author Donald Clifton. These themes, or potential strengths, are expressed as personality types and include the person who looks for agreement, the person who relates well with others, and the person who sees big ideas. FORTUNE’s Mark Borden catches up with the author to discuss strengths, Bill Gates, and Tiger Woods.

Every few weeks, some Silicon Valley start-up tries to lure Mary Morse, a software engineer, away from Autodesk, a computer-aided design company in San Rafael, Calif. At least one of them has dangled an options package that could have made her rich by now.

But Ms. Morse invariably says thanks, but no thanks. The reason she is staying put, she says, is simple: she likes her bosses.

Introduce a computer to a heap of raw data and the temptation to slice the information every which way can prove irresistible. One example is Amazon.com’s purchase-circle program, which enables customers to see what books are popular among different groups. Apparently, the idea is that readers can learn the buying preferences of people with whom they might have something in common, or about whom they might be curious, and that one can glean insights into a place or company by seeing, for instance, that a top seller in Kenya is ”The Carbohydrate Addict’s Lifespan Program” or that in Hoboken, N.J., a number of people want to know how to put on a Jewish wedding.

What makes a company a great place to work? Good managers. And good managers, say Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman in their best-selling book, First, Break All The Rules (Simon & Schuster, $25), are leaders who ignore conventional niceties. Good managers play favorites, don’t try to fix their employees’ weaknesses, and don’t believe in the power of positive thinking. Rather, they build on strengths and cast people in the right role. Based on interviews of more than 80,000 managers and a million employees, the Gallup Organization (yes, the poll people, but nearly all the company’s revenue comes from management research and consulting) created a 12-question formula to determine the strength of a workplace. None of the 12 questions address issues like pay, benefits, perks, or what employees think of the CEO. Instead, questions like “Do my opinions seem to count?” and “Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?” were used to discover the keys to higher levels of productivity, profit, retention, and customer satisfaction. FORTUNE’s Mark Borden discussed the book with its authors.