Summary : The one Thing You Need to Know – Marcus Buckingham

rigorously removing the irritants from his working life, engages the world in an equally imbalanced fashion. It takes insight to focus in this way, and discipline, and since lopsided bets can be scary, courage.”
– Marcus Buckingham

The critical skill is not balance, but its inverse, intentional imbalance. The great manager bets that he will prevail by magnifying, emphasizing, and then capitalizing on each employee’s uniqueness. The great leader comes to a conclusion about his core customer, his organization’s strengths, its core score, and the actions he will commit to right now, and then, in the service of clarity, banishes from his thought and conversation almost everything else. The sustainably effective individual, by

Something special must leave the room when you leave the room.”

Great leaders, by contrast, envision a better future and draw people towards it. The starting point for an effective leader is their vibrant image of the future. This is all the leader talks about, thinks about, discusses and reflects upon. He or she designs this better future in vivid detail and once this image is clear, the leader will then start working to persuade other people to buy in to what has been envisaged.

As you strive to lead us toward a better future, remember that we need clarity, and that actions, both the symbolic and the systematic, can be wonderfully, comfortingly clear. If you can sort through all the actions available to you and identify the few that can either grab our attention or alter our routines, then our confidence in you and your better future

is clear. Show us clearly whom we should seek to serve, show us where our core strength lies, show us which score we should focus on and which actions must be taken today, and we will reward you by working our hearts out to make our better future come true.”

Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate. They don’t have to be charming. They don’t have to be brilliant. They don’t have to possess the common touch. They don’t have to be great speakers. What they must be

What action must we take?

What gets measured gets managed” and “You get what you inspect” have survived over an extended period as business truisms because they are quite correct.

3. What is our current score?