Buckingham has taken his broad experience in management practices and employee retention and put it into a trio of best-selling books: First Break All the Rules: What the World's Best Managers Do Differently (Simon and Schuster), Now, Discover Your Strengths (The Free Press) and his latest work, The One Thing You Need To Know (The Free Press).

Buckingham's presentations take the key points of these books, combined with plenty of great examples from a wide variety of organizations, to show audiences how they can learn from the world's best managers and leaders.

A wonderful resource for leaders, managers and educators, Marcus Buckingham challenges conventional wisdom and shows the link between engaged employees and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction and the rate of turnover. Buckingham graduated from Cambridge Unversity in 1987 with a master's degree in Social and Political Science. A subject of in-depth profiles in The New York Times, Fortune and Fast Company, Buckingham is also a member of the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Leadership and Management.

The One Thing You Need to Know - Marcus Buckingham examines the controlling insights that drive great managing, great leading and sustained individual success.

Three things to know from One Thing:

1. The snowflake principle. Every employee is different. Good managers identify what is unique about their employees, then put each in a position to leverage those skills. If a clerk shows a knack for presentation, get him out from behind the counter and on the floor building displays.
2. Know fear. Knowing your employees' commonly held anxieties can be just as valuable as knowing their distinct strengths. If an impending merger creates fear of the future, the leader should offer clarity. If an outsider joins the team, work to build up the sense of community.
3. To thine own self be true. Only pursue work you love. If you're an ace at sales but your heart's in product development, do yourself a favor and request a transfer.

Now, Discover Your Strengths - Effectively managing personnel - as well as one's own behavior - is an extraordinarily complex task that, not surprisingly, has been the subject of countless books touting what each claims is the true path to success. That said, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton's Now, Discover Your Strengths does indeed propose a unique approach: focusing on enhancing people's strengths rather than eliminating their weaknesses. Following up on the co-authors' popular previous book, First, Break All the Rules, it fully describes 34 positive personality themes the two have formulated (such as Achiever, Developer, Learner and Maximizer) and explains how to build a "strengths-based organization" by capitalizing on the fact that such traits are already present among those within it.

Most original and potentially most revealing, however, is a Web-based interactive component that allows readers to complete a questionnaire developed by the Gallup Organization and instantly discover their own top-five inborn talents. This device provides a personalized window into the authors' management philosophy which, coupled with subsequent advice, places their suggestions into the kind of practical context that's missing from most similar tomes. "You can't lead a strengths revolution if you don't know how to find, name and develop your own," write Buckingham and Clifton. Their book encourages such introspection while providing knowledgeable guidance for applying its lessons.

First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently - Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman expose the fallacies of standard management thinking in First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently. In seven chapters, the two consultants for the Gallup Organization debunk some dearly held notions about management, such as "treat people as you like to be treated;" "people are capable of almost anything;" and "a manager's role is diminishing in today's economy."

Rules are for breaking. Research indicates that great business managers have one thing in common - a willingness to break the rules, step outside the boundaries. Marcus Buckingham takes this basic truth and applies it to the needs of his audience, unveiling new ways to exceed expectations and inspire colleagues.