Drucker on Strengths

Continuing on the subject of the history of the strengths philosophy, if you haven't read Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker's seminal work on the subject, written for the Harvard Business Review in 1999, I suggest you do so. How about this to whet the appetite:

Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. More often, people know what they are not good at - and even then more people are wrong than right. And yet, a person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.

Strengths Philosophers

It was a great pleasure to attend the inaugural meeting of The Strengths Foundation last week at the HQ of QVC in London. We heard from 3 speakers who told their story of how taking a strengths approach to leading and developing people had transformed their business. Against the current economic backdrop, to have delivered the level of change that we heard about, create a more positive place to work and deliver bottom line results is astonishing and a great illustration of the power of applying a strengths lens to change.

We also heard about some of the history of the strengths movement and given that my research had taken me no further back in time than Bernard Haldane (1945) , I left inspired to find out some more. A quick search on google took me to, guess what, The Strengths Foundation website and this page on strengths philosophers in particular.