Top 80 Marcus Buckingham Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Every time you make a rule you take away a choice, and choice, with all of its illuminating repercussions, is the fuel for learning.”

— Marcus Buckingham

52. “Define the outcomes you want from your team and its members, and then look for each person’s strength signs to figure out how each person can reach those outcomes most efficiently, most amazingly, most creatively, and most joyfully. The moment you realize you’re in the outcomes business is the moment you turn each person’s uniqueness from a bug into a feature.”

— Marcus Buckingham

53. “In a war, no matter the outcome of a certain skirmish or battle, the winner is the party whose attitudes, behaviors and preoccupations come to dominate the postwar landscape. By this measure, the outcome of the gender wars, if wars they were, is clear: women won.”

— Marcus Buckingham

54. “When you feel as though you can’t do something, the simple antidote is action: Begin doing it. Start the process, even if it’s just a simple step, and don’t stop at the beginning.”

— Marcus Buckingham

55. “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.”

— Marcus Buckingham

56. “MICHAEL: Maybe just this: A manager has got to remember that he is on stage every day. His people are watching him. Everything he does, everything he says, and the way he says it, sends off clues to his employees. These clues affect performance. So never forget you are on that stage.”

— Marcus Buckingham

57. “Any recurring patterns of behavior that can be productively applied are talents.”

— Marcus Buckingham

58. “American culture is CEO obsessed. We celebrate the hard-charging heroes and mythologize the iconoclastic visionaries. Those people are important.”

— Marcus Buckingham

59. “I think a good business book has one coherent idea that is richly played out.”

— Marcus Buckingham

60. “True individuality can be lonely.”

— Marcus Buckingham

61. “You won’t find a CEO who doesn’t talk about a ‘powerful culture’ as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time, you’d be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the strength of that culture.”

— Marcus Buckingham

62. “It’s odd that I’m a big name in America and not known in Britain.”

— Marcus Buckingham

63. “We live with them every day, and they come so easily to us that they cease to be precious.”

— Marcus Buckingham

64. “If you want execution, hail only success. If you want creativity, hail risk, and remain neutral about success.”

— Marcus Buckingham

65. “Most of my work has been in corporations, studying how you build an organization that helps people to identify and work to their strengths.”

— Marcus Buckingham

66. “If you want to be clear, act.”

— Marcus Buckingham

67. “Americans just love convening. They are a convention-happy country and they love to get together to talk.”

— Marcus Buckingham

68. “The corporate world is appallingly bad at capitalizing on the strengths of its people.”

— Marcus Buckingham

69. “As a manager your job is not to teach people talent. Your job is to help them earn the accolade “talented” by matching their talent to the role. To do this well, like all great managers, you have to pay close attention to the subtle but significant differences between roles.”

— Marcus Buckingham

70. “Life’s tricky for women because they have to make more choices than men. And yes, choice is good, but boy, you better be an expert choice-maker.”

— Marcus Buckingham

71. “Women have lives that become increasingly empty. They’re doing more and feeling less.”

— Marcus Buckingham

72. “Gen Y is really quite distinct from Gen X; it’s really self-involved and very narcissistic – their cameras are filled with pictures of themselves; Facebook, it’s about me. It’s a generation that’s been pampered by their parents and their schools, given prizes for just taking part.”

— Marcus Buckingham

73. “We need to say goodbye to the traditional methodologies of corporate universities.”

— Marcus Buckingham

74. “If you are innately skeptical of other people’s motives, then no amount of good behavior in the past will ever truly convince you that they are not just about to disappoint you. Suspicion is a permanent condition.”

— Marcus Buckingham

75. “The hardest thing about being a manager is realizing that your people will not do things the way that you would. But get used to it. Because if you try to force them to, then two things happen. They become resentful – they don’t want to do it. And they become dependent – they can’t do it. Neither of these is terribly productive for the long haul.”

— Marcus Buckingham

76. “Great managers know they don’t have 10 salespeople working for them. They know they have 10 individuals working for them. A great manager is brilliant at spotting the unique differences that separate each person and then capitalizing on them.”

— Marcus Buckingham

77. “This company didn’t have one culture. It had as many cultures as it did managers. No.”

— Marcus Buckingham

78. “The Four Keys, select for talent, define the right outcomes, focus on strengths, find the right fit, reveal how they attack this goal.”

— Marcus Buckingham

79. “Your childish clarity faded, and you started listening to the world around you more closely than you did to yourself. The world was persuasive and loud, and so you resigned yourself to conforming to its demands.”

— Marcus Buckingham

80. “But the best managers have the solution: Ask. Ask your employee about her goals: What are you shooting for in your current role? Where do you see your career heading? What personal goals would you feel comfortable sharing with me? How often do you want to meet to talk about your progress?”

— Marcus Buckingham

81. “You will have to manage around the weaknesses of each and every employee. But if, with one particular employee, you find yourself spending most of your time managing around weaknesses, then know that you have made a casting error. At this point it is time to fix the casting error and to stop trying to fix the person.”

— Marcus Buckingham

82. “If we have to know without a doubt that the choices we are making are the perfect ones, we risk never making any choices at all.”

— Marcus Buckingham

83. “Whereas cascaded goals are a control mechanism, cascaded meaning is a release mechanism. It brings to life the context within which everyone works, but it leaves the locus of control – for choosing, deciding, prioritizing, goal setting – where it truly resides, and where understanding of the world and the ability to do something about it intersect: with the team member.”

— Marcus Buckingham

84. “Even more than the rest, these five questions are most directly influenced by the employee’s immediate manager. What does this tell us? It tells us that people leave managers, not companies.”

— Marcus Buckingham

85. “This is the same feeling that many managers unwittingly create in their employees. Even when working with their most productive employees, they still spend most of their time talking about each person’s few areas of nontalent and how to eradicate them. No matter how well-intended, relationships preoccupied with weakness never end well.”

— Marcus Buckingham

86. “How can we all grow?”

— Marcus Buckingham

87. “This thinking is well-intended but overly simplistic, reminiscent perhaps of the four-year-old who proudly presents his mother with a red truck for her birthday because that is the present he wants. So the best managers reject the Golden Rule. Instead, they say, treat each person as he would like to be treated, bearing in mind who he is.”

— Marcus Buckingham