Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

You might recall that I picked this book up recently and was reminded of the Gallup Organisation’s prognosis of what my underlying “strengths” are.

As noted already, I could not remember much about what this book actually said – so (because we’re about to begin the recruitment of our GM for Sales and downstream Marketing) I took some time to peruse the book again.

Unfortunately I was disappointed.

The Book	What we thought
“Develop your Sales Strengths – How the world’s greatest salespeople develop winning careers” by Benson Smith & Tony Rutigliano	Maybe I missed something, but it seemed a bit shallow and repetitive?

In general terms, my disappointment with this book boils down to two factors – one which might not apply to other readers (depending on what they have read beforehand):

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Again on the topic of recruitment, I was interested to see these three true job interview questions posted by George Bradt on Forbes some time ago, but more recently  bounced around my contacts on LinkedIn.

For ease of reference, the three questions are here:

Q1 =  Can you do the job?

This, George says, is all about what they call “Strengths” – whereby he references the Gallup series of books, but places equal weight on a Talent + Knowledge + Skills combination.

When reduced to a single question, it sounds quite simple – though I’m sure many have found that it’s like those board games of yesteryear that are “a minute to learn and a lifetime to master”.  I surely have.

We have, however, improved markedly in the process - and will be looking for a further improvement when we kick off our next recruitment effort, shortly. read more »

We’ve had these books in the library at work for a couple of years.

Some time ago some of the guys who were working with us at the time had a read and gave their reviews. Unfortunately the core message was lost in translation – hence, I did not (at that time) form a favourable opinion of the books.

More recently I’ve started reading through them, and found they are well worth a read.  In my view they don’t form the whole picture of what needs to be considered (more on that later), but they do provide valuable insights.

Rather than review each separately I have grouped them together here.  I’ve only read two currently, and so might update this post later, whenever I have had time to read the others.

“First break all the rules” by Buckingham & Coffman	“Now Discover your Strengths” by Buckingham & Clifton	“The One Thing you Need to Know” by Buckingham	“Go put your Strengths to Work” by Buckingham
	Have not read it yet		Have not read it yet

Frequent visitors to the blog might be asking yourself “Why so many book reviews”? – if so, see here…

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