Marcus Buckingham

“Born of the impossibly varied options we have to amuse ourselves, cutting-edge companies are finding innovative ways to tailor our entertainment choices to who we are, relieving us of the burden of finding the diamond in the rough of 500 TV channels or thousands of movies and music albums released every year.”

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

“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.”

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

“Your strongest life is built through a continuous practice of designing moment by moment.”

“People buy pads all the time, because they want to write stuff down. We're never going to get away from paper, ever. People like writing; that's why more people are writing more real thank-you notes now - not just to stand out, but because there's something about pen to paper, about holding something cool in your hands.”

“Innovation and best practices can be sown throughout an organization - but only when they fall on fertile ground.”

“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.”

“CEOs hate variance. It's the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.”

“There has to be a way to redirect employee's driving ambition and to channel it more productively. There is. Create heroes in every role. Make every role, performed at excellence, a respected profession.”

“Google and Facebook, each in their own way, have revolutionized the delivery of advertising based on search and social networking, creating a sort of anti-Spam: targeted, relevant ads that a consumer might actually welcome rather than spurn.”

“Men have the choice to arrange their schedules so they can pick up the kids from school twice a week. And they have the choice not to, and then to feel guilty about this choice.”

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

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

“I do still get extremely nervous before speeches. My biggest fear is that I'll be standing there in front of hundreds of people and be incapable of talking. I'm afraid that I'll make a complete fool of myself and be unable to go on.”

“My career expertise is as a psychometrician - somebody who builds tests to measure personality. Companies would employ me to build interviews to measure the talents of people before they were hired.”

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

“Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're actually doing every day.”

“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.”

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