800-CEO-READ Podcasts

Citizen Marketers Interview with Jackie Huba

In this interview, I talk with Jackie Huba, co-author with Ben McConnell of Citizen Marketers: When People Are The Message.

Citizen Marketers is the next step for Ben and Jackie after their word-of-mouth marketing bible Creating Customer Evangelists. Here are the questions you'll get answered if you listen to this podcast:

• Why should I care about citizen marketers?
• How can your company engage citizen marketers?
• How can citizen marketing build the skills of your employees?

mp3, 29:01, 20 MB

Strengths Finder 2.0 Interview with Tom Rath

Strengths Finder 2.0 is a short book, so Tom Rath and I did a short interview. We talk about things like:

• What changes have been made in the Strengths Finder 2.0 tool?
• Do strengths change over time?
• At what age can you start assessing strengths?
• Can you use Strengths Finder as a hiring tool? (Hint on this one: No.)

mp3, 15:42, 10.8MB

Building On Your Strengths

I did a interview with Tom Rath of Gallup on Monday. We will be posting that in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to share something that he said during the interview.

A little background first...if you are familiar with with Now, Discover Your Strengths then you are familiar with Gallup's Strengths Finder survey. Playing to your strengths is a philosophy that Gallup has been advocating for over 40 years and is a key consulting practice for them. NDYS came out in 2001 and web based survey was an immediate hit. You answered a series of questions and they delivered back to you your five strengths. The book as well as the online commentary help you get your bearings. Now, Discover Strengths was really designed for managers and there were many suggestions on how to manage employees with these wide variety of strengths. The book has sold more each year than the prior and last year, it spent 50 weeks on the Wall Street Journal Bestsellers List.

Here was the amazing stat for me: 2.5 million people have taken their Strengths Finder survey [mouth dropped open]. Given the number of books they have sold, they have determined that somewhere between 80% and 90% of those who buy the book go on to take the assessment. How is that for response rate?

Add this one to it: With 34 possible strengths and each user's five strengths displayed in the order of importance, there are 16.4 million possible combinations. Tom said that chances are when you take StrengthFinder that you will get a result that has not been shown before.

The book featured on the podcast is Strengths Finder 2.0. This is the new book from Gallup and is meant for frontline employees. They have updated the assessment with better accuracy from their questions and more personalized insights on the results (i.e. even if two people both display the same strengths, they could get different suggestions for improvement based on how they answered the questions).

Erika Andersen and Danny Meyer Live

Forbes.com has video of our friend Erika Andersen (Growing Great Employees) and her ten year client Danny Meyer (Setting The Table).

The Wal-Mart Effect Part 2 with Charles Fishman

I decided to bring back Charles Fishman, author of The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy.

In the paperback version of the book, Charles has added an afterword. In it, he writes about his visit to Wal-Mart headquarters. The company was not particularly helpful while he was writing the book, but they invite him to talk after they find out he is not as negative on the company as many other authors have been. Our interview covers what has happened with the book in the last year.

mp3, 41:13, 28.3MB

What Got You Here Won't Get You There Interview With Marshall Goldsmith

In this interview I talk with Marshall Goldsmith, author of What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful.

What intrigued me about the book was Marshall writing a book for successful people. I find that idea counterintuitive—most successful people I know don't think they need much help. Marshall makes a great case for why that is the barrier that keeps those people where they are.

We talk about how leaders' suggestions become orders, how leaders should talk publicly about what they are trying to improve if they hope to get better, and how your efforts towards improvement should start at home.

mp3, 30:04, 20.7MB