How I Work

Marcus Buckingham on the four questions he asks himself every week

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Episode notes

My guest today is Marcus Buckingham. Marcus is the author of a stack of best-selling books, including First, Break All the Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths, The One Thing You Need to Know, and Stand Out, to name a few. His latest book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Publishing, 2019) takes an in-depth look at the lies that pervade our workplaces and the core truths that will help us change it for the better.

Marcus has appeared on “Larry King Live,” “The Today Show” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and now leads People + Performance research at the ADP Research Institute and remains CEO The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC).

I was keen to get Marcus on the show as he is someone who challenges the status quo of how organisations operate, and I was keen to see how he had applied his advice in his own life.

In our chat, we cover:
  • The four questions Marcus asks himself every week
  • Why "do what you love" is bad advice
  • Why “work-life balance” is an unhelpful concept
  • How Marcus has reduced the amount of work he loathes and increased the amount of work he loves
  • How Marcus reframed how he thinks about networking and mingling to find it more enjoyable
  • How Marcus made firing people a less awful task
  • Marcus’s process for creating great keynote presentations
  • How Marcus thinks about the opening of his speeches
  • Why the annual planning process organisations use is broken - and how to fix it
  • Why Marcus thinks about work as a collection of projects

Find out more about Marcus via his website, get your hands on his most recent book Nine Lies About Work, and sign up to the Freethinking Leader Coalition.

Visit https://www.amanthaimber.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.

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