Episode Details

Marcus Buckingham has spent more than 25 years studying what makes people extraordinary at work, and his newest research points to a word most businesses are too nervous to use: love.

In this episode of Truth Works, host Jessica Neal sits down with the co-creator of StrengthsFinder and author of First, Break All the Rules to talk about why Net Promoter Score barely predicts anything, why not one of the world's top business schools teaches the most powerful force in business, and how even a Netflix-level performance culture can accidentally train its best people to feel afraid.

Marcus traces his own fascination with talent back to a UK brewery with two thousand pubs, the unlikely origin of Gallup's decades of research into what separates great performers from everyone else. He walks through the "five feelings," control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, and growth, that decide whether a customer or an employee ever ends up loving a company, and why skipping the order backfires every time.

The conversation also gets personal: what Marcus calls "red threads," the parts of a job someone loves for no explainable reason, why no one else can spot yours for you, and what happens when AI starts writing your performance review before you have said a word to it. Marcus closes with the idea he calls mover and maker, that every person is, whether they notice it or not, making an experience for someone else in every single interaction.

Guest: Marcus Buckingham, researcher and author of First, Break All the Rules, Nine Lies About Work, and Love + Work
Host: Jessica Neal

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