In my continuing hobby of book reviewing, the next book up on the review list is a personal productivity book written by Marcus Buckingham entitled “The Truth About You”. The book comes with a short DVD and a small notebook (ReMemo Pad) that is used with the principles of the book.
To start with, everything is short in this book. The DVD is only about 20 minutes long, and consists of the author basically reciting a portion of the book dramatically. The book is only 110 pages long, and has a lot of blank space and pages to fill even that it. And the ReMemo pad is way to large to carry around in a pocket as is suggested in the book.
Also, the book is rather bulky, consisting of a paperback book glued into a hard cover that holds the notepad and DVD. It makes it very hard to carry this around or hold to read. I finally decided to pull the book out of the “case” and that helped.
As far as the content, it seems rather fluff and shallow. Mr. Buckingham stresses five points in the book: 1) Performance is always the point. 2) Your strengths aren’t what you are good at, and your weaknesses aren’t what you’re bad at. 3) When it comes to your job, the “What” always trumps the “Why” and the “Who”. 4) You’ll never find the perfect job. 5) You’ll never turn your weaknesses into strengths. He coaches to create plans to play to your strengths, with little in the way of letting you know how to go about it.
Overall, I found this book to be lacking in many ways. There are much better books out there about productivity.