Marcus Buckingham

Marcus Buckingham is the world’s foremost researcher on strengths, love, and performance at work — a distinction earned across more than three decades of large-scale empirical study and ten books that have collectively sold over five million copies. A Cambridge-educated social scientist, he spent nearly two decades as a Senior Researcher at the Gallup Organization, where he co-created the StrengthsFinder assessment now completed by over 30 million people worldwide, and co-authored First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths — two of the best-selling business books ever published.

Management speaker Marcus Buckingham is currently Head of People + Performance Research at the ADP Research Institute, where he leads some of the most ambitious workforce studies in the world. His annual People at Work report surveys tens of thousands of employees across more than 30 countries, generating data-driven insight into engagement, team dynamics, and the real drivers of performance. In 2022, he founded the Buckingham Institute, a dedicated research center advancing the science of outstanding human performance, and in 2024 launched Design Love In — an experience-design firm that translates his research into practical interventions helping organizations reshape how work actually feels, day to day.

His intellectual contributions have consistently challenged the orthodoxies of management. Concepts now embedded in leadership practice worldwide — “people leave managers, not companies,” “focus on strengths and manage around weaknesses,” “people crave attention, not feedback,” and “love is the most powerful force in business” — all originated in Buckingham’s books and Harvard Business Review articles, three of which rank among HBR’s most circulated cover stories of all time. His 2019 book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (co-authored with Ashley Goodall), dismantled the assumptions most organizations treat as truisms. His most recent book, Love + Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022), a Wall Street Journal bestseller, goes further: it presents a methodology for identifying the activities that energize each individual and redesigning work to center on them.

The Science Behind the Message

What distinguishes Buckingham from most thought leaders is the rigor behind the ideas. His conclusions are built on longitudinal research, psychometric tool design, and multi-country workforce surveys — not anecdote or consulting intuition. He studied psychometrics under the late Dr. Don Clifton, one of the founders of positive psychology, and has spent his career developing validated instruments to measure what actually predicts human performance. His StandOut assessment, used by over two million people, and the DLI Methodology emerging from his Design Love In venture represent the applied edge of a body of work that is as scientifically grounded as it is practically actionable.

As a speaker, Marcus Buckingham is one of the most sought-after voices on leadership and performance in the world, having addressed more than 250,000 people annually for over three decades. Organizations including Microsoft, Disney, lululemon, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Wells Fargo, and Facebook book him not for inspiration alone, but for the evidence-backed frameworks he delivers. Audiences leave with a precise, research-grounded understanding of how to identify their strengths, lead teams more effectively, and build work cultures where people do their best — not because they are told to, but because the conditions are designed for it.