“Overall, I found my experience with this similar to my experience with the first book of the serious "First, Break All the Rules" which is that the material is great but that it gets cheapened slightly by their focus on promoting Gallup.
If you haven't already you might benefit from reading "First, Break All The Rules" first as it lays down all the Gallup principles that this book is based on. After reading it I have been wanting to take their test to see how I fared. This lead me to one of two options: pay for the slightly older "Now, Discover Your Strengths" which goes much more into depth of what these strengths mean but contains the older, less accurate version of the test, or buy StrengthsFinder 2.0 which contains a newer, more accurate version of the test but, content-wise, is a condensed version of the previous book, with much of the the text it does contain being word-for-word match. Both books are hardcover and so cost a bit extra.
The proper approach that Gallup should have taken is either:
a) just update the old test and let those that bought the original to retake the test so that they don't have to kill money and trees to buy a SF2.0
or
b) Release SF2.0 as a softcover (or even online-only pdf or test) with some new information on the profiles (instead of rehashing them verbatim from NDYS) so that it wouldn't be cost-prohibited to buy both books.
They chose the route of trying to milk this franchise for what it's worth by releasing SF2.0 in hardcover only.
That being said, the test results were slightly surprising but made much sense. While taking the test I thought some the choices they were asking me to make didn't make sense as both seem to be equally representative of my talent, but it surprisingly worked out accurately after I looked over the results. It has made me think seriously about the projects I have taken on and plan to and I'm definitely glad I took the test.”
