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There is a noble promise at the heart of the new world of business: Everyone has the right to meaningful work, and people who do meaningful work create the most value in the marketplace. Even as the talent wars have fizzled into pink-slip parties, few senior executives would dispute the vital importance of finding, engaging, and developing the best people. Ask any CEO, "What's your company's most precious asset?" Without hesitation, the answer will be, "Our people." Ask the same CEO, "What's the primary source of your competitive advantage?" Chances are, the reply will be, "Our unique culture."

This kind of talk drives Marcus Buckingham nuts. It's not that he disagrees with the sentiments -- he's spent his 15-year career as a pioneering researcher and a global-practice leader at the Gallup Organization, making the link between people, their performance, and business results. What troubles him is the lack of rigor behind the rhetoric. "There's a juicy irony here," says the 35-year-old Cambridge-educated Brit. "You won't find a CEO who doesn't talk about a 'powerful culture' as a source of competitive advantage. At the same time, you'd be hard-pressed to find a CEO who has much of a clue about the strength of that culture. The corporate world is appallingly bad at capitalizing on the strengths of its people."

Buckingham, on the other hand, is remarkably good at communicating his subversive message. He has produced two best-selling books: First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently (Simon & Schuster, 1999), with coauthor Curt Coffman, and Now, Discover Your Strengths (The Free Press, 2001), with coauthor Donald O. Clifton. Meanwhile, Buckingham has helped build a ballooning consulting practice at Gallup, with more than 1,000 clients, including Best Buy, Disney, Fidelity Investments, Toyota, and Wells Fargo.

His mission, as he describes it, sounds almost quaint: "to create a better marriage between the dreams of workers and the drive of companies to win." His methodology is anything but quaint. Buckingham has led an effort inside Gallup to crunch three decades' worth of data on worker attitudes into actionable insights on human performance and productivity. First, he and his team tapped into a database of more than 1 million Gallup surveys that focused on workers from around the world. Although these workers had been asked many questions, there was one big question behind the interviews: "What does a strong and vibrant workplace look like?" Buckingham eventually distilled 12 core issues (called the "Q12" in Gallup-speak) that represent a simple barometer of the strength of any work unit.

Next, Buckingham's team ran massive number-crunching studies to analyze how answers to the Q12 shaped hard-core business results. The link between people and performance was vivid. The most "engaged" workplaces (those in the top 25% of Q12 scores) were 50% more likely to have lower turnover, 56% more likely to have higher-than-average customer loyalty, 38% more likely to have above-average productivity, and 27% more likely to report higher profitability.

Buckingham and his colleagues made one other finding that startled them: There was more variation in Q12 scores within companies than between companies. That is, in each of the more than 200 organizations that he analyzed, Buckingham found some of the most-engaged groups and some of the least-engaged groups. His conclusion: There is no such thing as a corporate culture. Companies are made up of many cultures, the strengths and weaknesses of which are a result of local conditions.