English Culture

Your organization's culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. People's competencies should be measured and their weaknesses shored up. People crave feedback. These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they're lies. As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies - distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking - running through our organizational lives.

For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: The union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.

English police constable Molly Blue is devastated when an assault forces her to endure weeks of therapy and disrupts her promising career. The cute physiotherapist getting her back on her feet is an intriguing distraction at least. Physiotherapist Kudzi Mufaro is a bold, confident woman in every area of her life except one. She hasn't told her Zimbabwean parents she's gay. That probably explains the parade of men her family keeps trotting past her nose. Is it time to finally be honest? But when Molly takes a visit home, it rocks her to the core.

The ever-increasing pace of change in today's organizations requires us all to understand and quickly adapt to constant shifts in the way our companies operate and how work gets done. Developing your own and your team's learning agility will keep your skills fresh, and help you stay flexible, grow from mistakes, and successfully respond to unexpected challenges.

Imagine a world where personal and professional growth are combined, where improving your relationships and owning your strengths at work translate directly into the rest of your life. Creating a company culture like that is not a dream. Through personal stories and real-life conversations, Jonathan Raymond takes you into the room with managers and employees where real culture change happens and shows you a new kind of employee mentoring where each person gets the real-time feedback, support, and clear boundaries we all need.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the 21st century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.

Caught up in Hitler's Final Solution to annihilate Europe's Jews, 15-year-old Jack Mandelbaum is torn from his family and thrown into the nightmarish world of the concentration camps. Here, simple existence is a constant struggle, and Jack must learn to live hour to hour, day to day. Despite intolerable conditions, he resolves not to hate his captors and vows to see his family again. But even with his strong will to survive, how long can Jack continue to play this life-and-death game?

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

This timely and powerful novel tells the story of three different children seeking refuge. Josef is a Jewish boy living in 1930s Nazi Germany. With the threat of concentration camps looming, he and his family board a ship bound for the other side of the world. Isabel is a Cuban girl in 1994. With riots and unrest plaguing her country, she and her family set out on a raft, hoping to find safety in America. Mahmoud is a Syrian boy in 2015. With his homeland torn apart by violence and destruction, he and his family begin a long trek toward Europe.

Uncommon Grounds tells the story of coffee from its discovery on a hill in ancient Abyssinia to the advent of Starbucks. In this updated edition of the classic work, Mark Pendergrast reviews the dramatic changes in coffee culture over the past decade, from the disastrous "Coffee Crisis" that caused global prices to plummet to the rise of the Fair Trade movement and the "third-wave" of quality-obsessed coffee connoisseurs.

Inappropriate workplace conduct, lateness, sexually offensive behavior, productivity and communication issues...these are just a few of the uncomfortable topics bosses must sometimes discuss with their employees. 101 Tough Conversations to Have with Employees offers realistic sample dialogues managers can use to facilitate clear, direct interactions with their employees, helping to sidestep potential awkwardness and meet issues head-on.

More than half of American adults and more than 75 percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. American Cosmic examines the mechanisms at work behind the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, a system that is changing and even supplanting traditional religions.

In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that the Objectives and Key Results system has spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

Interstellar, from acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan, takes us on a fantastic voyage far beyond our solar system. Yet in The Science of Interstellar, Kip Thorne, the physicist who assisted Nolan on the scientific aspects of Interstellar, shows us that the movie's jaw-dropping events and stunning, never-before-attempted visuals are grounded in real science. Thorne shares his experiences working as the science adviser on the film and then moves on to the science itself.

A note is left on a car windshield, an old dog dies, and Kent Nerburn finds himself back on the Lakota reservation where he traveled more than a decade before with a tribal elder named Dan. The touching, funny, and haunting journey that ensues goes deep into reservation boarding-school mysteries, the dark confines of sweat lodges, and isolated Native homesteads far back in the Dakota hills in search of ghosts that have haunted Dan since childhood.

Although we usually think of technology as something unique to modern times, our ancestors began to create the first technologies millions of years ago in the form of prehistoric tools and weapons. Over time, eight key technologies gradually freed us from the limitations of our animal origins.

Video game sales as a whole have continued to grow, now raking in twice as much money per year as the entire film industry, and countless psychologists have turned their attention to the effects gaming has on us: our confidence, our identity, and our personal growth. The Psychology of Zelda applies the latest psychological findings, plus insights from classic psychology theory, to Link, Zelda, Hyrule, and the players who choose to wield the Master Sword.

Lyn has her pottery artwork, her precocious kid, Willow, and the uncertain terrain of her midlife to keep her mind, heart and hands busy. June, a Métis Studies professor, yearns to uproot from Vancouver and move. With her loving partner, Sigh, and their faithful pup, June decides to buy a house in the last place on earth she imagined she’d end up: back home in Winnipeg with her family.

For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: Passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today’s dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. In Give and Take, Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton’s highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom.

The ultimate handbook for fostering and cultivating a strong team culture, from the New York Times best-selling author of The Culture Code and The Talent Code.