Organizational Culture

Hybrid work is here to stay - but what will it look like at your company? Organizations that mandate rigid, pre-pandemic policies of five days a week at the traditional, co-located office may risk a mass exodus of talent. But designing a hybrid office that furthers your business goals while staying true to your culture will require experimentation and rigorous planning.

Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help listeners choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization.

Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times best-selling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times. What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building.

Conklin’s audiobook is an interesting and informal discussion with the listener about the five principles of human performance; principle by principle, section by section. These five theories about how humans perform in organizations are principles, the building blocks of human performance, through which we have established a new way to think about safety and reliability in our worlds...and changing the way we think about work is a vital step toward improvement.

Get more of the communication ideas you want, from the authors you trust. With insights from leading experts, this book will inspire you to: rethink how you give feedback to employees; ask questions to encourage learning and the exchange of ideas; invest in the right virtual communication tools for your team or business; establish a language strategy for your company; negotiate effectively with anyone - including liars; and present data more powerfully using visualization.

In the tradition of Phil Knight's Shoe Dog comes the incredible untold story of how Netflix went from concept to company—all revealed by cofounder and first CEO Marc Randolph. From idea generation to team building to knowing when it's time to let go, That Will Never Work is not only the ultimate follow-your-dreams parable, but also one of the most dramatic and insightful entrepreneurial stories of our time.

From the time we learn to speak, we're told that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. When you become a manager, it’s your job to say it--and your obligation. Author Kim Scott was an executive at Google and then at Apple, where she developed a class on how to be a good boss. She has earned growing fame in recent years with her vital new approach to effective management, Radical Candor. Radical Candor is a simple idea: to be a good boss, you have to Care Personally at the same time that you Challenge Directly.

It is taken for granted in the knowledge economy that companies must employ the most talented performers to compete and succeed. Many firms try to buy stars by luring them away from competitors. But Boris Groysberg shows what an uncertain and disastrous practice this can be.

With this indispensable guide, you'll cultivate a values-driven approach to building a culture of sustained authentic inclusion where everyone can thrive; learn how to improve the interview process to avoid missing game-changing talent; develop a hybrid office protocol that works for everyone and a support infrastructure that aligns with universal design principles; uncover and eliminate the destructive influence of unconscious cognitive biases; understand unique problem-solving abilities such as lateral thinking, visual-spatial thinking, multisensory thinking, and much more.

We CAN create cultures where everyone does the best work of their lives and enjoys working together. Radical Respect offers a simple framework that helps us identify what gets in the way of that—and practical, tactical tips for how to get back on track. Candid stories from Scott’s career make it a memorable listen.

Following Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte’s groundbreaking examination of time management and stress, the prizewinning journalist now turns her attention to the greatest culprit in America’s quality-of-life crisis: the way our economy and culture conceive of work. Americans across all demographics, industries, and socioeconomic levels report exhaustion, burnout, and the wish for more meaningful lives. This full-system failure in our structure of work affects everything from gender inequality to domestic stability, and it even shortens our lifespans.

Author Matt LeMay explains agile in clear, jargon-free terms and provides concrete and actionable steps to help any team put its values and principles into practice. Examples from a wide variety of organizations, including small nonprofits and global financial enterprises, bring to life the on-the-ground realities of agile across industries and functions.

As our workloads expand, attention has never been more valuable. Or more difficult to keep. In Can I Have your Attention?, Curt Steinhorst shows business leaders how to cut through the noise and get their employees back to work. Curt has spent years helping Fortune 500 companies overcome distraction and achieve focus. With technology creating endless opportunities to "improve productivity", people spend so much time responding to the interruptions that they've lost the ability to focus and do their jobs.

Companies with the best cultures generate stock market returns of twice the general market and enjoy half the employee turnover of their peers. Their staff innovate more, deliver better customer service, and, hands-down, beat the competition. These companies outperform and disrupt their markets. Build It has found these rebels and the rule breakers. From small startups to global powerhouses, this book shows that courage, commitment and a people-centric mindset, rather than money and resources, are what you need to turn an average business into a category leader.

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are.

Backed by an extensive research project that looked at over 150 studies and articles, featured extensive interviews with over 150 executives, and analyzed over 250 global organizations, this book clearly breaks down the three environments that make up every single employee experience at every organization around the world and how to design for them. These are the cultural, technological, and physical environments. The Employee Experience Advantage guides listeners on a journey of creating a place where people actually want to show up to work.

The retired four-star general and and best-selling author of My Share of the Task shares a powerful new leadership model. Former General Stanley McChrystal held a key position for much of the War on Terror, as head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In Iraq, he found that despite the vastly superior resources, manpower, and training of the US Military, Al Qaeda had an advantage because of its structure as a loose network of small, independent cells. To defeat such an agile enemy, JSOC had to change its focus from efficiency to adaptability.

We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well. After decades of award-winning research, Amy Edmondson is here to upend our understanding of failure and make it work for us. In Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely.

In Impact Players, New York Times best-selling author and researcher Liz Wiseman reveals the secrets of these stellar professionals who play the game at a higher level. Drawing on insights from leaders at top companies, Wiseman explains what the most influential players are doing differently, how small and seemingly insignificant differences in how we think and act can make an enormous impact, and why - with a little coaching - this mindset is available to everyone who wants to contribute at their highest level.