Organizational Health

The unprecedented access to other humans that technology provides has ironically freed us from engaging with them. According to social psychologist Adam Waytz, our increasingly human-free lives come with a serious cost that we’ve already begun to pay: the loss of our humanity. Humans have superpowers. More than any other psychological stimulus, our presence can make experiences feel significant, inspire moral behavior, and encourage action. The Power of Human shows us how to rehumanize and harness these unique abilities to improve our lives, beginning with our jobs.

Behavior change is hard, but O’Mara shows that by adopting strategies that are well-founded in the science of brain and behavior, individuals and organizations can adapt to the demands of the modern world.

After a period of tremendous upheaval, it is necessary for organizations to transform alongside their employees and welcome new ways of working. While it is impossible to predict which changes will be successful, it is crucial for leaders to now ask: what should work look like to achieve productive, healthy, and safe organizations? In Brave New Workplace, Julian Barling argues that we should focus on creating environments in which employees can flourish, rather than relying on the resiliency of workers to withstand difficult working conditions.

To perform better in any situation - in your career, hobbies, relationships, or in any facet of your life - it is critical to develop psychological skills, which, just like physical abilities, can be taught, learned, and practiced. Both as individuals and as groups, we can tone these psychological skills and use them to heighten awareness, foster talents and technical abilities, and reach peak performance. Mental preparedness and psychological awareness are the keys to thriving in any environment.

In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant. Groups are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

"Your story is your life," says Loehr. As human beings, we continually tell ourselves stories: of success or failure; of power or victimhood; stories that endure for an hour, or a day, or an entire lifetime. We have stories about our work, our families and relationships, our health; about what we want and what we're capable of achieving.

Time-pressed professionals looking for practical guidance to shape their current or future safety programs should use this book. Pre-Accident Investigations: An Introduction to Organizational Safety helps to identify complex potential incidents before they take place. Based around the New View of human error, it offers established human performance theory in a highly practical context.

We've decided by consensus that consensus is good. In In Defense of Troublemakers, psychologist Charlan Nemeth argues that this principle is completely wrong: left unchallenged, the majority opinion is often biased, unoriginal, or false. It leads planes and markets to crash, causes juries to convict innocent people, and can quite literally make people think blue is green. In the name of comity, we embrace stupidity. We can make better decisions by embracing dissent. Dissent forces us to question the status quo, consider more information, and engage in creative decision-making.

Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we are all susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes can make us poor and unhealthy. We often make bad decisions about education, personal finance, health care, family, and the environment.

This book is for anyone who has experienced a difficult person at work. Revealing the nine different types of difficult people, there's a quick quiz so you can work out the personality type you're dealing with, and how to communicate with them effectively.

Now, based on years of academic research, The Formula finally unveils the ground-breaking discoveries of their pioneering study, not only highlighting the scientific and mathematic principles that underpin success, but also revolutionizing our understanding of: Why performance is necessary but not adequate. Why "experts" are often wrong How to assemble a creative team primed for success. How to most effectively engage our networks.

How many people does the ideal team contain? How do groups bond, earn trust and forge shared identities? How can leaders build environments adaptable enough to respond to shocks and still enable people to thrive together? How can you feel close to people if your only point of contact is a phone or a computer? In The Social Brain leading experts from the worlds of evolutionary psychology and business management come together to offer a primer on great team working. They explain what size groups work and how to shape them according to the nature of the task at hand.

Enchantment, as defined by bestselling business guru Guy Kawasaki, is not about manipulating people. It transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility and civility into affinity. It changes the skeptics and cynics into the believers and the undecided into the loyal. Enchantment can happen during a retail transaction, a high-level corporate negotiation, or a Facebook update.

What does the collapse of sub-prime lending have in common with a broken jackscrew in an airliner’s tailplane? These were systems that drifted into failure. While pursuing success in a dynamic, complex environment with limited resources and multiple goal conflicts, a succession of small, everyday decisions eventually produced breakdowns on a massive scale. The growth of complexity in society has outpaced our understanding of how complex systems work and fail. This book explores complexity theory and systems thinking to understand better how complex systems drift into failure.

Relying on extensive research and interviews, and carefully examined personal experience, The Likeability Trap delivers an essential examination of the pressure put on women to be amiable at work, home, and in the public sphere, and explores the price women pay for internalizing those demands. Rather than advising listeners to make themselves likeable, Menendez empowers them to examine how they perceive themselves and others and explores how the concept of likeability is riddled with cultural biases.

We’ve all had those perfect moments when events that could never be predicted, let alone controlled, remarkably seem to guide us along our path. Carl Jung called this phenomena “synchronicity” - “a collaboration between persons and events that seems to enlist the cooperation of fate.” In this book, Joseph Jaworski argues that the right state of mind will make you the kind of person who can enlist the cooperation of fate and take advantage of synchronicity, creating the conditions for “predictable miracles.”

What does it mean to be yourself at work? As a leader, how do you strike the right balance between vulnerability and authority? This book explains the role of authenticity in emotionally intelligent leadership. You'll learn how to discover your authentic self, when emotional responses are appropriate, how conforming to specific standards can hurt you, and when you need to feel like a fake.

How do you make sure your brand connects with consumers? Branding that Means Business draws from the authors’ experience and business literature as well as psychology, sociology, and even anthropology to show listeners that while any brand serves the business, the mechanisms that enable it are all about connecting with people. Listeners will learn how to create, maintain, and operationalize their brand, and think creatively about how to differentiate their product and most importantly, make consumers fall in love with it.

If you have ever felt unsure or uncomfortable when facing a social dilemma, John Bridges answers these questions and more in his classic handbook for men. The rules were simpler in bygone days, but technological changes have caused seismic shifts to the cultural landscape of 21st century. Do the rules of common courtesy still apply?

Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way much of what we do can be defined as being motivators. From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we've assumed.