Work Behavior

The human brain is an impossibly complex and delicate instrument—capable of extraordinary calculations, abundant creativity, and linguistic dexterity. But the brain is not just the most brilliant of evolutionary wonders. It's also one of the most bizarre. This book shows a whole other side of how brains work—from the patient who is afraid to take a shower because she fears her body will slip down the drain to a man who is convinced he is a cat and a woman who compulsively snacks on cigarette ashes.

Every manager makes tough calls - it comes with the job. And the hardest decisions are the "gray areas" - situations where you and your team have worked hard to find an answer, you've done the best analysis you can, and you still don't know what to do. But you have to make a decision. In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers a powerful, practical, and even radical way to resolve these problems.

In A Minute to Think, Juliet Funt, a globally recognized warrior in the battle against busyness, provides a powerful guide that will give you the permission, framework, and specific direction you need.

In this bold, enlightening book, social psychologist and professor Daniel M. Cable takes leaders into the minds of workers and reveals the surprising secret to restoring their zest for work. Disengagement isn't a motivational problem, it's a biological one. Humans aren't built for routine and repetition. We're designed to crave exploration, experimentation, and learning - in fact, there's a part of our brains, which scientists have coined "the seeking system", that rewards us for taking part in these activities. But the way organizations are run prevents many of us from following our innate impulses. As a result, we shut down.

“Accountability is the glue that ties commitment to the result." This quote, from author Bob Proctor, illustrates perfectly the key role accountability plays in personal and organizational success. But it begs the question: If accountability brings results then how do I ensure it in my own life? It feels like nobody is accountable today. Excuses abound, and our society seems to have fostered an atmosphere of complacency. This culture of complacency can seriously hurt your team or organization.

Shorter tells the story of entrepreneurs and leaders all over the world who have discovered how to shrink the workweek without cutting salaries or sacrificing productivity or revenues. They show that by reducing distractions, eliminating inefficiencies, and creating time for high-quality focus and collaboration, four-day workweeks can boost recruitment and retention, make leaders more thoughtful and companies more sustainable, and improve work-life balance.

Many workers believe that to compete with other top talent they must embrace a culture that rewards long hours and constant connection to work. Businesses and society have encouraged this by endorsing busyness, overwork, and extreme commitment as the most valued traits in workers. But more often it's an implicit contract, a buildup of organizational and cultural norms and the adoption of new technologies that increasingly make it easy to tether people to work. Either way, this workaholic behavior is unhealthy and counterproductive for workers and for organizations. It's time to fight back.

In The 4 Day Week, entrepreneur and business innovator Andrew Barnes makes the case for the four-day week as the answer to many of the ills of the 21st-century global economy. Barnes conducted an experiment in his own business, the New Zealand trust company Perpetual Guardian, and asked his staff to design a four-day week that would permit them to meet their existing productivity requirements on the same salary but with a 20 percent cut in work hours. The outcomes of this trial, which no business leader had previously attempted on these terms, were stunning.

Imagine what you could do with the time you spend writing emails every day. Complexity is killing companies' ability to innovate and adapt, and simplicity is fast becoming the competitive advantage of our time. Why Simple Wins helps leaders and their teams move beyond the feelings of frustration and futility that come with so much unproductive work in today's corporate world to create a corporate culture where valuable, essential, meaningful work is the norm.

Creating justice-centered organizations is the next frontier in DEI. This book shows how to go beyond compliance to address harm, share power, and create equity. Traditional DEI work has not succeeded at dismantling systems that perpetuate harm and exclude BIPOC groups.

Staying true to his trademark journalistic approach, Andrés Oppenheimer takes his listeners on yet another journey, this time across the globe, in a thought-provoking search to understand what the future holds for today's jobs in the foreseeable age of automation.

Francesca Gino has been studying rebels in life and in the workplace for more than 15 years. She has discovered that rebels - those who practice "positive deviance" at work - are harder to manage, but they are good for the bottom line: their passion, drive, curiosity, and creativity raise the entire organization to a new level. And she has found that at home, rebels are more engaged partners, parents, and friends. Packed with strategies for embracing rebellion at work and in life, Rebel Talent encourages all of us to rebel against what’s comfortable, so that we can thrive.

There are two kinds of managers in the world, those who have supervised non-team players and those who will. Those who have had this experience know how a non-team player can single-handedly kill a team’s productivity, focus, and morale. Most managers are woefully unprepared to work through these situations but it doesn’t have to be that way.

When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book.

With increased demand for hybrid and fully remote work styles, most firms understand that some form of distance work is here to stay—and have put some remote protocols in place. But many companies either see the shift to remote work as a threat to their culture and management style, or they just don’t know how to make the transition. It’s time to take advantage of the many opportunities remote work presents. This book will tell you how.

Too many people associate creativity solely with the arts, even though to be an incredible scientist, engineer, or entrepreneur requires immense creativity. Combining creativity tools and techniques with real-world stories of innovative people and businesses, this audiobook is a provocation, an inspiration, and an invitation to unleash the innate creativity that lies within each of us. It offers a more dynamic and integrative way to adapt and innovate, one that allows us the freedom to access our full human selves.

We are living in an epidemic of disengagement and despair that calls us to action. Awakening Compassion at Work answers the call, showing us new ways to enliven the humanity of work and in so doing address the suffering of the world and create an innovative, optimistic, and engaged workforce.

People Operations explains how leaders at small- and medium-sized businesses can stop spending time on HR administration - "paperwork" - and start focusing on the "peoplework" that truly fuels employee growth and productivity. Authors Jay Fulcher, Kevin Marasco, and Tracy Cote provide listeners with a playbook for creating a massive competitive advantage by eliminating antiquated approaches to HR. The book takes a look at how work has changed and what companies need to do about it, and the new approach they must take to processes, systems, and best practices.

What should our post-COVID work world look like? In Connected Capitalism, David Weitzner shows us how to draw from the classic teachings of Judaism in order to positively transform our workplaces and our working lives. He outlines a philosophy that will empower the disenchanted to build a stable future in a world of crony capitalism, global pandemics, racial injustice, and social disconnect. Weitzner, a professor of management who chooses to look beyond management and mindfulness, envisions a workplace based on the ancient Jewish practices of mitzvah.

What if you were given the ultimatum: make a radical shift in your life, or lose it all? This was the question Alan Deutschman posed in "Change or Die", his sensational cover story for the May 2005 issue of Fast Company. Surprisingly, Deutschman concluded that although we all have the innate capability and fundamental need to change our behavior, we rarely ever do.