This month we have new arrivals on internal communication; tech leadership; business models; finance; governance; critical looks at transformational leadership and big data; as well as a title by the co-creator of the Netflix culture deck.
You can see a list of all of our latest acquisitions from the last 6 months here.
Remember, book recommendations are always welcome!
Strategic internal communication : how to build employee engagement and performance / David Cowan
Strategic Internal Communication shows how to design and implement a strategy which will lead to engaged and motivated staff, increased productivity and consequently improved business performance. The book uses the author's own Dialogue Box tool designed to help companies explore more thoroughly what kinds of conversations they need to have with employees to address internal and cultural challenges. [Publisher text]
Weapons of math destruction : how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy / Cathy O'Neil.
Longlisted for the National Book Award and featured as a notable non-fiction book in 2016 by several publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Weapons of Math Destruction traces the arc of a person’s life, from school to retirement, and looks at models that score teachers and students, sort résumés, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole and prison sentences, and monitor our health. The models being used are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. [Publisher text]
Powerful : building a culture of freedom and responsibility / Patty McCord
Patty McCord helped create the unique and high-performing culture at Netflix, where she was chief talent officer. In her new book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, she shares what she learned there and elsewhere in Silicon Valley. [Author text]
The business model book / Adam J. Bock, Gerard George.
The Business Model Book combines the latest research, straightforward tools and current examples to bring this surprisingly tricky topic to life. Straightforward cases from the author's research and experience highlight key lessons. This book applies a novel, life-cycle based approach to make business models relevant to your company's development stage. [Publisher text]
The manager's path : a guide for tech leaders navigating growth and change / Camille Fournier
Managing people is difficult wherever you work. But in the tech industry, where management is also a technical discipline, the learning curve can be brutal—especially when there are few tools, texts, and frameworks to help you. In this practical guide, author Camille Fournier (tech lead turned CTO) takes you through each stage in the journey from engineer to technical manager. [Publisher text]
The dark side of transformational leadership : a critical perspective / Dennis Tourish
It is often taken for granted that transformational leadership is a good thing, and that leaders should have much more power than followers to decide what needs to be done. The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership confronts this orthodoxy by offering a rare critical perspective in the field of leadership studies, illustrating how such approaches can encourage narcissism, megalomania and poor decision-making on the part of leaders, at great expense to those organizations they are there to serve. [adapted from Publisher text]
The diversity bonus : how great teams pay off in the knowledge economy / Scott E. Page.
In The Diversity Bonus Scott Page presents overwhelming evidence that teams that include different kinds of thinkers outperform homogenous groups on complex tasks, producing what he calls “diversity bonuses.” These bonuses include improved problem solving, increased innovation, and more accurate predictions—all of which lead to better performance and results. Page shows that various types of cognitive diversity—differences in how people perceive, encode, analyze, and organize the same information and experiences—are linked to better outcomes. [Publisher text]
