“Standard operating procedure” used to be how organizations went about setting a routine and ensuring results, but times have changed, and Bill Taylor is our guide to companies around the globe that are doing business differently—and brilliantly. This is not a book about sweeping disruption, but about the simple steps companies are taking to put their values to work to enrich the employee and customer experience with imagination, conviction, and a desire to subvert the status quo. Taylor is a natural storyteller who lets his protagonists—leaders who refuse to accept “business-as-usual”—drive his thesis that business brilliance is available to every organization and not the sole property of Silicon Valley startups.

Modern organizations face a particularly difficult challenge, not just from competitors or advancing technology, or even the global marketplace, but also from a dual responsibility to grow the company as well as the people within the company. While some managers might grouse about the burden, in An Everyone Culture, Kegan and Lahey explain that helping people realize their potential results in higher levels of performance and profitability. The authors lay out the methods necessary to and benefits derived from designing a culture that integrates personal development in an organization’s everyday work.

Danish brand consultant Martin Lindstrom has made a career of noticing, of looking up from his screen and scouring his environment for hundreds of thousands of details that fly under the radar of today’s holy grail of big data. More of an ethnographic researcher than pure marketer, he gathers a wide range of clues—from refrigerator magnet arrangement and grocery lists to unused toy train sets and geographic patterns of diabetes—in the service of understanding the unmet desires of customers. At a time when the crushing weight of digital tracking makes us feel like numbers and not people, Small Data reminds us that our individuality is still powerful and matters quite a deal to marketers, salespeople, and the world at large.

In Wonderland, Steven Johnson has picked up on the scent of entertainment and its popular intersection with the business world. In Johnson’s intensely readable history, it is made plain that arts and entertainment have long been crucial to the developments we as a global society have come to think of as “serious.” Beware the irony of dismissing this book as trivial or frivolous; Johnson shows us how frivolity has accompanied serious scientific endeavor for centuries. Smart companies and their leaders are already aware of the correlation, and Wonderland impressively recolors industrial global history to help all of us realize how important play has been since the birth of industry itself.

Cal Newport is an accomplished writer and scholar. Although an exemplary thinker in the realm of personal development, his work isn’t diminished by the stylistic abuses common there, and he has not proclaimed himself a “guru” in that landscape. What Newport provides with Deep Work is a timely guide for taking steps that lead not only to success, but to a life well lived. From Carl Jung’s ideas on building his Tower to focus on his studies to Newport’s own advice on quitting social media, the book provides valuable lessons and tools for eliminating distractions and doing your best, deepest work.

You won’t find it in the business section of your local bookstore, but sociology professor Matthew Desmond’s Evicted provides a haunting look at what is perhaps the most personally impactful business of all for the poor—that conducted between landlords and tenants. One of the strengths of the book is that he gains access to both sides of the story, telling the stories of those paying the rent and those collecting it, entering the homes of those facing eviction and riding along with landlords performing it. Offering a thick description of people clinging to “the margins of society” in an American city (our home city of Milwaukee), desperately trying not to fall off, Desmond details how eviction is not just a result

Whether it’s an iPhone or an online order, the canned beverage in your refrigerator or your morning cup of coffee, each has been on a complicated, global journey before it reaches your door. In Door to Door, Edward Humes documents those journeys by taking us through a day

in his family’s life, tracking each of the products they use back to their source. In the process, he gives us a broad overview and stunning detail of our modern transportation infrastructure—its daily frustrations, logistical complexity, and future possibilities. What it reveals is that, for all the recent advances in technology, it is our modern transportation infrastructure that has changed our lives and business more than anything else.

Iris Bohnet’s book presents perhaps the most comprehensive roadmap ever written for making equality in the workplace a reality. Bohnet acknowledges that we must continue to chisel away at overtly discriminatory behavior facing women and minorities, but writes that real change will happen when we systematically design against subconscious biases. Bohnet spends significant time identifying and explaining the subconscious biases that lurk everywhere, not only in our structures, but in ourselves. Using multiple research studies, she describes the ways in which our decision-making is hindered by our habits, and how—if we design strategies to circumvent our biases or remap our brains—we can remove any detrimental defensiveness out of the effort and can instead follow a plan.