Business Books to Watch in January 2018

In order of their release date, these are the books we'll be getting to know more as the new year begins. 

How to Get Sh*t Done: Why Women Need to Stop Doing Everything so They Can Achieve Anything by Erin Falconer, North Star Way

Erin Falconer, editor in chief and co-owner of the highly respected self-improvement site Pick the Brain (with over 1.8 million monthly page views), shows overscheduled, overwhelmed women how to do less so that they can achieve more.

Women live in a state of constant guilt: that we’re not doing enough, that we’re not good enough, that we can’t keep up. If we’re not climbing the corporate ladder, building our side hustle, preparing home-cooked meals, tucking the kids in at night, meditating daily, and scheduling playdates, date nights, and girls’ nights every week, we feel like we’re not living our best lives. Yet traditional productivity books—written by men—barely touch the tangle of cultural pressures that women feel when facing down a to-do list.

Erin Falconer will show you how to do less—a lot less. In fact, How to Get Sh*t Done will teach you how to zero in on the three areas of your life where you want to excel, and then it will show you how to off-load, outsource, or just stop giving a damn about the rest. As the founder of two technology start-ups and one of Refinery29’s Top 10 Women Changing the Digital Landscape for Good, Erin has seen what happens when women chase an outdated, patriarchal model of productivity, and in How to Get Sh*t Done she shows how even the most perfectionistic among us can tap into our inner free spirit and learn to feel like badasses, rather than drudges.

Packed with real-life advice, honest stories from Erin’s successful career, and dozens of actionable resources, How to Get Sh*t Done will forever reframe productivity so that you can stop doing everything for everyone and start doing what matters to you.

Work It: Secrets for Success from the Boldest Women in Business by Carrie Kerpen, TarcherPerigee

An empowering career guide featuring bold advice from 50 high-profile women on how to succeed in work, leadership and life that shows you don’t have to be a #Girlboss or “lean in” to have a dream career and live a life you love.

In Work It, CEO of Likeable Media and popular podcast host Carrie Kerpen shares lessons from her career and an “advisory board” of powerful women in a wide range of industries to help women everywhere make their aspirations a reality. Packed with actionable tips and stories from the likes of Sheryl Sandberg, Aliza Licht, and Reshma Saujani, this inspiring book reveals their counterintuitive secrets for success, including:

• Why women should ditch the 5-year plan to build a successful career
• How and when to use work “superpowers” vs. “pay-to-play” skills
• Why women must stop criticizing each other and start leveraging their collective power

With advice on everything from mastering social media to navigating office politics and the seemingly impossible work/life balance, Work It arms every woman with the courage and skills to achieve success and happiness on her terms.

Type R: Transformative Resilience for Thriving in a Turbulent World by Ama Marston, Stephanie Marston, PublicAffairs

Forget Type As and Bs. The future lies with Type Rs-the resilient individuals, leaders, businesses, families, and communities who turn challenges into opportunities in times of upheaval, crisis, and change.

In Type R, Ama Marston and Stephanie Marston explore Transformative Resilience and the strategies of those who use difficult circumstances as catalysts for growth—springing forward rather than bouncing back during turbulent times.

Here, Ama and Stephanie share inspiring stories of Type Rs thriving during unprecedented world events and increasing global pressures—from climate change to financial crises. They share the individual and collective triumphs of people coping with the stress of daily life and the challenges and disruptions that rattle all our lives at some point. And they draw upon research that spans the personal and the professional, the local and the global. Reaching across psychology, neuroscience, business, and politics, Type R demonstrates how we can use challenges to innovate, create new strengths, and grow.

Type R also teaches leaders, businesses, and organizations how to cultivate the critical Type R Vision and Culture, which is essential for navigating and thriving in disruptive change. This thought-provoking book proves that there is much we can learn from those who use change, stress, and adversity as springboards to progress in a chaotic world.

Ogilvy on Advertising in the Digital Age by Miles Young, Bloomsbury USA

From Miles Young, worldwide non-executive chairman of Ogilvy & Mather, comes a sequel to David Ogilvy’s bestselling advertising handbook featuring essential strategies for the digital age.

In this must-have sequel to the bestselling Ogilvy On Advertising, Ogilvy chairman Miles Young provides top insider secrets and strategies for successful advertising in the Digital Revolution. As comprehensive as its predecessor, this indispensable handbook dives deep into the digital ecosystem, discusses how to best collect and utilize data—the currency of the digital age—breaks down when and how to market to millennials, highlights the top five current industry giants, suggests best practices from brand response to social media, and offers 13 trend predictions for the future.

This essential guide is for any professional in advertising, public relations, or marketing seeking to remain innovative and competitive in today’s ever-expanding technological marketplace.

This Could Hurt: A Novel by Jillian Medoff, Harper

A funny and deeply felt novel that illuminates the pivotal role of work in our lives—a riveting fusion of The Nest, Up in the Air, and Then We Came to the End that captures the emotional complexities of five HR colleagues trying to balance ambition, hope, and fear as their small company is buffeted by economic forces that threaten to upend them.

Rosa Guerrero beat the odds as she rose to the top of the corporate world. An attractive woman of a certain age, the longtime Chief of Human Resources at the Ellery Consumer Research Group is still a formidable presence, even if her most vital days are behind her. A leader who wields power with grace and discretion, she has earned the devotion and loyalty of her staff. No one admirers Rosa more than her doting lieutenant Leo Smalls, a benefits vice president whose whole world is Ellery.

While Rosa is consumed with trying to address the needs of her staff within the ever-constricting limits of the company’s bottom line, her associate director Rob Hirsch, a middle-aged, happily married father of two, finds himself drawing closer to his “work wife” Lucy Bender, an enterprising single woman searching for something—a romance, a promotion—to fill the vacuum in her personal life. For Kenny Verville, a senior manager with an MBA, Ellery is a temporary stepping stone to bigger and better places—that is, if his high-powered wife has her way.

Compelling, flawed, and heartbreakingly human, these men and women scheme, fall in and out of love, and nurture dreams big and small. As their individual circumstances shift, one thing remains constant—Rosa, the sun around whom they all orbit. When her world begins to crumble, the implications for everyone are profound, and Leo, Rob, Lucy, and Kenny find themselves changed in ways beyond their reckoning.

Jillian Medoff explores the inner workings of an American company in all its brilliant, insane, comforting, and terrifying glory. Authentic, razor-sharp, and achingly funny, This Could Hurt is a novel about work, loneliness, love, and loyalty; about sudden reversals and unexpected windfalls—a novel about life.

The Motivation Toolkit: How to Align Your Employees' Interests with Your Own by David Kreps, W.W. Norton & Company

Renowned Stanford economist David M. Kreps reveals the fundamental principles of employee motivation.

Getting your employees to do their best work has never been easy. But it is a particular challenge for knowledge workers, who must attend to many different tasks and whose to-do list is often ambiguous, requiring outside-the-box thinking. Lists of dos and don’ts are rarely effective. Instead, your best bet is to align their interests with your own—the heart of motivation—and set them free to use their own drive and creativity on their, and your, behalf.

But how do you align their interests with your own? How do you avoid incentive schemes that warp priorities, encourage perfunctory and sloppy work, or cause unethical behavior?

In The Motivation Toolkit, economist and management expert David Kreps offers a variety of tools, drawn from the disciplines of economics and social psychology, that you can adapt to your specific situation to achieve better motivation. This starts with understanding both the economic and social relationship your employees have with their work, their jobs, and your organization, then using that understanding to find economic or psychological motivators that will work.

Whatever your business, and whether you’re a newly minted manager, a seasoned executive hungry for your employees’ best work, or a curious leader looking for new ways to be effective, The Motivation Toolkit will prove a useful and enlightening read.

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink, Riverhead Books

Daniel H. Pink, the #1 bestselling author of Drive and To Sell Is Human, unlocks the scientific secrets to good timing to help you flourish at work, at school, and at home.

Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don’t know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of “when” decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork.

Timing, it’s often assumed, is an art. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink shows that timing is really a science.

Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink reveals how best to live, work, and succeed. How can we use the hidden patterns of the day to build the ideal schedule? Why do certain breaks dramatically improve student test scores? How can we turn a stumbling beginning into a fresh start? Why should we avoid going to the hospital in the afternoon? Why is singing in time with other people as good for you as exercise? And what is the ideal time to quit a job, switch careers, or get married?

In When, Pink distills cutting-edge research and data on timing and synthesizes them into a fascinating, readable narrative packed with irresistible stories and practical takeaways that give readers compelling insights into how we can live richer, more engaged lives.

Reset: Business and Society in the New Social Landscape by James Rubin, Barie Carmichael, Columbia University Press

How businesses can rebuild trust in a transformed media environment.

As consumers, our access to—and appetite for—information about what and how we buy continues to grow. Powered by social media, increasingly we look at the companies behind the products and are disappointed when their actions do not meet our expectations. With engaged citizens acting as 24/7 auditors of corporate behavior, one formerly trusted company after another has had their business disrupted with astonishing velocity in the wake of what, in the past, might have been written off as a bad media cycle. Gone are the days when a company could hide behind “socially responsible” branding or when marketing controlled the corporate narrative. That control has shifted to engaged stakeholders in the new social landscape, requiring a more radical change to company practices.

James Rubin and Barie Carmichael provide a strategic roadmap for businesses to navigate the new era, rebuild trust, and find their voice. Reset traces the global decline of trust in business at the same time that the public’s expectations for business’s role in society is increasing. Today, businesses must bridge this widening gap at a time when online stakeholders are committed to holding business accountable for its behavior, with unprecedented internal and external scrutiny. This requires strategic solutions anchored in a critical outside-in understanding of the stakeholder footprint of the business model. Reset offers case studies of reputations lost and found, suggesting fundamental strategies to mitigate risk and build the corporate brand. In this new era of instant transparency, corporate behavior has become the proof of corporate character for recruiting and retaining both customers and the next generation of talent. Offering essential advice for managing brand, reputation, and risk, this book is a guide to navigating the pitfalls and taking advantage of the opportunities of the reset.

The High Potential's Advantage: Get Noticed, Impress Your Bosses, and Become a Top Leader by Jay Conger, Allan Church, Harvard Business Review Press

Do You Know What It Takes to Be a High Potential in Your Organization?

Being seen as a high-potential leader is essential to getting promoted and reaching your organization's upper echelons, but most companies keep their top-talent list a closely guarded secret. And the assessment process they use to decide who is and isn't a future leader is an even greater mystery.

The High Potential's Advantage takes you behind the scenes and shows how you can get on, and stay on, your company's fast track. Leadership development experts Jay Conger and Allan Church draw upon decades of research and experience—designing high-potential programs for hundreds of large well-known global organizations and assessing and coaching thousands of talented leaders—to answer the critical questions asked by ambitious individuals like you: What will it take for me to advance in this organization? What does my boss look for when deciding whether I’m a high potential? Once I'm on the list, then what? Can I fall off it and, if so, what do I do?

Revealing the key differentiators—five critical "X factors"—that set people apart across companies of all types, Conger and Church show what you need to do to achieve and maintain top-talent status. You’ll find detailed advice for cultivating and practicing each X factor, with numerous and rich examples from those on the verge of their first promotion to those only a step away from the C-suite. The High Potential's Advantage also shows you how to gain insight into and excel at the specific process your company uses to identify and develop high potentials—and how to determine which unique capabilities your company values the most. The High Potential's Advantage is the essential guide to becoming a leader in your organization.

The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win by Jeff Haden, Portfolio

From Inc.com’s most popular columnist, a counterintuitive—but highly practical—guide to finding and maintaining the motivation to achieve great things.

It’s comforting to imagine that superstars in their fields were just born better equipped than the rest of us. When a co-worker loses 20 pounds, or a friend runs a marathon while completing a huge project at work, we assume they have more grit, more willpower, more innate talent, and above all, more motivation to see their goals through.

But that’s not at actually true, as popular Inc.com columnist Jeff Haden proves. “Motivation” as we know it is a myth. Motivation isn’t the special sauce that we require at the beginning of any major change. In fact, motivation is a result of process, not a cause. Understanding this will change the way you approach any obstacle or big goal.

Haden shows us how to reframe our thinking about the relationship of motivation to success. He meets us at our level—at the beginning of any big goal we have for our lives, a little anxious and unsure about our way forward, a little burned by self help books and strategies that have failed us in the past—and offers practical advice that anyone can use to stop stalling and start working on those dreams.

Haden takes the mystery out of accomplishment, proving that success isn’t about spiritual awakening or a lightning bolt of inspiration, but about clear and repeatable processes. Using his own advice, Haden has consistently drawn 2 million readers a month to his posts, completed a 107-mile long mountain bike race, and lost 10 pounds in a month.

Success isn’t for the uniquely-qualified; it’s possible for any person who understands the true nature of motivation. Jeff Haden can help you transcend average and make lasting positive change in your life.

Treating People Well: The Extraordinary Power of Civility at Work and in Life by Lea Berman & Jeremy Bernard, Scribner

A guide to personal and professional empowerment through civility and social skills, written by two White House Social Secretaries who offer an important fundamental message—everyone is important and everyone deserves to be treated well.

Former White House social secretaries Lea Berman, who worked for George and Laura Bush, and Jeremy Bernard, who worked for Michelle and Barack Obama, have written an entertaining and uniquely practical guide to personal and professional success in modern life. Their daily experiences at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue taught them valuable lessons about how to work productively with people from different walks of life and points of view. These Washington insiders share what they’ve learned through first person examples of their own glamorous (and sometimes harrowing) moments with celebrities, foreign leaders and that most unpredictable of animals—the American politician.

This book is for you if you feel unsure of yourself in social settings, if you’d like to get along more easily with others, or if you want to break through to a new level of cooperation with your boss and coworkers. They give specific advice for how to exude confidence even when you don’t feel it, ways to establish your reputation as an individual whom people like, trust, and want to help, and lay out the specific social skills still essential to success—despite our increasingly digitized world. Jeremy and Lea prove that social skills are learned behavior that anyone can acquire, and tell the stories of their own unlikely paths to becoming the social arbiters of the White House, while providing tantalizing insights into the character of the first ladies and presidents they served.

This is not a book about old school etiquette; they explain the things we all want to know, like how to walk into a roomful of strangers and make friends, what to do about a difficult colleague who makes you dread coming to work each day, and how to navigate the sometimes-treacherous waters of social media in a special chapter on “Virtual Manners.” For lovers of White House history, this is a treasure of never-before-published anecdotes from the authors and their fellow former social secretaries as they describe pearl-clutching moments with presidents and first ladies dating back to the Johnson administration.

The authors make a case for the importance of a return to treating people well in American political life, maintaining that democracy cannot be sustained without public civility.

Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord, Silicon Guild

When it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams, Patty McCord says most companies have it all wrong.

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.

McCord advocates practicing radical honesty in the workplace, saying good-bye to employees who don’t fit the company’s emerging needs, and motivating with challenging work, not promises, perks, and bonus plans. McCord argues that the old standbys of corporate HR—annual performance reviews, retention plans, employee empowerment, and engagement programs—often end up being a colossal waste of time and resources. Her road-tested advice, offered with humor and irreverence, provides readers a different path for creating a culture of high performance and profitability.

Powerful will change how you think about work and the way a business should be run.

Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires by Shomari Wills, Amistad

The astonishing untold history of America’s first black millionaires: former slaves who endured incredible challenges to amass and maintain their wealth for a century, from the Jacksonian period to the Roaring Twenties, and self-made entrepreneurs whose unknown success mirrored that of American business heroes such as Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison

While Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Michael Jordan, and Will Smith are among the estimated 35,000 black millionaires in the nation today, these famous celebrities were not the first blacks to reach the storied one percent. Between the years of 1830 and 1927, as the last generation of blacks born into slavery was reaching maturity, a small group of smart, tenacious, and daring men and women broke new ground to attain the highest levels of financial success.

Black Fortunes is an intriguing look at these remarkable individuals, including Napoleon Bonaparte Drew—author Shomari Wills’ great-great-great-grandfather—the first black man in Powhatan County (contemporary Richmond) to own property in post-Civil War Virginia. His achievements were matched by other unknown black entrepreneurs including:

• Mary Ellen Pleasant, who used her Gold Rush wealth to further the cause of abolitionist John Brown.
• Robert Reed Church, who became the largest landowner in Tennessee.
• Hannah Elias, the mistress of a New York City millionaire, who used the land her lover gave her to build an empire in Harlem.
• Orphan and self-taught chemist Annie Turnbo-Malone, who developed the first national brand of hair care products.
• Madam C. J Walker, Turnbo-Malone’s employee, who would earn the nickname of America’s “first female black millionaire.”
• Mississippi school teacher O. W. Gurley, who developed a piece of Tulsa, Oklahoma into a “town” for wealthy black professionals and craftsmen that would become known as “the Black Wall Street.”

A fresh, little-known chapter in the nation’s story—A blend of Hidden Figures, Titan, and The Tycoons—Black Fortunes illuminates the birth of the black business titan and the emergence of the black marketplace in America as never before.

Social Startup Success: How the Best Nonprofits Launch, Scale Up, and Make a Difference by Kathleen Kelly Janus, Da Capo Lifelong Books

Kathleen Kelly Janus, a lecturer at the Stanford University Program on Social Entrepreneurship and the founder of the successful social enterprise Spark, set out to investigate what makes a startup succeed or fail.

She surveyed more than 200 high-performing social entrepreneurs and interviewed dozens of founders. Social Startup Success shares her findings for the legions of entrepreneurs working for social good, revealing how the best organizations get over the revenue hump. How do social ventures scale to over $2 million, Janus's clear benchmark for a social enterprise's sustainability? Janus, tapping into strong connections to the Silicon Valley world where many of these ventures are started or and/or funded, reveals insights from key figures such as DonorsChoose founder Charles Best, charity:water's Scott Harrison, Reshma Saujani of Girls Who Code and many others. Social Startup Success will be social entrepreneurship's essential playbook; the first definitive guide to solving the problem of scale.

Herding Tigers: Be the Leader That Creative People Need by Todd Henry, Portfolio

A practical handbook for every new manager charged with leading teams to creative brilliance, from the author of The Accidental Creative and Die Empty.

New managers in creative fields got the job because they were good at being makers—and learned to strategize their time, relationships, and mindset to produce the best creative work possible on their own. But when they’re put in charge, the rules change, and they must unlearn their hard-won working habits in favor of new ones, and navigate a minefield of complex relational dynamics with colleagues and bosses.

Successful leaders of creative teams have mastered the difficult transition from doing the work to leading the work, and this book shows how. Todd Henry picks up where The Accidental Creative left off, and provides an indispensable handbook of on-the-ground, tactical advice for new managers of creatives. He draws from interviews with brilliant leaders and his experience consulting in creative organizations to share a wealth of practical advice, including:

• Why conflict can be a good thing, and how to manage it in a healthy way.
• How to build time and attention buffers to protect your team’s ability to do its best work.
• How to deal with the imbalance of power on your team, and manage inevitable struggles that arise.
• How to create “hunting trails” that will keep your team inspired and motivated to deliver brilliant work.
• Why you should still “get your hands dirty”, even as you strive to remove yourself from the work.
• Why you should fight to measure value, not time, when evaluating your team’s work.

Readers will come away with the tools and resources to handle the most challenging aspects of new leadership, from how to talk to your work friends when you’ve been promoted above them to how to maintain quality control without being a micromanager.

Cowgirl Power: How to Kick Ass in Business and Life by Gay Gaddis, Center Street

As the owner of one of the largest female-owned independent agencies in the U.S. and former chairman of C200, one of the country's top women's business organizations, Gay Gaddis knows a thing or two about empowerment.

In Cowgirl Power, advertising CEO and cowgirl Gay Gaddis shares insights and examples for women to lead like fearless, risk-taking cowgirls: enhance and exude confidence, developing personal power on all fronts. Gay's secrets of success have roots in the spirited strength of real cowgirls who were fearless risk-takers in everything they did. They've inspired Gay. As the owner of a fully operational Texas Longhorn Cattle Ranch, Gay is a true cowgirl. And she brings cowgirl power to the boardroom, as well. In Cowgirl Power, Gay shares her story and an inspiring action plan for women who are ready to blaze their own trail in business and in life. Whatever your goals—to start a family or your own business, to climb the corporate ladder, organize community outreach, or run for office, Gay says it all comes down to power: knowing how to develop it and not being afraid to take it when it comes your way. You build your own power through knowledge, hard work, excellence, creativity and good will and Gay's book has the Cowgirl Tool Kit that supplies all the tools to get there!

The Gambler: How Penniless Dropout Kirk Kerkorian Became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History by William C. Rempel, Dey Street Books

The rags-to-riches story of one of America’s wealthiest and least-known financial giants, self-made billionaire Kirk Kerkorian—the daring aviator, movie mogul, risk-taker, and business tycoon who transformed Las Vegas and Hollywood to become one of the leading financiers in American business

Kirk Kerkorian combined the courage of a World War II pilot, the fortitude of a scrappy boxer, the cunning of an inscrutable poker player and an unmatched genius for making deals. He never put his name on a building, but when he died he owned almost every major hotel and casino in Las Vegas. He envisioned and fostered a new industry—the leisure business. Three times he built the biggest resort hotel in the world. Three times he bought and sold the fabled MGM Studios, forever changing the way Hollywood does business.

His early life began as far as possible from a place on the Forbes List of Billionaires when he and his Armenian immigrant family lost their family farm to foreclosure. He was four. They arrived in Los Angeles penniless and moved often, staying one step ahead of more evictions. Young Kirk learned English on the streets of L.A., made pennies hawking newspapers and dropped out after eighth grade. How he went on to become one of the richest and most generous men in America—his net worth as much as $20 billion—is a story largely unknown to the world. That’s because what Kirk Kerkorian valued most was his privacy. His very private life turned to tabloid fodder late in life when a former professional tennis player falsely claimed that the 85-year-old billionaire fathered her child.

In this engrossing biography, investigative reporter William C. Rempel digs deep into Kerkorian’s long-guarded history to introduce a man of contradictions—a poorly educated genius for deal-making, an extraordinarily shy man who made the boldest of business ventures, a careful and calculating investor who was willing to bet everything on a single roll of the dice.

Unlike others of his status and importance, Kerkorian made few public appearances and strenuously avoided personal publicity. His friends and associates, however, were some of the biggest names in business, entertainment and sports—among them Howard Hughes, Ted Turner, Steve Wynn, Michael Milken, Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Elvis Presley, Mike Tyson, and Andre Agassi.

When he died in 2015 two years shy of the century mark, Kerkorian had outlived many of his closest friends and associates. Now, Rempel meticulously pieces together revealing fragments of Kerkorian’s life, collected from diverse sources—war records, business archives, court documents, news clippings, and the recollections and recorded memories of longtime pals and relatives. In The Gambler, Rempel illuminates this unknown, self-made man and his inspiring legacy as never before.

The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups by Daniel Coyle, Bantam

A toolkit for building a cohesive, innovative and successful group culture, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Talent Code.

Daniel Coyle spent three years researching the question of what makes a successful group tick, visiting some of the world’s most productive groups—including Pixar, Navy SEALs, Zappos, IDEO, and the San Antonio Spurs. Coyle discovered that high-performing groups relentlessly generate three key messages that enable them to excel: 1) Safety - we are connected. 2) Shared Risk - we are vulnerable together. 3) Purpose - we are part of the same story. Filled with first-hand reporting, fascinating science, compelling real-world stories, and leadership tools that can apply to businesses, schools, sports, families, and any kind of group, The Culture Code will revolutionize how you think about creating and sustaining successful groups.

Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More by Morten Hansen, Simon & Schuster

From the New York Times bestselling author of Great by Choice comes an authoritative, practical guide to individual performance—based on analysis from an exhaustive, groundbreaking study.

Why do some people perform better at work than others? This deceptively simple question continues to confound professionals in all sectors of the workforce. Now, after a unique, five-year study of more than 5,000 managers and employees, Morten Hansen reveals the answers in his “Seven Work Smarter Practices” that can be applied by anyone looking to maximize their time and performance.

Each of Hansen’s seven practices is highlighted by inspiring stories from individuals in his comprehensive study. You’ll meet a high school principal who engineered a dramatic turnaround of his failing high school; a rural Indian farmer determined to establish a better way of life for women in his village; and a sushi chef, whose simple preparation has led to his restaurant (tucked away under a Tokyo subway station underpass) being awarded the maximum of three Michelin stars. Hansen also explains how the way Alfred Hitchcock filmed Psycho and the 1911 race to become the first explorer to reach the South Pole both illustrate the use of his seven practices (even before they were identified).

Each chapter contains questions and key insights to allow you to assess your own performance and figure out your work strengths, as well as your weaknesses. Once you understand your individual style, there are mini-quizzes, questionnaires, and clear tips to assist you focus on a strategy to become a more productive worker. Extensive, accessible, and friendly, Great at Work will help you achieve more by working less, backed by unprecedented statistical analysis.

Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence-and How You Can, Too by Gary Vaynerchuk, Harper Business

Four-time New York Times bestselling author Gary Vaynerchuk offers new lessons and inspiration drawn from the experiences of dozens of influencers and entrepreneurs who rejected the predictable corporate path in favor of pursuing their dreams by building thriving businesses and extraordinary personal brands

In his 2009 international bestseller Crush It, Gary insisted that a vibrant personal brand was crucial to entrepreneurial success, In Crushing It!, Gary explains why that’s even more true today, offering his unique perspective on what has changed and what principles remain timeless. He also shares stories from other entrepreneurs who have grown wealthier—and not just financially—than they ever imagined possible by following Crush It principles. The secret to their success (and Gary’s) has everything to do with their understanding of the social media platforms, and their willingness to do whatever it took to make these tools work to their utmost potential. That’s what Crushing It! teaches readers to do.

In this lively, practical, and inspiring book, Gary dissects every current major social media platform so that anyone, from a plumber to a professional ice skater, will know exactly how to amplify his or her personal brand on each. He offers both theoretical and tactical advice on how to become the biggest thing on old standbys like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat; podcast platforms like Spotify, Soundcloud, iHeartRadio, and iTunes; and other emerging platforms such as Musical.ly. For those with more experience, Crushing It! illuminates some little-known nuances and provides innovative tips and clever tweaks proven to enhance more common tried-and-true strategies.

Crushing It! is a state-of-the-art guide to building your own path to professional and financial success, but it’s not about getting rich. It’s a blueprint to living life on your own terms.