Business Books to Watch in November 2018

We feel, in covering the best literature on business, it's as important to expose bad practices as it is to lift up "best practices." This month sees the release of a lot of great books in both categories.

In order of their release dare, here are 20 books we feel are worthy of slowing down for in the month of November, beginning with one we missed from late last month.

Work is Love Made Visible: A Collection of Essays About the Power of Finding Your Purpose From the World's Greatest Thought Leaders by Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, and Sarah McArthur, Wiley

Channel happiness and find your purpose with stories from the world’s leading minds.

Work is Love Made Visible offers the insights of some of the world’s greatest thought leaders as they tackle one of life’s most difficult treasure hunts: finding purpose. The word “purpose” is big. Very big. And heavy. It carries the weight of a lifetime of work and struggle; the weight of legacy, and the mass of days spent not doing something else. It’s something we all grapple with at some point—some of us find our purpose, others spend a lifetime searching. A lucky few grow to realize they’ve been working their purpose all along. Most of us aren’t quite that lucky; often, fulfilling your purpose requires some kind of change—career, lifestyle, habits, family—and what then? Are we selfish for the upheaval, or are we fulfilling destiny? Once we know our purpose, how do we pursue it?

This book asked those very questions of people who have followed their purpose and succeeded on a global scale. Their undistilled answers are here, lending you the wisdom of their experiences, their examples, inspiration, and motivations as they:

• Tackle the universal struggle with individual purpose and meaning
• Illustrate how personal thought patterns contribute to real-world action
• Move challenges into the opportunities of their lives
• Reveal how they arrived at their life’s purpose, and what they sacrificed to get there

We all want a meaningful life. We want to work together for a brighter future, we want to celebrate our differences and commit to good. We want to inspire others, nurture their talents, and help them grow. We want to look back one day on a life well-lived, and leave something behind that matters to the world. Work is Love Made Visible shows you how some of us have succeeded, and offers you insight and guidance so that you can do the same.

Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Guide to Building a Better World by Klaus Schwab, with Nicholas Davis, Currency

World Economic Forum Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab offers a practical companion and field guide to his previous book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Today, technology is changing everything—how we relate to one another, the way we work, how our economies and goverments function, and even what it means to be human.

One need not look hard to see how the incredible advances in artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, biotechnologies, and the internet of things are transforming society in unprecedented ways. But the Fourth Industrial Revolution is just beginning, says Schwab. And at a time of such tremendous uncertainty and such rapid change, he argues it’s our actions as individuals and leaders that will determine the trajectory our future will take. We all have a responsibility—as citizens, businesses, and institutions—to work with the current of progress, not against it, to build a future that is ethical, inclusive, sustainable, and prosperous.

Drawing on contributions from 200 top experts in fields ranging from machine learning to geoengineering to nanotechnology, to data ethics, Schwab equips readers with the practical tools to leverage the technologies of the future to leave the world better, safer, and more resilient than we found it.

Make Some Noise: The Unconventional Road to Dominance by Ken Schmidt, Simon & Schuster

The former director of communications at Harley-Davidson and one of the most sought-after speakers in the world reveals his exhilarating, innovative approach to creating customer loyalty and marketplace dominance.

Ken Schmidt is a wanted man. His role in transforming Harley-Davidson Motor Company—one of the most celebrated corporate success stories in history—led business leaders all over the world to seek his guidance. After all, how many companies can get their customers to tattoo their logo on their arms?

After having worked with more than one thousand companies worldwide, Schmidt is ready to share the secrets that spurred Harley-Davidson’s remarkable turnaround. An avid motorcycle enthusiast, Schmidt harnessed his passion for riding to create his famed Noise Cubed Trilogy—the three questions he asks every one of his clients. They assess a company’s positioning, competitiveness, and reputation, and are the key ingredients for any successful corporation:

• What do the customers your business served yesterday say about your business when they’re talking about you to prospective customers?
• What do you want them to say?
• What are you doing to get them to say it?

In Make Some Noise, Schmidt shares his full-throttle approach for businesses and individuals alike. Anyone looking to become more competitive and grow customer loyalty can learn from the case studies and experiences he shares. From a nondescript heavy construction company, to the most high-end “luxury” gas station in America, to Apple, and to his own personal landscaper, Schmidt illustrates how the answers to his trio of questions will yield a course of action to stand out in today’s marketplace.

Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition by Anthony Iannarino, Portfolio

The first ever playbook for B2B salespeople on how to win clients and customers who are already being serviced by your competition, from the author of The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need and The Lost Art of Closing.

Like it or not, sales is often a zero-sum game: Your win is someone else’s loss. Most salespeople work in mature, overcrowded industries, your offerings perceived (often unfairly) as commodities. Growth requires taking market share from your competitors, while they try to do the same to you. How else can you grow 12 percent a year in an industry that’s only growing by 3 percent?

It’s not easy for any salesperson to execute a competitive displacement—or, in other words, “eat their lunch.” You might think this requires a bloodthirsty “whatever it takes” attitude, but that’s the opposite of what works. If you act like a Mafia don, you only make yourself difficult to trust and impossible to see as a long-term partner. Instead, this book shows you how to find and maintain a long-term competitive advantage by taking steps like:

• ranking prospective new clients not by their size or convenience to you, but by who stands to gain the most from your solution.
• understanding the different priorities for everyone in your prospect’s organization, from the CEO to the accountants, and addressing their various concerns.
• developing a systematic contact plan for all those different stakeholders so you can win over the right people at the organization in the optimal sequence.

Your competitors may be tough, but with the strategies you’ll discover in this book, you’ll soon be eating their lunch.

Leading Transformation: How to Take Charge of Your Company's Future by Nathan Furr, Kyle Nel, and Thomas Zoega Ramsoy, Harvard Business Review Press

New Tools to Overcome the Human Barriers to Change.

Leaders know that their job is to transform their organizations to keep pace with technology and an ever-changing business environment. They also know that they are bound to fail in doing so. But this discouraging prospect is not because they won't be able to solve a technological or strategic problem. Leaders will fail because of intractable human responses associated with change—responses such as fear, ingrained habits, politics, incrementalism, and lack of imagination. These stumbling blocks always arise when we humans are faced with change, but what if we had a way to transcend them?

This book reveals a radical new method for doing just that.

Written by the executive who designed and implemented it, the neuroscientist who helped make it work, and the academic who explains why it works and how to do it, Leading Transformation introduces an innovative yet proven process for creating breakthrough change.

Divided into three steps—envisioning the possible, breaking down resistance, and prototyping the future—this process uses cutting-edge tools such as science fiction, cartoons, rap music, artifact trails, and neuroprototypes to overcome people's inability to imagine or react to what doesn't yet exist, override powerful habits and routines that prevent them from changing, and create compelling narratives about the organization's future and how to get there.

Showing how these tools have been used successfully by companies such as Lowe's, Walmart, Pepsi, IKEA, Google, Microsoft, and others, the process revealed in this book gives leaders the means to transcend the human barriers that block change and lead their organizations confidently into the future.

Automating Humanity by Joe Toscano, powerHouse Books

A shocking and eye-opening new manifesto from international award-winning designer Joe Toscano that unravels and lays bare the power agendas of the world’s greatest tech titans in plain language, and delivers a fair warning to policymakers, civilians, and industry professionals alike: we need a strategy for the future, and we need it now.

Automating Humanity is an insider’s perspective on everything Big Tech doesn’t want the public to know—or think about—from the addictions installed on a global scale to the profits being driven by fake news and disinformation, to the way they’re manipulating the world for profit and using our data to train systems that will automate jobs at an explosive, unprecedented scale.

Toscano provides a critique of modern regulation, including parts of the new European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) suggesting how we can create proactive, adaptable regulation that satisfies both the needs of consumer safety and commercial success in the international economy. The content touches on everything from technology, economics, and public policy to psychology, history, and ethics, and is written in a way that is accessible to everyone from the average reader to the technical expert.

Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History by Matthieu Auzanneau, Chelsea Green Publishing

A critical "People's History," looking at the way oil interests have commandeered politics and economies, changed cultures, disrupted power balances across the globe, and spawned wars.

Auzanneau upends commonly held assumptions about key political and financial events of the past 150 years, and he sheds light on what our oil-constrained and eventually post-oil future might look like.

Oil, Power, and War follows the oil industry from its heyday when the first oil wells were drilled to the quest for new sources as old ones dried up. It traces the rise of the Seven Sisters and other oil cartels and exposes oil’s key role in the crises that have shaped our times: two world wars, the Cold War, the Great Depression, Bretton Woods, the 2008 financial crash, oil shocks, wars in the Middle East, the race for Africa’s oil riches, and more. And it defines the oil-born trends shaping our current moment, such as the jockeying for access to Russia’s vast oil resources, the search for extreme substitutes for declining conventional oil, the rise of terrorism, and the changing nature of economic growth.

We meet a long line of characters from John D. Rockefeller to Dick Cheney and Rex Tillerson, and hear lesser-known stories like how New York City taxes were once funneled directly to banks run by oil barons. We see how oil and power, once they became inextricably linked, drove actions of major figures like Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler, Kissinger, and the Bushes. We also learn the fascinating backstory sparked by lesser-known but key personalities such as Calouste Gulbenkian, Abdullah al-Tariki, and Marion King Hubbert, the once-silenced oil industry expert who warned his colleagues that oil production was facing its peak.

Oil, Power, and War is a story of the dreams and hubris that spawned an era of economic chaos, climate change, war, and terrorism—as well as an eloquent framing from which to consider our options as our primary source of power, in many ways irreplacable, grows ever more constrained.

Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network by David Montero, Viking

An investigation into corporate bribery around the world and how it undermines democracy and the free market system.

The World Bank estimates that rich multinational corporations pay hundreds of billions of dollars in bribes every year to officials overseas. The perpetrators are not a handful of rogue companies, but many members of the Fortune 500. Kickback is a sweeping, global investigation into corporate bribery around the world and how these back-door financial transactions undermine democracy and the free market system by lining the pockets of some of the world’s worst dictators and criminals. Ultimately this system affects billions of people by creating conditions that lead to poverty, violence, environmental disaster, and political instability in countries like Nigeria, Bahrain, Costa Rica, and Iraq.

Kickback examines the origins of corporate bribery during the reign of the British East India Company, the methods by which it is carried out today, and its effects at both the individual and the national level throughout the globe. From the murder of a young activist in Bangladesh, to a Texas billionaire’s dealings with Sadaam Hussein, to pharmaceutical firms’ payoffs to gain market share in China, to corporations who outsource bribery to “superagents” in the criminal underworld, to how the entrenched culture of bribery helped destroy the Greek economy. Montero also examines the countermeasures that have been introduced to combat these practices, from the Justice Department’s efforts to halt them to identifying and restituting its victims.

Given the new era of profound uncertainty we are entering—as allegations mount that President Donald Trump and his associates are possibly tainted by bribery themselves, as the strength of the European Union founders and the power of China rises, as the global economy continues on a path of perilous flux—the stakes for eradicating corporate bribery have never been higher.

American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts by Chris McGreal, PublicAffairs

A comprehensive portrait of a uniquely American epidemic—devastating in its findings and damning in its conclusions.

The opioid epidemic has been described as "one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine." But calling it a mistake is a generous rewriting of the history of greed, corruption, and indifference that pushed the US into consuming more than 80 percent of the world's opioid painkillers.

Journeying through lives and communities wrecked by the epidemic, Chris McGreal reveals not only how Big Pharma hooked Americans on powerfully addictive drugs, but the corrupting of medicine and public institutions that let the opioid makers get away with it.

The starting point for McGreal's deeply reported investigation is the miners promised that opioid painkillers would restore their wrecked bodies, but who became targets of "drug dealers in white coats."

A few heroic physicians warned of impending disaster. But American Overdose exposes the powerful forces they were up against, including the pharmaceutical industry's coopting of the Food and Drug Administration and Congress in the drive to push painkillers—resulting in the resurgence of heroin cartels in the American heartland. McGreal tells the story, in terms both broad and intimate, of people hit by a catastrophe they never saw coming. Years in the making, its ruinous consequences will stretch years into the future.

Back to Human: How Great Leaders Create Connection in the Age of Isolation by Dan Schawbel, Da Capo Lifelong Books

Back to Human explains how a more socially connected workforce creates greater fulfillment, productivity, and engagement while preventing burnout and turnover.

New York Times bestselling author Dan Schawbel guides the next generation of leaders to create a workplace where teammates feel genuinely connected, engaged, and empowered to grow strong interpersonal skills rather than relying on technology. Based on Schawbel's exclusive research studies—featuring the perspectives of over 2,000 managers and employees across different age groups and from the US, UK, China, India, Brazil, and other countries—Back to Human reveals why electronic and virtual communication, though vital and useful, actually contributes to a stronger sense of isolation at work than ever before.

The corporate cultures we are experiencing right now need to change, and Schawbel offers a new leadership model featuring The Work-Life Balance Myth (we should consider work-life integration instead, which creates more synergies between all areas of your life and puts you in control of how you allocate your time), Shared Learning (how sharing knowledge allows you to stay relevant despite industry disruptions), and more. The book includes:

• Interviews with 100 leaders from notable companies including Facebook, Honeywell, HBO, Starbucks, General Mills, GE, Nike, American Express, Four Seasons, Walmart, TIME, LinkedIn, and The U.S. Air Force.
• A self-assessment called "The Work Connectivity Index" that measures the strength of team relationships.
• Exercises, examples, and activities that readers can work on individually, or as a team, which will help them improve their leadership skills.
• Tips and strategies on how to increase personal productivity, be more collaborative, and become more fulfilled at work.

Dark Commerce: How a New Illicit Economy Is Threatening Our Future by Louise I. Shelley, Princeton University Press

A comprehensive look at the world of illicit trade.

Though mankind has traded tangible goods for millennia, recent technology has changed the fundamentals of trade, in both legitimate and illegal economies. In the past three decades, the most advanced forms of illicit trade have broken with all historical precedents and, as Dark Commerce shows, now operate as if on steroids, tied to computers and social media. In this new world of illicit commerce, which benefits states and diverse participants, trade is impersonal and anonymized, and vast profits are made in short periods with limited accountability to sellers, intermediaries, and purchasers.

Louise Shelley examines how new technology, communications, and globalization fuel the exponential growth of dangerous forms of illegal trade—the markets for narcotics and child pornography online, the escalation of sex trafficking through web advertisements, and the sale of endangered species for which revenues total in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The illicit economy exacerbates many of the world’s destabilizing phenomena: the perpetuation of conflicts, the proliferation of arms and weapons of mass destruction, and environmental degradation and extinction. Shelley explores illicit trade in tangible goods—drugs, human beings, arms, wildlife and timber, fish, antiquities, and ubiquitous counterfeits—and contrasts this with the damaging trade in cyberspace, where intangible commodities cost consumers and organizations billions as they lose identities, bank accounts, access to computer data, and intellectual property.

Demonstrating that illicit trade is a business the global community cannot afford to ignore and must work together to address, Dark Commerce considers diverse ways of responding to this increasing challenge.

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better by Rob Reich, Princeton University Press

The troubling ethics and politics of philanthropy.

Is philanthropy, by its very nature, a threat to today’s democracy? Though we may laud wealthy individuals who give away their money for society’s benefit, Just Giving shows how such generosity not only isn’t the unassailable good we think it to be but might also undermine democratic values and set back aspirations of justice. Big philanthropy is often an exercise of power, the conversion of private assets into public influence. And it is a form of power that is largely unaccountable, often perpetual, and lavishly tax-advantaged. The affluent—and their foundations—reap vast benefits even as they influence policy without accountability. And small philanthropy, or ordinary charitable giving, can be problematic as well. Charity, it turns out, does surprisingly little to provide for those in need and sometimes worsens inequality.

These outcomes are shaped by the policies that define and structure philanthropy. When, how much, and to whom people give is influenced by laws governing everything from the creation of foundations and nonprofits to generous tax exemptions for donations of money and property. Rob Reich asks: What attitude and what policies should democracies have concerning individuals who give money away for public purposes? Philanthropy currently fails democracy in many ways, but Reich argues that it can be redeemed. Differentiating between individual philanthropy and private foundations, the aims of mass giving should be the decentralization of power in the production of public goods, such as the arts, education, and science. For foundations, the goal should be what Reich terms “discovery,” or long-time-horizon innovations that enhance democratic experimentalism. Philanthropy, when properly structured, can play a crucial role in supporting a strong liberal democracy.

Just Giving investigates the ethical and political dimensions of philanthropy and considers how giving might better support democratic values and promote justice.

This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See by Seth Godin, Portfolio

A game-changing approach to marketing, sales, and advertising, by bestselling author and renowned business thinker Seth Godin.

Over the past quarter century, Seth Godin has taught and inspired millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, leaders, and fans from all walks of life, via his blog, online courses, lectures, and bestselling books. He is the inventor of countless ideas and phrases that have made their way into mainstream business language, from Permission Marketing to Purple Cow to Tribes to The Dip.

Now, for the first time, Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, and timeless package.

This Is Marketing shows you how to do work you’re proud of, whether you’re a tech startup founder, a small business owner, or an executive at a large corporation. Great marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problem; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems. Their tactics rely on empathy, connection, and emotional labor instead of attention-stealing ads and spammy email funnels. When done right, marketing seeks to make change in the world.

No matter what your product or service, this book will teach you how to reframe how it’s presented to the world, in order to meaningfully connect with the people who want it. Seth employs his signature blend of insight, observation, and memorable examples to teach you:

• How to build trust and permission with your target market
• The art of positioning—deciding not only who it’s for, but who it’s not for
• Why the best way to achieve your marketing goals is to help others become who they want to be
• Why the old approaches to advertising and branding no longer work
• The surprising role of tension in any decision to buy (or not)
• How marketing is at its core about the stories we tell ourselves about our social status

You can do work that matters for people who care. This book shows you the way.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age by Tim Wu, Columbia Global Reports

From the man who coined the term "net neutrality" and who has made significant contributions to our understanding of antitrust policy and wireless communications, comes a call for tighter antitrust enforcement and an end to corporate bigness.

We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms—big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the "curse of bigness" can no longer remain the province of specialist lawyers and economists, for it has spilled over into policy and politics, even threatening democracy itself. History suggests that tolerance of inequality and failing to control excessive corporate power may prompt the rise of populism, nationalism, extremist politicians, and fascist regimes. In short, as Wu warns, we are in grave danger of repeating the signature errors of the twentieth century.

In The Curse of Bigness, Columbia professor Tim Wu tells of how figures like Brandeis and Theodore Roosevelt first confronted the democratic threats posed by the great trusts of the Gilded Age—lessons of the Progressive Era that were forgotten in the last 40 years. He calls for recovering the lost tenets of the trustbusting age as part of a broader revival of American progressive ideas as we confront the fallout of persistent and extreme economic inequality.

Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life by Hal Gregersen, HarperBusiness

What if you could unlock a better answer to your most vexing problem—in your workplace, community, or home life—just by changing the question?

Talk to creative problem-solvers and they will often tell you, the key to their success is asking a different question.

Take Debbie Sterling, the social entrepreneur who created GoldieBlox. The idea came when a friend complained about too few women in engineering and Sterling wondered aloud: “why are all the great building toys made for boys?” Or consider Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, who asked: “would it change economic theory if we stopped pretending people were rational?” Or listen to technologist Elon Musk, who routinely challenges assumptions with questions like: “What are people accepting as an industry standard when there’s room for significant improvement?”

Great questions like these have a catalytic quality—that is, they dissolve barriers to creative thinking and channel the pursuit of solutions into new, accelerated pathways. Often, the moment they are voiced, they have the paradoxical effect of being utterly surprising yet instantly obvious.

For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear—but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including over two hundred interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions—and breakthrough insights—and how anyone can create them.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky, Yale University Press

A critical examination of economics' past and future, and how it needs to change, by one of the most eminent political economists of our time.

The dominant view in economics is that money and government should play only minor roles in economic life. Economic outcomes, it is claimed, are best left to the "invisible hand" of the market. Yet these claims remain staunchly unsettled. The view taken in this important new book is that the omnipresence of uncertainty makes money and government essential features of any market economy.

Since Adam Smith, classical economics has espoused non-intervention in markets. The Great Depression brought Keynesian economics to the fore; but stagflation in the 1970s brought a return to small-state orthodoxy. The 2008 global financial crash should have brought a reevaluation of that stance; instead the response has been punishing austerity and anemic recovery. This book aims to reintroduce Keynes’s central insights to a new generation of economists, and embolden them to return money and government to the starring roles in the economic drama that they deserve.

Chief Joy Officer: How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear by Richard Sheridan, Portfolio

The founder of Menlo Innovations and author of the business culture cult classic Joy, Inc. offers an inspirational guide to leaders seeking joy in the challenge of leading others.

Rich Sheridan’s Joy, Inc. told the story of how his tiny software company in Ann Arbor, Michigan achieved success and renown by embracing offbeat culture and human-centered values. In Chief Joy Officer, he turns his attention from culture to leadership, and draws on his experience running Menlo and consulting elsewhere to offer a wise, provocative guide on how anyone can build leadership capacity for joy within their own organization.

Chief Joy Officer offers sage, hard-won advice to any manager or leader who yearns to make more of an impact on the lives of others, including:

• Self-understanding is the cornerstone for every virtue of leadership: authenticity, trust, humility, and optimism.
• Good leaders make more leaders: Learn to judge your performance not on whether people are doing what they’re told, but whether they’re developing independent leadership capacity.
• Influencing up is just as important is influencing down: how to encourage different thinking in those above you in your organizations.

Filled with colorful anecdotes from Sheridan’s personal journey and wisdom from many leadership mentors, Chief Joy Officer offers an approachable, down-to-earth philosophy and practice that will help even the most disillusioned of middle managers bring a renewed sense of purpose to their work building others.

Convinced!: How to Prove Your Competence & Win People Over by Jack Nasher, Berrett-Koehler

Competence does not speak for itself! You can’t simply display it; you have to draw people’s attention to it. World-renowned negotiation and deception detection expert, business professor, and mentalist Jack Nasher offers effective, proven techniques to convince others that we are talented, trustworthy, and yes, even brilliant.

Nasher offers the example of Joshua Bell, possibly the world’s most famous violinist. In January 2007, at rush hour, he stepped into a Washington, DC, subway station, dressed like any street busker, and began to play a $4,000,000 Stradivarius. It was part of an experiment staged by a journalist of the Washington Post, who expected Bell’s skill alone to attract an immense, awed crowd. But Bell was generally ignored, and when he stopped, nobody applauded. He made $34.17.

The good news is that you don’t have to accept obscurity: you can positively affect others’ perception of your talent. Whether you’re looking for work, giving an important presentation, seeking clients or customers for your business, or vying for a promotion, Nasher explains how to use techniques such as expectation management, verbal and nonverbal communication, the Halo Effect, competence framing, and the power of nonconformity to gain control of how others perceive you.

Competence is the most highly valued professional trait. But it’s not enough to be competent, you have to convey your competence. With Nasher’s help you can showcase your expertise, receive the recognition you deserve, and achieve lasting success.

Taking the Work Out of Networking: An Introvert's Guide to Making Connections That Count by Karen Wickre, Touchstone

The former Google executive, editorial director of Twitter and self-described introvert offers networking advice for anyone who has ever cancelled a coffee date due to social anxiety—about how to nurture a vibrant circle of reliable contacts without leaving your comfort zone.

Networking has garnered a reputation as a sort of necessary evil in the modern business world. Some do relish the opportunity to boldly work the room, introduce themselves to strangers, and find common career ground—but for many others, the experience is often awkward, or even terrifying.

The common networking advice for introverts are variations on the theme of overcoming or “fixing” their quiet tendencies. But Karen Wickre is a self-described introvert who has worked in Silicon Valley for 30 years. She shows you how to embrace your true nature to create sustainable connections that can be called upon for you to get—and give—career assistance, advice, introductions, and lasting connections.

Karen’s “embrace your quiet side” approach is for anyone who finds themselves shying away from traditional networking activities, or for those who would rather be curled up with a good book on a Friday night than out at a party. For example, if you’re anxious about that big professional mixer full of people you don’t know, she advises you to consider skipping it (many of these are not productive), and instead set up an intimate, one-on-one coffee date. She shows how to truly make the most out of social media to sustain what she calls “the loose touch habit” to build your own brain trust to last a lifetime.

With compelling arguments and creative strategies, this new way to network is perfect not only for introverts, but for anyone who wants for a less conventional approach to get ahead in today’s job market.

The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth by Amy C. Edmondson, Wiley

Conquer the most essential adaptation to the knowledge economy.

With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent—but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of “fitting in” and “going along” spells doom in the knowledge economy. Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical thought, and the interpersonal climate must not suppress, silence, ridicule or intimidate. Not every idea is good, and yes there are stupid questions, yes dissent can slow things down, but talking through these things is an essential part of the creative process. People must be allowed to voice half-finished thoughts, ask questions from left field, and brainstorm out loud. It creates a culture in which a minor flub or momentary lapse is no big deal, and where actual mistakes are owned and corrected, and where the next left-field idea could be the next big thing.

This book explores this culture of psychological safety, and provides a blueprint for bringing it to life. The road is sometimes bumpy, but succinct and informative scenario-based explanations provide a clear path forward to constant learning and healthy innovation.

• Explore the link between psychological safety and high performance.
• Create a culture where it’s “safe” to express ideas, ask questions, and admit mistakes.
• Nurture the level of engagement and candor required in today’s knowledge economy.
• Follow a step-by-step framework for establishing psychological safety in your team or organization.
• Shed the “yes-men” approach and step into real performance.
• Fertilize creativity, clarify goals, achieve accountability, redefine leadership, and much more.

The Fearless Organization helps you bring about this most critical transformation.