The Best Management & Workplace Culture Books of 2024

“People don’t leave bad jobs,” the saying goes, “they leave bad bosses.”  

People do leave bad jobs, of course, and bad bosses. They also leave bad policies, toxic workplaces, stagnant or exclusionary cultures, and a lack of opportunities. They leave the rat race, the feeling like they need to perform work rather than accomplish something real. They leave the never-ending busy work, the red tape and hurdles, the endless inefficiencies and ways that technology—which was supposed to streamline work—seems to have added more work to manage in the modern workplace. And when they leave, they usually encounter a different variation of the same problems in their next job.

People sometimes stay in a bad job because of a good boss or manager, one who shields them from many of the things above, who they feel not only wants to get the best out of them, but what is best for them, who lets them focus on contributing what is unique to them to whatever role they have, and who will help them build their skills and get a better job down the line—even if it is reimagining or expanding a current role, or a bad job, to make it a good one.  

The following five books focus on fixing what is broken and building something simpler—something more human—in its place. 

The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work by Ludmila Praslova, Berrett-Koehler Publishers   

The current backlash against DEI efforts ignores the fact that the modern organization was built with one kind of person—a neurotypical, able-bodied, white male person—in mind, and that construct is not good for most people or businesses today. The only reason inclusion efforts exist is that most of the world has historically been exclusionary. As Ludmila Praslova notes in the opening lines of the Introduction to her book:  

Exclusion robs people of opportunities, and it robs organizations of talent. In the long run, exclusionary systems are a lose-lose. 

The Canary Code focuses on neurodiversity in the workplace, but it isn’t simply about neurodiverse workers. It was written for them, with the book’s construction and formatting designed to be easily digestible. And the book’s author is not only an expert in the field but a member of the autistic, neurodivergent community herself.  

The title of the book is a nod to a popular metaphor in Autistic culture that, like canaries in a coalmine, autistic people are more sensitive to toxic elements in today’s work environments. But The Canary Code isn’t only a helpful metaphor. It provides a model and a method for building environments and systems we can all thrive in, from big ideas to small daily steps we can take to build neuroinclusive organizations that attract and retain a wider array of talent.  

The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make Right Things Easier and Wrong Things Harder by Robert I. Sutton & Huggy Rao, St. Martin's Press  

Bob Sutton has been a favorite of ours ever since he wrote The No-Asshole Rule. The working world would be a much better place today if more organizations would heed the call he made in that book. But even kind people can make work more difficult for the people they manage, and in some specific instances they should.  

Sutton has teamed up with Huggy Rao and spent a decade studying the ways leaders create friction that slows down the work of the entire organization—whether it be in long emails that could have been boiled down to a sentence or two, or introducing a new technology or process that only adds more work to people’s proverbial plates. They have developed a Help Pyramid with five levels that explain how you can assist in overcoming friction in the workplace or avoid it altogether. This will help you identify just how many of the ways we ask people to accomplish their work are inefficient and unnecessary. It will also help how you may be the culprit: 

Technologies like Slack and Zoom that are meant to remove friction can also make it too easy for clueless leaders to inflict long and convoluted communications on colleagues and customers.  

“Yet,” they write early on, “as piles of studies show, to do creative work right, teams need to slow down, struggle, and develop a lot of bad ideas to find the rare good one.” It is important to remember that the goal of work isn’t efficiency, but quality. And this is the other part of The Friction Project: determining where it is best to deliberately slow people down so that they have time to develop good ideas and do great work, and aren’t as easily able to act on bad ideas or engage in bad practices. The first principle is that “we serve as trustees of others’ time.” With that in mind, Sutton and Rao dive deep into how we can help better balance the friction in our organization to make the right things easier and the wrong things harder.  

Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture Is Bad for Business—and How to Fix It by Malissa Clark, Harvard Business Review Press  

Melissa Clark begins the book with the story of a young woman who, beginning before she even reached high school, did everything she was supposed to do to succeed in life—participating in youth sports and all the extracurricular and volunteer activities she could handle, pursuing advanced degrees and positions in all the right programs, putting in as many hours at work as possible. The young woman she describes is herself, and it led to her becoming a workaholic. You might see yourself in that description or know someone in your life who followed similar instructions for success to build a life of overworking.  

It doesn’t have to be this way. Clark explains how the “ideal worker” does not have to be—and should not be—a workaholic. It is not healthy for individuals or, ultimately, the organizations they work for, let alone for societies or cultures that encourage it. Not only does it affect our health, but the quality of the work suffers. There is ample evidence in countless studies to prove this, but to stop overworking we need a way to counteract the messaging and rewards (some of them from our own brain chemistry) that lead us into it. From reinventing your to-do list to implementing four-day workweeks, Clark offers ways to do that on every level. From a personal standpoint, nothing affected me so much as something she asks of us near the end of the book:  

Imagine what kind of workplace you would want your children or future generations of workers to experience.   

Reshaping expectations around work is not only good for us and those in our workplaces, but also for the future of work and those who come after us. Thinking of it that way, it is our responsibility to the future to dismantle the culture of overwork we have inherited.  

The Problem with Change: And the Essential Nature of Human Performance by Ashley Goodall, Little, Brown Spark  

One big way to prevent the overwork described in Clark’s book, and the friction described in Sutton and Rao’s, is to stop constantly changing everything we do and how we do it. That is easier said than done, because, as Ashley Goodall writes, it is “hard to overstate the extent to which this is work today, so thoroughly have our ideas about the unimpeachable virtues of change colonized our workplaces and the thinking of those who shape them.”  

It is almost a prerequisite for any leadership candidate to have a change plan. Rather than focusing on improvement or stability, supporting workers and connecting them to a larger goal or each other, it seems that the job of leaders today is just to change things. We have become obsessed with disruption—not just the threat of it from outside our organization, but the necessity to disrupt our own operations before others can. The assumptions and expectations have become: 

Large-scale change is necessary, always; instigating change is the way to win; and if you are not disrupting every element of your operations, you are losing. These are the commandments of the cult of disruption. And their effect on humans at work has been dire.  

Change is an ever-present fact of life, but adding uncertainty with never-ending change efforts that disrupt our work, sever our ties to others, and obscure the effects and impact of our efforts has left many workers questioning whether they even know how to do their job anymore, or what our job even is. Where we once felt capable and engaged, can lead us to question our own competence and question our commitment.  

Real improvement is born of stability, of a well-understood set of conditions that enable each of us to contribute our best. […] What we really want to feel is rooted. To feel attached to the ground, to feel supported. To feel connected to our past, and resilient in the face of the future.  

Perhaps the best change we can make today is to stop changing everything so much all the damned time, to focus on stability and human growth, and on improvement rather than disruption. 

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport, Portfolio 

Cal Newport’s work calls for significant change, but the kind mentioned in Sutton and Rao’s book, the kind that slows us down and focuses on creating great work rather than engaging in performative work. In addition to a cult of overwork and disruption, there is a cult of productivity in our workplaces and management thinking today. But productivity should be focused on quality rather than output. Or, as Newport suggests:  

[P]erhaps knowledge workers’ problem is not with productivity in a general sense, but instead with a specific faulty definition of this term that has taken hold in recent decades. The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that “good” work requires increasing busyness—faster responses to emails and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours. But when we look closer at this premise, we fail to find a firm foundation.  

Like Goodall, Newport helps us focus on what is most important, on intentionality, building good work habits and rituals and building a more stable, sustainable, and humane approach to work. In doing so, he shows us that a slower approach to work is not only possible, but superior to the frenetic pace too many of us are expected to work at today. It creates better working conditions for knowledge and creative work, produces better results, and may even help us redefine worker productivity in a way that improves our lives. 

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Porchlight will announce the eight winners of the 2024 Porchlight Business Book Awards–one from each category–at the end of January. Be one of the first to know by subscribing to our weekly newsletter.