The Fearless Organization

Your organization's culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. People's competencies should be measured and their weaknesses shored up. People crave feedback. These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they're lies. As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies - distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking - running through our organizational lives.

Continuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increasingly, by flexible team-like entities.

The team behind How Google Works returns with management lessons from legendary coach and business executive Bill Campbell, whose mentoring of some of our most successful modern entrepreneurs has helped create well over a trillion dollars in market value. Bill Campbell played an instrumental role in the growth of several prominent companies, such as Google, Apple and Intuit, fostering deep relationships with Silicon Valley visionaries, including Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt.

Measure What Matters is a revolutionary approach to business that has been adopted by some of Silicon Valley's most successful start-ups. It is a movement that is behind the explosive growth of Intel, Google, Amazon and Uber and many more. Measure What Matters is about using Objectives and Key Results (or OKRs) to make tough choices on business priorities. It's about communicating these objectives throughout the company from entry level to CEO, and it's about collecting timely, relevant data to track progress - to measure what matters.   

When General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq in 2003, he quickly realized that conventional military tactics were failing. The allied forces had a huge advantage in numbers, equipment and training - but none of the enemy's speed and flexibility. McChrystal and his colleagues discarded a century of conventional wisdom to create a 'team of teams' that combined extremely transparent communication with decentralised decision-making authority.

World-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in decades of research on achievement and success, has discovered a truly groundbreaking idea - the power of our mindset. Dweck explains why it's not just our abilities and talent that bring us success - but whether we approach them with a fixed or growth mindset. She makes clear why praising intelligence and ability doesn't foster self-esteem and lead to accomplishment but may actually jeopardise success. 

A book that will change how you think and transform how you live.Forget everything you thought you knew about how to motivate people – at work, at school, at home. It is wrong. As Daniel H. Pink explains in his paradigm-shattering book Drive, the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today’s world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and the world.

“There are at least two kinds of games,” states James P. Carse as he begins this extraordinary book. “One could be called finite, the other infinite.” Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life; they are played in order to be won, which is when they end. But infinite games are more mysterious. Their object is not winning but ensuring the continuation of play. The rules may change, the boundaries may change, even the participants may change - as long as the game is never allowed to come to an end.

Penguin Audio presents Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, read by Rob Shapiro. We stand at the beginning of a new era. What was once science fiction is fast becoming reality, as AI transforms war, crime, justice, jobs and society - and even our very sense of what it means to be human. More than any other technology, AI has the potential to revolutionise our collective future - and there's nobody better situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor and cofounder of the Future of Life Institute, whose work has helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

Penguin presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of Emotional Agility by Susan David, read by Claire Gordon-Webster. Every day we speak around 16,000 words - but inside our minds we create tens of thousands more. Thoughts such as 'I'm not spending enough time with my children' or 'I'm not good enough to present my work' can seem to be unshakable facts. In reality they're the judgemental opinions of our inner voices.